Animation and Reality, or the Coordinates of Isao Takahata’s Realism

Foreword: This essay won prizes in both the Eve Festival and After Festival of Rags Drum 2020, organized by Lab on Roof.

The question is not whether nature “really looks” like these pictorial devices but whether pictures with such features suggest a reading in terms of natural objects. —Ernst Gombrich

Foreword

In his commentary on Tamako Love Story (2014), Ryōta Fujitsu describes a lineage of Japanese animation devoted to depicting everyday life—initiated and opened up by Heidi, Girl of the Alps (Arupusu no Shōjo Haiji, 1974; hereafter Heidi), directed by Isao Takahata, with Magical Emi, the Magic Star: Semishigure (Mahō no Star Magical Emi: Semishigure, 1986) and Tamako Love Story as its successors. He writes: “Deliberately excluding the dramatic and accumulating depictions of the everyday—the so-called ‘life animation’ style had already attained a kind of completion by the time of Heidi, Girl of the Alps and 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother (Haha o Tazunete Sanzenri, 1976; hereafter 3000 Leagues).” (1)

We can see that Heidi and 3000 Leagues display Takahata’s attempt to present, objectively and coolly, the plain, complete, unvarnished face of life. He proved that such an approach could actually be realized in animation, and this set him apart from his contemporaries. For these two works of “life animation” to stand without depending on the dramatic, sustained only by an accumulation of everyday depiction, they had to create a convincing sense of lived reality: viewers need to feel reality in the animation, and a psychological compact—“these characters really are living”—must be built between life animation and its audience.

Takahata therefore adopted the viewpoint of cultural anthropology, designing the stage space on the basis of “actual human life” by ① establishing the background of social life (clothing, food, housing, transport; the educational system; the labor environment; politics and economy; and so on) and ② establishing the natural environment and geographical conditions (climate and temperature, visible light, mountains, rivers and seas, ecosystems, and so on). (2) This is a rough program for orienting the work toward the real; but how the animated space is to be constructed, and how characters are to move upon the stage, are not merely questions of concrete craft—they touch on a deeper problem of realism. Takahata’s handling of those problems constitutes the core of his realism.

This essay takes Takahata’s life animation as a point of entry into the problem of reality in animation. The questions are numerous and complex, but we will begin by isolating two of particular importance: one methodological, the other concerning the nature of animation itself. ① How does animation represent reality? ② How is animation able to represent reality? (As will become clear, these are inseparable from the paired questions: “① How does animation represent time and space? ② What is the nature of the time and space that animation represents?”)

In the live-action field, cinematic realism has been explored exhaustively, in a large body of writing. We cannot avoid mentioning André Bazin, whose ontology of the cinematic image—“the image is identical with the object photographed in objective reality”—is foundational; one may say that an entire system of film theory and criticism was built around this idea. More important still, we can see that Takahata and Bazin, standing in the two separate fields of animation and live action, converged in their treatment of how a medium produces a sense of reality.

While making 3000 Leagues, Takahata was influenced by Italian neorealism (for instance Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948)) and depicted social reality with severity; Bazin, beyond any doubt, was an ardent champion of Italian neorealism. Toshio Suzuki has mentioned that Takahata often talked about Bazin’s What Is Cinema? (3); and Takahata himself pointed out that by reading “Editing Prohibited” (“Montage interdit”), collected in What Is Cinema?, one can confirm the importance of the “composition in depth” that “gathers into a single frame antagonistic figures pregnant with crisis” (4). It is therefore hard to imagine that Bazin’s film theory exerted no significant influence on Takahata.

Bazin’s theory proclaims guiding principles concerning the real: ① the reality of the represented object; ② the reality of time and space; ③ the reality of narrative structure—and the methodological realization of these is his theory of the deep-focus shot (5).

In “Respecting Real Time, Committed to Acting-Led Direction: A Technical Study of Isao Takahata’s Direction” (6), Seiji Kanō writes: “Takahata’s direction rests on the following three features: ‘a viewpoint of fixed-point observation based on the fixed camera (fix) throughout,’ ‘the frequent use of long takes exceeding ten seconds,’ and, ‘as the premise of the two points above, meticulous scene design and animation (acting) design.’” Of these, the “fixed camera” is one source of Takahata’s cool, objective, restrained style, while the “long take” is a vital part of Bazin’s deep-focus theory: compared with cutting and joining, it respects the continuity of space, the duration of time, and the actual connections between things.

