II. Love and Transcendence
“But there is a presence of something which I call God, but I don’t want to show it too much. I prefer to make people feel it.”
—Robert Bresson1
In Patlabor 2, stillness and delay are used in the narrative to express a lack of agency and the constraints that a political quagmire imposes on those who act. Here, an aesthetics of slowness serves as a realist strategy for presenting reality in images. Its possibilities do not end there, however—even within Oshii’s animated films.
For many viewers, one of the most conspicuous features of Oshii’s animated films is the sequences of “empty shots”—without dialogue, action, or characters—that unfold between their narrative passages. These interludes have many variants across his films. Some follow one or two characters searching for or traveling toward a destination. Others give priority to dialogue and narration, with images in a supporting role, presenting visual motifs or adding information to accompany the speech. Oshii’s protégé Kenji Kamiyama understands them this way: “Unlike material whose main vehicle is the story, empty shots should be like spaces left blank: time flowing outside the storyline, scenes that allow the audience to imagine.” “When a film ends, some films leave you feeling that there are other times and spaces beyond the ones they have shown, while others don’t. So I wonder whether empty shots serve to create that time and space.”2
Kamiyama’s “time flowing outside the storyline” chiefly refers to time for a breather, an interval within a film: “In a feature, audiences would get tired if all they did was follow the story, wouldn’t they? Sometimes you need to put in empty shots to keep them from getting tired.” More important for my argument, however, is his identification of a space and time of the moving image separate from the main narrative. Oshii’s animated films often use this space-time to work through their themes, or to produce a nonnarrative or antinarrative spiritual experience. In Patlabor 2’s sequence of empty shots reflecting on “war and peace,” Oshii places dialogue—sound—in a different space-time from the images. The dialogue is cut out of and severed from its original context. Successive empty shots lacking narrative elements combine with sounds from a past space-time, detaching the entire passage from the story. It becomes a pure space of ontological reflection, composed of visual forms and concepts. An aesthetics of slowness often produces not only “slowness” but a series of strategies of visual “subtraction” that accompany it. In the anime directed by Naohito Takahashi, we can see that these strategies of subtraction mostly lead to the presence of “the Wholly Other.”
It is difficult to say whether Takahashi has any particular religious attachment. He rarely gives interviews and has never brought up religion or theism in any interview. Yet the adaptations he takes on repeatedly feature directorial elements related to monotheism or transcendence—or, one might say, personal preoccupations “smuggled in.” In Takahashi’s “Mirror” section of Yūwaku COUNT DOWN (1998),3 the two protagonists find salvation on Christmas Eve. The direction repeatedly hints at some external assistance. Even during their final sexual union, the camera keeps cutting to a sketch of two angels nestled against one another—a “subtle” hint at a comparison between the protagonists and the angels. After Takahashi directed two seasons adapted from Kaishaku’s manga Steel Angel Kurumi (1999 and 2001), the spin-off OVA4 Steel Angel Kurumi Zero (2001) presented a world wholly unrelated to either season. Its characters resemble those of the two television series in design and personality, but their experiences and relationships are entirely different. The story transforms the original’s largely science-fictional “angel heart” into a sacred miracle unrelated to technology, brought about directly by love.
At its core, the “Mirror” section of Yūwaku is exceptionally simple and clear: a male and a female protagonist seek true love. What has made it so much talked about is that, astonishingly, viewers see it almost entirely as a succession of still drawings. Its images divide into two sharply opposed modes. In the everyday scenes, this “animation” consists of motionless, held images. In the scenes of sexual intercourse, however, the direction uses animation entirely on ones, doing everything possible to convey the body’s vitality. Takahashi has described himself as a director deeply influenced by Dezaki’s expressionism. In “Mirror,” he makes every effort to exploit Dezaki’s varied uses of still drawings. Asked in an interview for Berserk why he used so many still images, or harmony shots, Takahashi replied: “Of course, there are practical reasons: too many action scenes take a lot of time, and we don’t have enough labor or staff. But that doesn’t mean I use still images as a matter of course. I use them because, when emotions are intense or quiet, people want to linger over a still image and let their thoughts and feelings settle further. That’s all.”5
In both form and content, “Mirror” is a work full of original invention and authorial intervention, radically different from its source. The original manga is short and its narration extremely ambiguous. The male protagonist indulges in sexual intercourse while constantly thinking of his older sister as his true love, waiting for her return from abroad. At the opening, the female protagonist condemns his promiscuity. Later—only six pages later in the manga—she finds herself drawn to him, but cannot win his love. On the surface, we might read this as a story in which each character’s soul is “out of place” during bodily union: they find true love but cannot attain it. Yet the character 鏡 (“mirror”) in the title and in the male protagonist’s name, Akira, together with the ending in which he calls for his sister while dressed as a woman before a mirror, suggests that he may have descended into mental confusion. Readers cannot be sure whether the sister really exists or is merely an imaginary other in his mind, bearing the weight of his narcissism.
