Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Eight: Chapter Fourteen: Inner Natures
The following clip from episode 19 of Nadia is a good example of how the character layer becomes frame of reference for movement. But because the movement remains relative, this gesture does not transform the human into a stable and reliable frame of reference. On the contrary, the human appears to be only one more engineered life form, just another ‘assembly model’ from the standing reserve of creatures. In the clip, we see how the enframing of the human as a reserve of life follows from techniques of sliding planes and flat compositing.
Episode 19, in which the crew of the Nautilus arrives at a base deep under the South Pole, fills in part of the background story for the alien intervention into life on earth. After the crew puts ashore in yet another enclosure, Captain Nemo takes Jean and Nadia through transparent tube that passes through the layers of ice. Frozen in the ice, we see in exploded projection the natural history of earth. Nemo calls it the ‘ice museum of natural history.’ The three humans travel through this projection of natural history, gazing on a variety of strange creatures, a series of experiments with terrestrial life forms.
As Nadia first calls Jean’s attention to the monsters frozen in the ice, note how the character layer is standing still, while the layer with the circular rings moves past them. The background layer with the frozen monsters is also moving but slower than the circular ring layer. Even though there is a sort of parallax effect in which things farther away move more slowly (monster layer slower than circles), the relation between the character layer and the two moving layers is rather odd. In fact it is somewhat disorienting for it makes both the background monster layer and the character layer appear as a frame of reference. Nemo’s voiceover tells of the natural history of experiments with life forms frozen in the ice, which situates humans as just one more experiment. In effect, we already experience this situation of human through the situation of the character layer as a relative frame of reference, one of a series of possible frames. Thus the sliding layers and flat compositing not only enclose the earth and its nature (an exploded projection of natural history) but also enclose the human (a transformation of the human into a reserve of life materials to be manipulated). The human is at once assembly and assembler.
These animation techniques situate the human without any absolute frame of reference for orientating action and aspiration such as God or Nature or Life or Humanity. Yet rather than a nihilist absence, there is a multiplication of frames of reference. This particular relation of the one and the multiple implies a structure of exploded projection in which each element is striving to take the whole thing apart and put it back together. There is a line of sight, a line of passage, through the exploded projection that implies a line of action and interaction. But the interaction is relative to projection.
Such a structure is also in keeping with a kind of an ‘otaku effect’ in which the enclosed world (the residence, the room, anime world) is also the site of multiple and multiplying connections (internet links, serialization across media, frames of reference), but these are connections that are not intended or designed to get you out of the enframed world. Rather the oscillation between one and multiple is optimized into cycles of explosion and consolidation, disintegration and reintegration, destruction and regeneration, death and rebirth.