Following Fujitsu’s historical view of life animation, we can observe other directors along this lineage who also favored fixed long takes—for instance, later on, Takashi Annō (episode 27 of Maison Ikkoku (1986), Magical Emi, the Magic Star: Semishigure, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (1998)) and Tomomi Mochizuki. Annō has a certain kind of long take in which he boldly abandons the musical score in favor of ambient sound: the slow change of the landscape gives concrete form to the passage of time, the characters’ inner images lie implicitly within it, and the poetry of everyday life rises of itself out of time. The first episode of Mochizuki’s Twilight Q (1987) is composed entirely of fixed-camera shots; episode 2 of Seraphim Call (1999) even consists, for its entire length, of a single surveillance shot; and Kimagure Orange Road: I Want to Return to That Day (1988) deliberately uses long, oppressive shots to express the restless drift of adolescence and the suffocation of a love triangle.

Another director on this lineage is Naohito Takahashi (To Heart (1999)), whose direction has its source in Osamu Dezaki; he may differ from the other directors in methodology, but the line of thought is the same—the expression of an everyday life in which “nothing has happened, and yet something seems to have changed” (1), the depiction of trivial detail.

Directors not on this lineage, such as Mamoru Oshii and Yoshiyuki Tomino, have also declared themselves greatly influenced by Takahata. Both attach real importance to location research and to expressing the texture of lived life, and Oshii, for his part, often uses fixed long takes in a stylized way.

Exploring Takahata’s influence, and comparing the styles of these directors, would be another complex undertaking. Takahata’s realism is an unavoidable landmark in twentieth-century animation history; the evolution of his work can even be viewed as a “moving coordinate axis” within it. Like Osamu Dezaki, his lineage forms a great web spanning the world of animation.

To return to our earlier thread: even if live action—Bazin’s film theory, the fixed long take—can supply animation with methodological points of reference, animation and live action necessarily differ in nature, and therefore in their modes of expression and means of realization. This bears directly on the questions posed above. What follows approaches the problem of reality in animation by describing and analyzing those differences under three broad headings: shot and space, movement and time, reality and sign. The three are not sharply separate. The third is the heart of the essay, and will require us to draw on a little knowledge of painting.

Shot and Space

We should first explain that in Heidi, Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki formally introduced layout into the animation production pipeline for the first time. Layout on the technical level, in the plainest sense, means making the characters’ forms and movements match the space shown by the background. Whereas Mushi Production–line layout emphasized graphic design, concept, and impression—for instance the Aim for the Ace! theatrical film (Ace o Nerae!, 1979) directed by Osamu Dezaki, and Haguregumo (1982), whose layouts were handled by Yoshiaki Kawajiri—Toei-line and A Pro–line layout (Hayao Miyazaki, Tsutomu Shibayama) paid more attention to the representation of space and to an awareness of camera position and lens characteristics.

Miyazaki handled layout—or rather scene design—for Heidi and 3000 Leagues in succession, giving spatial unity a technical guarantee; his use of telephoto and standard lenses also laid an extremely important foundation for the later development of layout in animation history.

In live action, where there is a point of focus, the longer the focal length, the shallower the depth of field; to present a many-layered space, Bazin’s deep-focus theory relies chiefly on wide-angle, deep-focus lenses to create the integrity of time and space. In cel animation, by contrast, the perspective picture fixed on the flat plane is photographed once again through a lens, essentially with everything in focus, so that at the outset there was no concept of depth of field at all—which made possible long-focal-length telephoto shots in which foreground, middle ground, and background are all sharp, without ever running into the problem of insufficient depth of field.

Takahata used telephoto shots extensively in Heidi and 3000 Leagues. Compared with the wide-angle lens, the telephoto lens ① comes closer to what a person sees—the image generated after processing by the human brain—and so looks more comfortable; ② through its strong compression along the depth axis, better expresses the sense of space and of air; ③ compared with the wide-angle lens’s immediacy and unease, is more objective and stable.

Moreover, unlike real space, the space in animation can be a blend of several different spaces; “‘how it looks’ takes priority over ‘logic’” is often the guiding rule of animated space design. For example, using different lenses within the same frame—composing the near and far ends of the image differently (wide-angle for the near end, telephoto for the far end)—allows an appropriate exaggeration that increases the force of the picture. Again, in a one-point perspective drawing one need not be bound to the position of the vanishing point, letting one’s own feeling take priority over the correct vanishing point; or again, multiple viewpoints can exist within one picture, guiding the viewer’s gaze.