In the anime, the screenwriter and director complete the story in religious terms, in both content and form. Its opening shot tilts up from the layers of residential buildings below a hill to a church at the summit. Inside the church, the male protagonist reaches toward a stained-glass Virgin Mary. The sound of sexual panting enters first, and the image dissolves into a scene of him making love with a supporting female character. This establishes the tone and basic structure of the entire anime: the two protagonists’ spirituality apart from the secular world as its context, the search for true love as its goal, and sexual union as its means. The manga never explains the female protagonist’s shift from condemning him to being attracted to him. The anime’s script supplies a framework of transcendence, suggesting that his appeal to her comes precisely from the transcendence and purity of the “I–You” relation they both seek. His sister never appears in the manga. The anime not only recalls their past but has her return from abroad and appear before him in person. Her storyline expands and transforms the narcissistic reading of the original. In contrast to the unique, irreplaceable relation he seeks, she treats him throughout as a “toy” who resembles her and whom she can dress up as she pleases. Her narcissism means she never really “sees” him. In her demands on him and the clothes she has him wear, she looks instead at a “refracted” image of herself.
In his discussions of Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, Paul Schrader identifies their common visual qualities as a “transcendental style.” In this style, “the Transcendent” is not directly encountered in tangible form but expressed. We cannot specify exactly what the Transcendent in a film is, yet we can still affirm its presence as “posited” by the film’s form.6 By Schrader’s criteria, neither Yūwaku nor Kurumi Zero could readily be described as an instance of transcendental style. Both allow their characters to confront the sacred in highly concrete—even sumptuous—ways. Most notably, at the end of the latter, love’s miracle directly brings about an angel’s descent. Apart from this, however, we might say that both anime fairly fully realize the three successive stages Schrader considers necessary to transcendental style: the everyday, disparity, and stasis.7 All three take shape through Takahashi’s sculpting of images.
The anime Yūwaku gives the relationship between soul and body three implicit levels. These are never made explicit in the script, yet its visual form presents them beyond dispute. The stagnant everyday is directly represented by a succession of still drawings. Souls fall into the deprivation of the real world without finding salvation. Every character except the two protagonists, however, possesses “freedom,” indulging in everyday pleasures. The heroine’s boyfriend is free to be unfaithful to her and to promise love to other women as he pleases. Most people are portrayed as regarding changing partners and sexual openness as ordinary attitudes. The protagonists, intent on finding a unique, irreplaceable relation, feel deeply imprisoned. In contrast to the everyday, bodily union is depicted with the utmost vitality. Instinct and sexual desire rescue the characters in this animated world from daily tedium. Many men and women, including the heroine’s friend, fall for the male protagonist’s beauty and are content to unite with his body. The body, as a rich exteriority, is realized in full animation on ones. This rich exteriority can reach the soul directly, yet always falls back into the earthly world. The Transcendent belongs neither to the everyday of still drawings nor to the body of full animation. It never appears in the entire work, yet its presence is confirmed at every moment. During intercourse, expressive backgrounds resembling those of shōjo manga sometimes appear, while two line segments repeatedly leap and intersect to represent the soul’s fluctuations within bodily communication. The heroine can recognize the male protagonist at a glance even through women’s clothing and makeup. The penetrating power of her gaze and the pair’s pursuit of a spiritual, unique, transcendent “I–You” encounter are finally guaranteed by the Wholly Other. Never appearing, the Wholly Other is nonetheless everywhere.
In Kurumi Zero, the opening shot pulls back from the oppressive rain outside a window into the room within. From then on, the entire anime is confined to a fixed, enclosed interior stage with little decoration and little room for interpretation. The heroine, Kurumi, falls in love with a male character, but the audience never sees his face or hears his voice. Their meeting and falling in love take place entirely outside, unseen by viewers. The space of Kurumi Zero thus becomes a ritual space. Within it, conventional understandings of reality—external ones, realist and rationalist, and internal ones, psychologistic and expressionist—are discarded. These are the emotional and rational constructions Bresson called “screens,” intended to “screen” us from the transcendence of what exists and keep us distant from it. In transcendental style, these constructions are “nonexpressive,” reduced from specific human experience to stasis.8 Only within this nonspecific ritual space can transcendence as eternity be approached without mediation.
