Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Eight: Chapter Fourteen: Inner Natures
Let’s look at some clips to explore how enframing or enclosure of the world follows from flat compositing and relative movement. Take, for instance, the sequence in which the Nautilus enters the undersea city of Atlantis.
The enclosure of the massive city is, of course, announced in the series: Atlantis has not been discovered (that is, by 19th-century humans) because they don’t have the technical means to reach it far beneath the ocean. And apparently, the gates won’t open without the blue water. But such elements are only part of the experience of enclosure. First, there is the flatness of the image. The sense of flatness of the image is not simply a matter of its composition. The images do impart a sense of depth. The skeletal remains of giant body that guards the entrance is painted with shading and modeling that impart a sense of depth, a sense that we can move into the boney frame with melted remnants of flesh. Yet the image shakes in a manner that makes us aware of its flatness. The shaking of the enormous architecture comes of an image being slid up and down in the animation stand. In other words, the relation of movement flattens depth. And as we enter the ribs, the viewing position slides down the image to depict movement into depth. But this is still the sliding of flat layers. The scene quickly cuts to the submarine inside the skeleton, and the viewing position pulls back, as if to show the submarine moving away. We actually have the foreground layer sliding slightly. Then, as the submarine ‘descends’ into the passage, it does not change in size. It merely slides with respect to the background image. The sequence cuts to the submarine sliding towards another opening. The sequence continues with the submarine layer sliding over different background layers. While such procedures may be said to be connoting a sense of movement into depth, movement into an enclosure, the actual experience is one of sliding layers, a movement over or across depth as painted onto background. Yet the sense of depth of these backgrounds is continually flattened by the techniques of movement as well as the equal vividness of different layers.
Interesting enough, however, sliding layers and flat compositing induce a different and maybe greater sense of enclosure than if we used 3D animation and showed the Nautilus entering a small passage that opened into a vast enclosure. This is because sliding layers tend to multiply frames of reference, to the point where we are not entirely sure where we are going. There is a sense of passage, of moving past things, but little sense of where the passage leads or ends. There is a sense of multiple pathways. At the same time, with sliding layers, the sense of movement into depth is lessened to the point where the sense of inside versus outside is also diminished. Such techniques fit nicely with the undersea city of Atlantis: it seems like an outside because it entails panoramic views. But it is in fact enclosed. In fact, in general in Nadia, after the initial flight from Paris and then from France, we are not outside. We are always inside or under. Consequently, there is always the hope that being outside and above will put an end to our enclosure. Thus flying through the skies promises release from this condition. Ultimately, however, even the skies turn out to be enclosed: there are satellites and space ships circling the earth that effectively enframe and enclose it.
In sum, techniques of sliding layers and flat compositing make multiple frames of reference and technical enclosure into flipsides of the same coin. This takes us back to the emergent structure of exploded projection. What we have here is a world arrayed in layers (exploded) without a fixed frame of reference other than that of disassembly and reassembly. It is simultaneously taken apart and put together. We can look at this world from different angles, we can take different pathways through it, and yet its openness is already enclosed or enframed. Such animation techniques generate an experience of a ‘toy world’ or ‘kit-model universe.’
As such, as the human-shaped entrance to Atlantis, everything is somehow inside the human. But the human is now an entity that oscillates between spiritual or psychological states (hopes, dreams, desires) and technologically engineered capacities. In effect, sliding layers and flat compositing generate not only an enframed ‘model kit’ world but also an enframed ‘model kit’ human.
Before we turn to techniques of character animation in the next chapter, let’s consider how sliding layers tend to enframe the human.