Compared with live action, which is a “mechanical reproduction” of real things, animated space possesses greater plasticity and can conform more closely to the aesthetics of the human eye—in the 3000 Leagues model notes, Miyazaki writes, “I set the layouts according to the feeling of the human eye.” Precisely because Miyazaki layout is constructed on visual cognition and aesthetics rather than on strict perspective drawing (which is closer to the live-action lens), it may in fact give viewers a more direct sense of reality on the plane of sensibility.

In a certain sense, this capacity of animation in the representation of space, as against live action, might be called “plasmaticness.” The concept was first proposed by Sergei Eisenstein, who described it thus:

“A rejection of once-and-for-ever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to assume dynamically any form… I call this ability ‘plasmaticness,’ for here we have a being represented in drawing—a being that already possesses a given form, that has already attained a particular appearance—which nevertheless behaves like primal protoplasm, without any stable form, capable of assuming the form of any animal life upon the evolutionary ladder.” (7)

“Plasmaticness” is generally taken here to mean the drawn line’s freedom of movement, a capacity close to “plasticity.” The animation scholar Nobuaki Doi, however, argues that it names not change on the visual plane but change produced on the abstract plane of the viewer’s consciousness: the capacity to set the abstract and formless “metaphor” in motion, in Yuri Norstein’s phrase. The “metaphor” is not the figure itself (materiality), but the fluid image it evokes (abstraction). Freed from physical constraints, animation uses plasmaticness to fabricate an ambiguous, plural reality in consciousness. Drifting among realities, it makes viewers aware that the relation they themselves have formed with reality is only one of countless possibilities. Plasmaticness is not a departure from reality, but a shaking of reality at its roots. When animation persuasively presents a reality whose nature has been transformed, live-action images—precisely because they are too homogeneous—can come to seem false and fabricated. Animation thus becomes an “intimate” reality, and live action an “estranged” one. (8) (9)

In this sense, the “metaphorized” space of animation was put to effective use by Takahata and Miyazaki as a methodology oriented toward the real. Here “metaphor,” grounded in bodily sensibility—in the way our bodies come to know the world—holds out another “reality”: one closer than the live-action image to our physiological instincts, to the “reality” of our bodies, one that even feels more intimate to us.

In the fourth section, “Reality and Sign,” we will discuss the mechanism behind this sense of reality in greater detail.

As a supplement to the discussion of animated space: in the field of painting there likewise exists a “multi-viewpoint” manner of drawing—so-called scattered perspective—and it is in fact quite common. In Édouard Manet’s famous Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863), for instance, multiple perspectival relations exist within a single painting.

But the way we perceive animation is very different from the way we perceive a still painting. In animation, characters move about within the space, and the camera begins to push, pull, pan, and track—this mobility and narrativity are precisely animation’s advantage over the still image, and the reason we can feel “life” in it. As Doi puts it, “A still image does not need the magic by which life becomes visible. The magic must happen in the dimension of story, in the circumstances the characters find themselves in.” (8)

As a representative case of “multi-viewpoint” pictures in motion, one shot in the opening of Galaxy Cyclone Braiger (Ginga Senpū Buraigā, 1981), animated by Yoshinori Kanada, contains three viewpoints—looking down, looking level, looking up—each corresponding to one of three characters; the spatial perspective is warped, and the picture then moves according to that warped perspective. Ryūsuke Hikawa comments: “Ordinarily, with a layout like this, there would be absolutely no way to fit it into a single drawing. That he could draw such a picture without batting an eye is remarkable. And not only did he draw it—he made it move according to this warped perspective. The feeling of the warped picture rotating like this is something unique to Kanada that could never be drawn from ordinary imagination.” (10)

Kanada layout (especially his work on Invincible Superman Zambot 3 (Muteki Chōjin Zanbotto 3, 1977)), like Miyazaki layout, has exerted a deep influence on animation history.

Movement and Time

In “Editing Prohibited,” Bazin writes: “When the essence of a scene demands the simultaneous presence of two or more factors in the action, montage is ruled out. It can reclaim its right to be used, however, whenever the import of the action no longer depends on physical contiguity, even though implied.” (5) This lays down the range within which montage is forbidden, and marks out the territory where the theory of the deep-focus shot applies: different actions unfolding simultaneously on several planes of the space within a single shot.

In hand-drawn animation, however—in TV animation broadcast once a week—such shots in which “different actions unfold simultaneously” become exceptionally difficult. Moreover, the longer a single shot runs, the more easily the viewer’s attention concentrates on the acting of the moving characters, and the greater the test for the animators—especially in the sixties and seventies, when shortage of budget, time, and hands was particularly severe. Animation therefore naturally inclined toward using montage to express “dramatic time.”