Where the two protagonists of Yūwaku escape the secular world and find a unique, irreplaceable relation, in Kurumi Zero the Wholly Other is associated with an “illness.” Throughout the first two episodes, the world remains ill-defined, while Kurumi and her lover’s relationship faces indistinct intimations of crisis. When the truth about the characters is disclosed in the third episode, we learn that people in this world commonly fall “ill.” Those with this illness are called “the nonimmune.” No external force makes them sick, yet their bodies move toward death of their own accord. Here the script finally brings the “is” into an “ought” directed toward transcendence. The characters explain that humanity “ought” no longer to exist in this world. Though they have somehow survived, as living beings they are “people who should already have died.” The death of the nonimmune is not a malfunction but, on the contrary, the natural dissipation of vitality. Bypassing illness as an intermediary, Kurumi Zero links life and death directly to an encompassing ethics. At this moment, the story finally shows its true face. The conflict between death and the longing for love shared by Kurumi and her nonimmune lover forces an earthly problem entirely into a contradiction of transcendence, driving the whole story toward its final miraculous instant.
In the television anime To Heart, “subtraction” operates not only on audiovisual and story elements. Takahashi takes his “scissors” further, to narration itself. In To Heart, nothing ever “happens,” yet everything has already happened. Making everyday life the main subject is hardly new in anime today. Yet most so-called slice-of-life or kūki-kei anime—atmosphere-centered, low-conflict works—are not without narrative. Rather, they refocus the structure of introduction, development, turn, and conclusion, shifting it from a “major event” that changes an entire situation to the small matters of daily life. Even when some slice-of-life anime lack continuity between episodes, they still use a dramatic structure within each episode, or at least within each little story. Before kūki-kei had even developed a consciousness of itself as a genre, however, To Heart presented an extremely unusual narrative construction that no one has yet attempted to imitate.
Overall, To Heart still uses its various self-contained episodes to bring its male protagonist into contact with different supporting characters. Yet the main storyline woven through them seems never to get under way. The first episode opens on a rainy day. The two leads, still in elementary school, are already childhood friends. The girl accidentally scatters her books over the ground. The boy sighs and picks them up, reassuring her by offering to exchange his notebook for her rain-soaked one. She then wakes up, and viewers learn that she has been dreaming of the past. In the classical mode, memory always serves a function. A recollection necessarily prompts an action, whether as an outward expression of a character’s psychological problem or as a structural turning point brought about by a revelation about the character. In To Heart, this action is not merely suppressed: right through to the end, it scarcely receives any dramatic treatment that departs from everyday routines. This “nothing happens” profoundly determines the script’s construction, even elevating the conventional “obliviousness” of certain harem-anime protagonists toward supporting girls who are not their true loves.
We can see very clearly how “nothing happens” becomes a structure charged with tension in To Heart. In episode eight, the heroine, the male protagonist, and two friends decide to hold a pre-exam study session at her house. The opening carefully shows her preparations: baking cookies, looking at the wall clock, quietly anticipating their arrival. After the opening theme, however, we see only the boy turn up. The two friends then phone in succession to say that an urgent matter and an illness will prevent them from coming. Obviously, we can predict what is coming: alone together at her house, the two are certain to grow closer in this episode. Even without our acquired familiarity with the genre, that is an entirely reasonable expectation. Yet the plot seems to go otherwise. A friend is astonished to hear that the pair will be alone, but when the heroine hangs up, she mentions this to the boy as if it were ordinary conversation, and he thinks nothing of it. With only one guest instead of three, he then says that the living room is too big, and the two go straight to her bedroom to study. Their friend is so concerned about how things are going that she finds an excuse to call again. Clearly, she wants to give them some advice to move the romance along, but the boy cuts her off and hangs up, saying that she is ill and should get some rest.
The family will be home late; the two are alone; the room is private. Everything that needs to be in place is in place. Yet the protagonists seem oblivious to all the dramatic action implicit in their surroundings, steadily carrying on with the everyday time in which “nothing happens.” Only when they take a break does the first action genuinely prompted by the setting occur: the boy happens to notice a childhood photograph of the two of them beside her bed. He mentions it, and they open a photo album to remember the past.
This deliberate provocation of anxiety also appears in the editing. During the final study session after dinner, the clock tells us it is already 7:10 p.m. The two sit studying across the desk from each other. The establishing shot gives way to shot/reverse-shot; both are looking down at the desk. The shot/reverse-shot pattern repeats twice, as though something ought to happen, but instead we cut back to the establishing shot. When the film returns to shot/reverse-shot, the two raise their heads and look at each other. The action freezes there. We wait a while, but still nothing happens. The next shot moves straight to the following scene, eliding the interval between sitting at the desk and leaving the house. A reverse shot returns to the heroine, who has finished locking the door, and the two go to visit their sick friend. Unlike the long-take strategies of Oshii or of Kawatsura, whom I discuss below, Takahashi particularly favors analytical editing. Yet amid his elaborate cutting, characters remain still or act in ways that arouse our expectations, only for nothing to happen. Alternatively, the editing leaves out the action, and viewers have no way to know when it occurred.
