Don’t Move

This is something by way of an extremely belated response to a post on Ha Neul Seom.

In his 2009 post gaguri contrasted Japan and America in terms oF animation style - dividing them into ‘modernist’ and ‘classical’ - the expressive and the realistic, if that’s not dumbing it down too much. On the anime side of the equation the description brings to mind the frantic motion and stylistic exuberance of FLCL, Mononoke, and Kaiba. Dem crazy runefolk.

But on reflection, and upon returning to gaguri’s post, I find myself more interested in cases where the ‘modernism’ of anime is in its lack of motion or low frame-rate. Now, cynically (and even accurately), one might put the presence of scenes of striking non-animation down to a desire to save money - but I think that, regardless of rationale, the effect of such techniques can be artistically interesting. In fact it’s in some way a barometer of ambition for commercial series - in that most animators are forced to come to terms with budget limitations, and we can assess how far they try to incorporate inevitable practical limitations into their technique.

Now here K-On!(and for that matter !!) provides both a bucketload of frenetic motion and the odd example of unreal non-animation - with exaggerated expressions being held static for comic effect. Real life isn’t so static as a reaction-face, real life breathes. Static moments stand in contrast to the constant mutation approach, but gel naturally with that hyper-fluidity in that they’re part of the show’s foregrounding of visual technique. K-On!’s an animated experience which buries the viewer under visual tics. If Haruhi (2007) is Kyoani’s animation masterpiece, K-On!/! would be the tour de force.

Neither fluidity nor fixity is intended to be real by K-On!’s animators. They are both means of expression beyond the limits of classical depiction - and they are fundamentally dealing with the interaction between animation and art . The importance of motion to emotion.

And, to point out the obvious, they are the territory in which K-On!’s manga original meets Kyoani’s animation team. The animators absorb manga’s capacity to capture an instant into their parade of techniques. That aspect of manga, the adoration of still frames, makes me think of Natsume Ono’s Not Simple, where relatively simple character designs are used to express complex and ambiguous reactions. The quality of the book’s art is largely in its ability to provide insight via those glimpses of facial expressions.

Not that stillness is necessarily a manga legacy: take nearly any given scene in the notorious Bakemongatari. Our hero speaks, the camera cuts to a pointless still shot of a building. The camera cuts again, a coloured panel fills the screen for a moment. Cut. Senjougahara delivers a line in appropriate pose. Back to Araragi, with a newly chastised expression. Cut. Senjougahara’s next line is accompanied by a new camera angle, a new face. Animation scarcely comes into it, the illusion of reality isn’t in breathing life into the character designs, it’s in the correlation of image and dialogue. It’s a show with no direct manga legacy shot in a style which is not unlike a moving manga. Or a light novel with far too many illustrations.

With the successive stills accompanying a ceaseless blather we find ourselves concerned with finding the truth behind our heroine’s provocatively arranged expressions. At times we are caught up (like the male lead) in her willingness to hide herself behind a careful mask, and at times the director is really allowing us a measured glimpse into her mind. Illustrative moments can be both aids and misdirections, in both cases serving as wild exagerrations of real-life emotional cues.

What makes Bakemongatari a neat example is just how extreme its approach is. And that, at least in the first couple of episodes, the approach was deployed with a reasonably high budget. Its tricks aren’t so new. Only, like K-On!’s take on fluid motion, Bakemonogatari pulls what might be termed an ‘accepted modernist’ animation technique into such an extreme form that even viewers accustomed to illustrative pauses simply have to take note.

Most anime shows will use quick cuts and static shots to some degree. Even a quite realistic piece of animation will pause too long on a well drawn frame.

There are subtleties of presentational device which might even be produced unconsciously - Nick Park of Wallace &  Gromit fame is said to have been moving his plasticine model’s eyes in accordance with the thoughts of his characters before becoming aware that our eyes really do provide slight hints as to the bit of the brain being used: realism sneaking into his cartoony work. Similarly little artificially expressive touches can find their way in to the classicist’s repetoire.

It’s perhaps because of this inherent admixture of an accidental modernism into our experience that only extreme forms of creative animation, or creative non-animation, jolt us out of our customary surrender to anime’s modulated unreality. If only for a moment, the absolute oddballs challenge us. They show us some of the artifice in what we normally consume. Hopefully after such a moment of challenge we can still allow ourselves to slip into a new world. Perhaps it’ll be a place where even the most madcap of modernist expressions is quite real, and even a budget-forced pause can be meaningful.