Bazin writes: “The practice of breaking a scene down into shots, and the montage of those shots, amount to an expressionism of time—to rearranging events according to an artificial, abstracted time: dramatic time. Neorealism raised an all-around challenge to virtually all of these general rules of cinematic spectacle.” (5) In animation direction, dramatic time displays a discontinuity, and perhaps also carries an implicit “heterogeneity of psychological activity.”

Through various omissions, abstractions, simplifications, amplifications, or truncations of movement, and through a wide variety of photographic techniques, Mushi Production sought, “when an object moves, to reduce its movement as much as possible according to whether movement is necessary, while making it express as much dynamism as possible as animation” (11); these theories of drawing and direction are collectively called the techniques of limited animation. In Heidi and 3000 Leagues, by contrast, Takahata inclined toward excluding the dramatic, depicting complete movement across a complete passage of time, thereby guaranteeing the duration of time, and using acting to express the characters’ subtleties. This of course did not mean a total exclusion of limited-animation techniques; it was, rather, a posture of compromise and fusion within opposition.

To take drawing counts in TV animation as an example: one episode of Heidi used two to three times the count of an ordinary TV series, averaging 5,000–6,000 drawings (12); Mushi Production, meanwhile, ran low-count experiments in Sabu to Ichi Torimono Hikae (1968), in which episode 9, handled by Moribi Murano, used roughly 1,200 drawings, and episode 14 a mere 800 (13).

Collaboration with top-class animators such as Hayao Miyazaki and Yōichi Kotabe was the key to keeping drawing quality stable across long, high-count series. Later, after the trio of Takahata, Miyazaki, and Kotabe dissolved, on Anne of Green Gables (Akage no An, 1979; hereafter Anne) Yoshifumi Kondō—recommended by Miyazaki—served as animation director for the entire series, controlling the drawing quality with astonishing energy and achieving extraordinarily delicate character acting. (It is worth mentioning that Miyazaki resigned from screen composition after episode 15 of Anne, with Michiyo Sakurai taking over from episode 18; production ran into difficulty for a time, but miraculously regained its brilliance under those extreme production conditions.)

Let us take one concrete scene as an example. In the parting of Marco and his mother at the end of episode 1 of 3000 Leagues, there is a shot lasting more than a minute. In its first half, the mother takes her leave of Marco, but Marco says not a word, and after she departs he remains silent, head lowered, for nearly half a minute. After the crowd walks away and leaves Marco alone, Takahata performs a slow push-in (T.U.) of great craftsmanship, entering deep into the character’s heart; alone, Marco hears the voices of everyone’s farewells in his ears—the duration, and the push-in’s accumulation of the character’s feeling, make the tears in Marco’s eyes in the short close-up (UP) that follows land with exceptional impact. Bursting with emotion, Marco runs, falls and gets up, falls and gets up again; even though the character’s lines are simple and essentially without shading, even though the movement is not showy—one might even call it downright plain—every viewer can feel the sorrow brimming in Marco’s body. Toshiyuki Inoue surmises that Miyazaki single-handedly did everything here from layout to key animation, and considers this passage a piece of direction that strikes the heart in a way live action could not achieve; from Marco’s falls Inoue even felt pain (14). In this scene we see Takahata’s respect for real time and his demand for complete movement, and also the need for powerful animators to support the layouts and the scenes of action.

On the other hand, the “action” in “two or more factors in the action” is not in fact the core of Bazin’s dictum; the core is the relation, or potential relation, between two or more elements—a mutual relation conveyed through spatial unity and emphasized in the representation of time.

Regarding the Eskimo’s wait for the seal in Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), Bazin writes in “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema”: “The length of the hunt is the very substance of the image, its true object.” (5) The moving hunter and the motionless hole in the ice appear in the same shot, which both secures a sound spatial unity and expresses the tension within the waiting time of the hunt.

For animation, static compositions that emphasize actual or potential relations are especially important: they not only save drawings but heighten expressive power. Yet without the support of movement, since animation lacks the means to render the minute changes of light, shade, and nature, empty shots (BG only) and held drawings (tome-e) can hardly express the passage of time. For example, in the roughly one-minute held image at the end of episode 24 of Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995; hereafter EVA), even though the background music continues, the viewer still feels that time has stopped rather than that it flows.

How to express time while a character stands still thus naturally became a major problem for animation.