The male protagonist of To Heart does, admittedly, bear some resemblance to the stock oblivious lead of harem anime. In substance, however, he is quite different. A harem protagonist’s obliviousness provides an internal reason to delay dramatic collisions between characters. Unable to notice changes in the situation, he is permitted not to respond to them. The To Heart protagonist’s obliviousness seems intended to postpone the final dramatic action, yet no such action is really needed. The relationship between the two leads had already come into being in the distant past, long before it was confirmed. Everything seems destined. The agent takes no action, remaining above the situation, because the qualitative change has long been gestating in memory. It arises from countless small details already latent in everyday life. When these details flower and bear fruit at the anime’s end, the result is not a revelatory, decisive instant but a renewed affirmation of everyday life. In this way, through everyday situations, To Heart presents us with a love that transcends time and seems to lead toward eternity.
III. The Time-Image
(i)
“I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience—and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema: ‘stars’, story-lines and entertainment have nothing to do with it.” “What is the essence of the director’s work? We could define it as sculpting in time.”
—Andrei Tarkovsky9
The animators of the 1980s brought animation a set of realist directorial techniques and an ontological turn toward space. These became the preconditions for animation’s use of visual styles from cinema’s artistic tradition. In circumstances both similar to and different from Oshii’s, Shinya Kawatsura likewise became a director known for “slowness.”10
Kawatsura trained under Koichi Mashimo, receiving his first episode storyboarding and direction credits on Mashimo’s television anime Noir (2001). Over the next decade, he directed episodes of many Bee Train productions, became assistant director on the first season of Meine Liebe (2004), and was promoted to director for its second season (2006). It is difficult to say exactly what he learned under Mashimo. Mashimo had no especially conspicuous directorial style during his time at Tatsunoko. After founding Bee Train, however, he began to favor static long takes and sparsely distributed information as his signature. Kawatsura too excels at creating atmosphere, but little of his technique comes from Mashimo. Looking at his early work, one might rather say that his atmospheric effects seem to have been a last resort in a studio lacking strong staff in the drawing and animation stages. In his episodes of .hack//Legend of the Twilight (2003)—episodes two and six—Kawatsura experimented in various ways with rich staging across foreground, middle ground, and background. But the drawing and animation on the other .hack anime were for the most part extremely poor, nowhere near good enough to give him room to exercise his abilities. He was consequently forced to concentrate on reducing shot and drawing counts, becoming exceptionally skilled at static long takes and the use of ma—the interval or pause—to shape time.
As a result, Kawatsura’s style is remarkably “unobtrusive.” Not only does he lack the strong personal traits that let ordinary viewers easily recognize someone like Akiyuki Shinbo; his authorial signature is difficult to detect even in comparison with other outstanding directors. This is because his direction of time operates entirely within the grammatical structures of film language. Its characteristics are not “seen” but gradually “felt,” without our noticing. Even Kawatsura has joked at his own expense on Twitter: “I tell people that ‘for someone just starting out in direction, the best shortcut is to learn from a director whose work you instinctively like.’ Looks as though the day when I get to teach someone will never come.”11
Time, however, is at the heart of the moving image’s ontology. After leaving Bee Train, Kawatsura finally had access to high-quality layouts and backgrounds for his directing projects. In Non Non Biyori in particular, Kusanagi’s exquisite background art made an indispensable contribution. With all the necessary resources available, the two seasons of Non Non Biyori are no longer “unobtrusive.” Kawatsura uses a wide variety of temporal techniques, making the series a work of considerable value as moving-image art.12 First, though, let us look at the temporal characteristics it inherits from the manga.
On the third page of the manga’s first chapter (fig. 25), the first four panels are exactly the same size. Panels two through four have almost identical content, while the fifth takes up half the page. The stillness of the first four concentrates the scene’s tension, which the fifth releases all at once through its large scale, pronounced depth, and complex imagery, making the reader laugh. This comic device recurs throughout the original manga. At times, it accounts for almost all of a chapter’s jokes—it occurs seven times in chapter thirty-three, for instance—and can be called one of Non Non Biyori’s distinctive features.
I call these comic constructions, with their particular use of the interval, “silent jokes.” As the manga continued, they developed many variants: montage patterns in which panels progressively grow or shrink, “two-track progressions” that alternate with another panel, and so forth. But the earliest and most frequently used form remains consecutive panels of equal size and almost identical content.
Clearly, Atto carried this technique over from drawing four-panel manga. Once applied to the language of ordinary Japanese manga, however, it took on an entirely new meaning. In four-panel manga, equally sized panels are part of the fixed form and need not have any particular significance. In ordinary manga, by contrast, changing the panels’ size, position, and internal composition to control the rhythm of reading is entirely standard. Unlike moving images, which dictate exactly how long viewers watch, however, manga is actively read. Its reading rhythm is therefore always elastic.
What happens, then, when ordinary manga uses equally sized panels whose content forms a continuous sequence? Whatever their reading speed, readers are unlikely to take the temporal intervals between these panels as unequal. Their sense of rhythm gives way here: they see with their own eyes that panels of the same size prescribe equal spans of time, while the largely unchanging content establishes continuity. This is much like flipping through finished animation drawings. In other words, through its silent jokes, the original manga actually conveys a temporality akin to that of moving images.
Kawatsura absorbed this characteristic of the manga. He not only reproduced its silent jokes but adapted a number of the supplementary four-panel strips into a similar form and incorporated them into the anime. Take the following example:
In the anime, Kawatsura likewise recreates this through the staging of a pause (season two, episode one, 13:58–14:40). Although the passage looks very much like a silent joke, there is a slight difference. That difference is precisely what decisively separates the anime from the original.
(ii)
For many filmmakers, the key to the moving image’s realist strategies lies in time. Classical narration, however, emphasizes the coherent presentation of causal chains. Dramatic situations and actions unfold step by step from predetermined premises, ultimately reaching a deterministic conclusion. Watching such films, the spectator “cannot help feeling that the stories which they impart do not grow out of the material life they picture but are imposed on its potentially coherent fabric from without.” On these grounds, Kracauer considers cinema incompatible with this classical form.13
What choices do image-makers have beyond classical narration? Animation offers some very interesting works in new forms. One approach intensifies narrative functionality to its limit, compresses the scope for direction, and purifies storytelling into a complete display of the story’s structural characteristics: UN-GO and Concrete Revolutio: Superhuman Phantasm. Another dilutes the story until story and situation are almost disconnected. Images cease to be closely bound to narration and become a purely audiovisual presentation of “nature.” This is Non Non Biyori, one among the many “cute-girl zoos.”14
Kawatsura uses an approach in the anime that resembles the silent joke. The decisive difference is that its silence lacks the silent joke’s structural tension. Although silent jokes possess a temporality similar to moving images, they are ultimately dramatic beats—that is why they are funny. By comparison, the example in the previous section seems more like a surplus outside the structure. It renders time in a way closer to natural, nondramatized narration, reaching beyond ordinary narrative.
As though afraid the audience might be too slow on the uptake, the first episode repeatedly uses this natural quiet: stillness without sound or action “spills out” between plot developments. Nor does Kawatsura stop there. Seemingly unwilling to rest until every viewer recognizes his authorship, he repeatedly goes a step further. Near the beginning of the episode proper, for example (season one, episode one, 04:58–05:51), a character’s distraction interrupts the conversation. The direction forces a situation without action or dialogue into existence. Kawatsura seems almost to be driving viewers to think of a kind of stillness associated with neorealism and the New Wave: “dead time” (temps mort). The natural quiet described above brings the narrative into a lifelike treatment of time. Here, interruption yanks action directly away from the situation, making the latter a relatively independent fragment. Off-center framings that keep their distance from the subject, long takes, restricted narration, and other techniques are used alongside this. Everything tends toward objectivity and the removal of drama. Or perhaps we should say that the objectivity of these other choices is what makes dead time possible.
Something similar happens with the close-ups of Renge’s hands that appear when she experiences negative feelings. They signal Kawatsura’s restraint in expressing emotion. Such passages often tell their stories through images alone, yet subtly touch on the characters’ deepest, most private feelings: the passage involving Honoka in season one, episode four, for example, and Renge’s unease in season two, episode one. This accords exactly with Kracauer’s ideal of expression: films “seem to be the more cinematic, the less they focus directly on inward life, ideology, and spiritual concerns.”15 Sometimes this restraint lets emotion accumulate for a later release; at others, it leaves a blank for the viewer’s imagination.
What Kawatsura achieves16 through dead time and successive empty shots is precisely the first two of the three possibilities for narrative time that Christian Metz discusses: “space-significate—space-signifier” and “space-significate—time-signifier.” These are, respectively, the pure nonnarrative image and a description of space that occupies narrative time. Metz regards the first, an image as still as a photograph, as lacking a temporal element. Even if an image requires time to be viewed, “it is not a reading of the signifiers in a single, controlled order of concatenations.”17 Yet Metz’s view in fact points to the true value of this first kind of image: a window through which to contemplate pure image-time. Precisely because Metz’s “order of concatenations” is absent, duration can become apparent, and the image can at last move beyond movement and become a time-image (image-temps).
(iii)
Filmmakers’ ideology underwent a profound transformation during the Second World War. This also changed how they saw reality, giving rise to the movement later called neorealism. Neorealist directors tried to break with previous narrative methods and classical forms of artistic credibility, striving instead to show the loose and trivial reality of the present. “The real was no longer represented or reproduced but ‘aimed at’ … neo-realism aimed at an always ambiguous, to be deciphered, real.”18 In neorealist films, a situation no longer leads through action to another situation, as in classical narration’s large form. Nor, through a more localized focus, does action lead through a situation to further action, as in the small form. Instead, situations become independent fragments. The viewer’s former mode of experience, extending perception into movement, breaks down here. The absence of an “order of concatenations” liberates image-time. Situations thus shed their narrative function, changing from a functional reality dependent on narration into the autonomous reality of the time-image. Gilles Deleuze calls these “purely optical and sound situations” (situation optique pure).
I will now draw out three characteristics of Kawatsura’s long-take aesthetics, analyzing each through passages from the series.
1. Giving Time Concrete Form
Attentive viewers will surely have noticed that an object moving across the background is a recurring device in Non Non Biyori. Let us compare a passage that appears in both the manga and the anime.
Natsumi pretends to understand what Renge has said. The manga represents this pause with one panel in which the background is blank and movement has stopped. Presumably, readers spend no more than a second on it. What happens in the anime? From the beginning of the shot until Renge speaks, there are a full seven seconds of stillness (season one, episode one, 15:20–15:52).
How can it remain still for so long? Clearly, it is the little scooter in the background that gives the viewer’s active looking something to follow. We could, of course, represent this stillness through manga’s dotted symbols. But to achieve realism in moving images, the arbitrariness of signs must be constrained. This technique can be traced to early film history, when Hollywood had already developed a mature repertoire: changes in the background could divide a scene into sections; particular background activities could give the main characters latent motivations; moving objects entering and leaving the background could mark out and clearly define a complete span of time. In other words, movement through space gives time concrete form.
Non Non Biyori seeks to present a picture beyond narration, an “unhurried” harmony between people and nature. When the protagonists are motionless, Kawatsura therefore uses images and sounds that give time concrete form to sustain viewers’ attention. By generalizing the technique, he makes it an important element of the series’ audiovisual vocabulary. Consider a scene of waiting for a bus (season one, episode one, 21:26–21:51). Once the long take begins, we hear a vehicle offscreen; then see and hear it; then hear it offscreen again; then hear Renge playing the recorder. Within the plot, the vehicle’s sound makes Hotaru and the viewer think that it might be the next bus. Once it proves not to be, expectation is left hanging during the interval from Renge’s recorder-playing to Hotaru’s next line. Viewers ask along with her: when will the next vehicle come? Outside the plot, meanwhile, Renge’s playing ensures that no actual gap opens up in our attention.
Then there is the fifty-three-second long take that provoked so much discussion when it aired. Renge has arranged to visit a small waterfall with Honoka, a new friend she has met during the holidays. When she calls the next morning, however, she learns that urgent work came up for Honoka’s father and that Honoka has already returned to the city with him. Renge is terribly sad. We can see that the manga uses the form of a silent joke, with the real emotional release arriving in the fifth panel. The anime cleverly brings it forward (season one, episode four, 17:40–20:25). Music begins after the grandmother says “Welcome,” and the cicadas gradually grow quieter. As she closes the door, the cicadas disappear completely, leaving only the nondiegetic background music; then the long take begins. Here, the subjective expression of a character’s emotions coincides with control over viewers’ attention. The music starts before the long take and takes more than thirty seconds to insinuate itself carefully into our awareness and move us. While Renge’s expression remains unchanged, only the slow push inward, probing her inner life, and the music’s rising volume guide the viewer. Once enough emotion has accumulated, the music disappears. Our attention returns to Renge’s face, whose rich changes of expression, contrasting with what came before, provide an appropriate emotional outlet. Her two blinks while her expression is otherwise unchanged keep viewers from thinking the picture has frozen and being jolted out of the scene.
For Renge herself, meanwhile, the unannounced departure of her friend is a terrible blow. Her surroundings fall outside her awareness, and the cicadas disappear. Once she responds and understands what the grandmother has said, her attention to her surroundings returns, and the cicadas sound again. The direction of viewers’ attention from music to facial expression is also Renge’s own movement from inward feeling to outward expression: emotion flowing from within to without.
Many viewers finished the episode without even realizing the shot had lasted so long, a measure of how accomplished it is. This long take can be said to mark the maturity of Kawatsura’s unobtrusive staging and his complete assurance in compensating for animation’s inherent disadvantages in using long takes. He dares to depart from conventional forms precisely because these traditional methods come so readily to him. Thus, at the end of the second season, we encounter a nearly four-minute long take, something few in television animation have attempted (season two, episode twelve, 13:24–17:16). Successive movements by different things within the shot, wide framing, and deep focus sustain our attention. Characters entering and leaving the frame expand our imagined space, while offscreen sounds with clearly defined positions in the foreground and background give concrete form to the space beyond the frame. Most importantly, the steadfastly fixed camera gives us the sense of reality of direct cinema: less a “fly on the wall” than a peephole in it. Kawatsura seems to be saying that, whatever techniques one uses, none is as effective as directly showing continuous, lifelike, “unhurried” everyday existence. Working with simple methods in animation, he finally returns to the true character of daily life.
2. Still Life
One feature common to Non Non Biyori’s varied long takes is that the things within the shot are completely or almost completely motionless. As already discussed, this absence of action releases the series from narration and makes it a purely optical and sound experience. Yet the time-image arises from a crisis in the movement-image. If the only aim is to create purely optical and sound situations, the key is to break the triggering relation between situation and action in the large and small forms. Characters need not remain motionless; the nearly four-minute take is an excellent example. This stillness reminds me of Ozu’s “still-life images.” “If empty spaces, interiors or exteriors, constitute purely optical (and sound) situations, still lifes are the reverse, the correlate.”19 Let us take the famous empty shot of the vase in Late Spring (1949).
The father falls asleep first while talking with his daughter. She looks at him, smiling, but after six seconds of the empty shot of the vase, she is on the verge of tears. Deleuze analyzes it as follows: “The vase in Late Spring is interposed between the daughter’s half smile and the beginning of her tears. There is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes does not itself change, does not pass on. This is time, time itself, ‘a little time in its pure state’: a direct time-image, which gives what changes the unchanging form in which the change is produced.” “The still life is time, for everything that changes is in time, but time does not itself change, it could itself change only in another time, indefinitely.” “Ozu’s still lifes endure, have a duration, over ten seconds of the vase: this duration of the vase is precisely the representation of that which endures, through the succession of changing states. A bicycle may also endure; that is, represent the unchanging form of that which moves, so long as it is at rest, motionless, stood against the wall.”20
Set beside the father–daughter bond in Late Spring is Renge’s affection for her pet tadpole shrimp.21 The two key long takes in this episode (season two, episode four, 13:37–14:30 and 16:34–17:10; figs. 31 and 32) plainly have the characteristics of purely optical and sound situations and still-life images. Both are introduced through several successive empty shots, separating them from the preceding dramatic action. The characters enter and take their places before the viewers arrive. Each long take ends with an offscreen character calling to Renge, returning her from her still-life state to movement. Because the character herself is rendered as a still life, a separate still-life image is no longer needed as an intermediary. The unifying relation occurs within the shot. The two takes establish clear contrasts: the subjects at the center or at opposite edges of the frame; characters facing toward or away from the camera; sunshine or overcast, rainy weather. Sound deserves particular attention. The first uses the diegetic sound of Renge’s recorder, the second nondiegetic piano music. In “Giving Time Concrete Form,” I noted that the audiovisual means of giving time concrete form and sustaining viewers’ attention are a key element of the series’ visual vocabulary. Yet this element disappears from the second long take. What does that mean? If the first shot’s diegetic recorder expresses vitality, the second shot’s nondiegetic piano plays the disappearance of vitality. The intermittent notes and sustain accentuate this sense of absence. In other words, these two shots express the paired motifs of “life” and “death.”
At the end of this episode, the tadpole shrimp’s death and the emergence of new life leave Renge moved, without realizing it, by the dialectical relationship between life and time. In Henri Bergson’s account, death is by no means the stilling or end of life’s movement. Life continually endures in time, creating and evolving through its original impetus. In the anime’s long takes, this dialectical relation is in turn written into experience through still-life images: an “enduring form filled with change,” a duration that joins “change” and “unchangingness.”
3. Interruption and Drifting Away
I have found no definite evidence that Kawatsura was influenced by Ozu. Research on Ozu’s films is nevertheless particularly well suited to analyzing and interpreting Non Non Biyori. Earlier, we saw an example of ordinary narration disrupted by the characters’ independent actions, with characters acting simultaneously (season one, episode one, 04:58–05:51). Interrupting dialogue or a dramatic climax and having characters perform some action at the same time is also one of Ozu’s habitual methods.
Discussing an interruption in Early Summer (1951), Shiguéhiko Hasumi writes: “What moves us is not the symbolism of the balloon about to disappear into the sky, but the simultaneity of the two people spontaneously raising their eyes to look at it.” Such simultaneous action, “in linking the two people, also swiftly severs the psychological symbolism implicit in the image.” This externalized visuality is “like imitating the other person’s movements: simply repeating the same action is enough.”22 At moments of interruption, Ozu often has characters turn to gaze at the sky and appreciate the fine weather. “The weather, nature, the world outside human beings and their trivial concerns … when we give ourselves over to appreciating it, or even simply look at it, our thoughts grow gentler and our spirits revive.” This brings characters and nature into harmony.23
Interruption and stillness have the same quality in Non Non Biyori. Having discussed Deleuze’s two kinds of image, we naturally think of contrasting the “unhurried” sense of time in which Natsumi and Renge nearly miss the bus—the time-image—with the bus’s scheduled arrival: the movement-image, or, more precisely, a conception of homogeneous, spatialized time arising, in Bergson’s account, from modern science’s notion of the any-instant-whatever. Taken alone, this example might seem strained. The script therefore makes the point through the changing attitude of Hotaru, who has just arrived in the village (season one, episode one, 18:06–21:10). In the first episode, Hotaru feels both uneasy and curious about all the things in her new surroundings. The other three notice that she has not settled in and take her to eat cherry-blossom cakes beneath a cherry tree. Having passed through the “suffering” symbolized by the ritual ascent of the hill—a meaning underlined when Hotaru trips—she is moved by the view and atmosphere at the top. Eating the cakes with her companions, she completes the passage from not fitting in to becoming one with her surroundings. Afterward, the four protagonists, sharing nature’s “unhurried” state, finally do miss the bus this time. This means that, at that moment, they have become synchronized with nature’s temporal state.
Another passage that immediately brings Ozu to my mind comes at the end of the first season. For no apparent reason, the camera suddenly leaves the characters behind to “climb the hill” on its own, as though too impatient to wait for the protagonists before going to see the cherry blossoms. Formally, this passage closely resembles the ending of An Autumn Afternoon (1962). In each, the camera leaves the characters to climb a hill or staircase, then approaches a key signifying object and gives it a close-up, before finally returning to the protagonist or protagonists to bring the film to a close.
In An Autumn Afternoon, the protagonist’s daughter has married. What this series of empty shots films is precisely her “absence”; the camera approaches the mirror and chair she once used. It is plainly not anyone’s point of view. Yet in light of the character’s feelings, we can regard it as a mental point of view belonging to the protagonist: the empty shots film the very objects to which his sorrow attaches. In Non Non Biyori’s first episode, the other three take Hotaru up the hill to help her become part of her surroundings. At the end of the first season, Hotaru affirms the countryside’s merits, concluding the main storyline. The camera’s solitary climb means precisely that the protagonists no longer need the ritual of climbing. They have already attained harmony.
IV. Conclusion
This essay’s analysis of three writers in images—Mamoru Oshii, Naohito Takahashi, and Shinya Kawatsura—and their experiments with slow anime aims not only to examine animation’s ontology in depth but also to reassert a method of analysis. In the 1980s, film theory saw the rise of cognitive film theory, led by Noël Carroll, David Bordwell, and others, replacing the Grand Theory that had prevailed since the 1960s: structural linguistics, semiotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Mainstream film studies turned toward what Bordwell calls “middle-level” research: “Rather than constructing theory in terms of the subject, ideology, or culture as a whole, it builds theory from particular phenomena. It investigates specific, concrete problems.” This brought renewed attention to film histories and visual styles across the world.24
By contrast, scholarship on animation, comics, and games—ACG—remains dominated by cultural studies and still lacks detailed, comprehensive attention to animation’s visual form and style. As the boundaries between animation, live-action cinema, and even games grow increasingly blurred, bottom-up, problem-driven, middle-level research is imperative. Japanese animation’s success today rests to a considerable degree on its importation of cinematic methods, yet it has produced distinctive aesthetic effects. It therefore has an even greater need for deep, thorough identification and analysis of the characteristics of its audiovisual works, to establish the unique aesthetic value of their form. Confronted both with the prejudices of animators and critics trained in the American tradition and with the “cross-disciplinary” guidance of live-action filmmakers, ACG otaku must ground their identity not only in the subcultural and political character of their position, but also in a searching, thorough understanding of what they love: an attitude to research that faces the complexity of the phenomena before us. Bordwell describes how master directors make subtle innovations in the simple techniques of established artistic practice. Likewise, applying cinematic techniques to animation is not merely copying them: it creates an entirely new way of constructing images through minute differences. The aesthetics of slowness is just such a distinctive fruit: it has grown from live-action art cinema, taken root in Japanese animation, sprouted, and spread its branches.
Space prevents this essay from analyzing all the many remaining characteristics of slow anime one by one. I can only hope that, having read it, readers will think further about the possibilities for innovation in the art of animation.