Before EVA, episode 4 of Anne and Angel’s Egg (Tenshi no Tamago, 1985) had each attempted shots of this kind. Their common features: a fixed camera; a duration longer than an ordinary shot (the single shot in Anne lasts about twenty seconds; in Angel’s Egg, an astonishing two minutes and more); a tense relation of confrontation, or potential confrontation, formed between multiple characters; and characters without movement, or nearly so.

But unlike EVA, Anne uses the swaying of the grass in the near foreground and the passing of dark clouds, and Angel’s Egg uses the flickering and extinguishing of a flame with the changes of light and dark it brings, to give the flow of time concrete form.

In the two pairs Bazin–Takahata and Tarkovsky–Oshii, we may perhaps find the root of what Takahata’s and Oshii’s images share. Oshii admits it directly: “I wanted to try making a film like Stalker (Сталкер, 1979).” (15) It is worth mentioning that Oshii went on, in later works, to make some new attempts at the expression of time in animation—for instance, the great quantity of precise in-between drawings added for Batou in the grocery-store scene of Innocence (2004); or Suito Kusanagi’s “motionless movement,” or unconscious micro-movements, in The Sky Crawlers (2008). These methods make the flow of time heavy and viscous.

To return to the topic. Anno, Takahata, and Oshii alike attempt to link the image with a stretch of time detached from the characters’ movement—which is not the same as the drawing-saving devices of animation, such as re-exposing layers or compositing so that a character merely moves the mouth (kuchi-paku) or blinks (me-pachi). The directorial aim is to make the viewer’s flow of time identical with the character’s while enlarging the viewer’s experience of time; and the “waiting” state of mind in which one watches forms at once a certain identification with, and a contrast to, the character’s inner psychology.

Among these shots, the time in EVA and Angel’s Egg also serves to build momentum for the subsequent development of the plot—a directorial preparation for the characters’ later actions—and can be regarded as a deliberately prolonged “sensory-motor situation”; whereas the scene in which the Anne shot stands is closer to Gilles Deleuze’s time-image: movement is no longer the chief motive force by which the image advances.

Anne dashes down from the carriage and sits on the collapsed fence some distance away; then a long silence… then she stands up and silently returns to the carriage. Here “the sensory-motor link is broken and fails”—Anne’s act of moving away becomes an element that produces the rupture; “this new element will prevent perception from extending itself into action, in order to bring it into relation with thought,” and so the “sensory-motor situation” passes over into the “purely optical and sound situation”: Anne seated in stillness and Marilla seated in stillness, the two of them sunk into the helplessness and impotence of movement, where “no foreseeable, determinate action is going to occur—only the arrival of the improvised event of the present… latent affect and spirit are made manifest through the impotence and poverty of action.” (16) (17)

Let us continue with Anne and speak of the arrangement of time in Takahata’s work as a whole. Anne came after Heidi and 3000 Leagues, in which the so-called life-animation style had “attained a kind of completion”; yet astonishingly, its first episode at once began a further exploration in directing methodology, whose avant-garde character arguably even surpassed the two earlier works, making it a celebrated episode in the history of Japanese animation.

The image researcher Seiji Kanō wrote on Twitter that episode 1 of Anne is “a slow tempo faithful to actual time, long takes and fixed shots, an excess of dialogue, a live-report-style male narration, objectivism, and so on—the whole episode is nothing but exceptions to the rules.” (18) Mamoru Oshii likewise directed his attention to Takahata’s use of time. He points out that episode 1 greatly influenced him in the making of animation: put simply, what happens in thirty minutes of real life is depicted in the animation in thirty minutes—is it really all right to do that in TV animation? Whenever he thinks of this, he receives a kind of encouragement. (19)

“What happens in thirty minutes of real life is depicted in the animation in thirty minutes” is a relatively exaggerated formulation, but it states with great concision what is avant-garde in Takahata’s direction. We can see that episode 1 is composed of several very long passages, each of which is essentially a “faithful transcript” of time, with no truncation or compression of time anywhere; the viewer’s flow of time thereby becomes identical with the characters’.

From the eighth minute, when Matthew meets Anne at the station, to the end of the episode, when Anne is still on Matthew’s carriage returning to Green Gables—this is documentary style pushed to the utmost. In the tension built by the script, in Anne’s torrential, childishly extravagant talk, and in the lovely scenery of the broad countryside, the viewer reaps an utterly distinctive experience of time: the episode’s time feels at once endless and fleeting.

In fact, the series spends the entire first five episodes on these two consecutive days of Anne’s; episode 4, from beginning to end, is basically nothing but Anne and Marilla talking on the carriage. The carriage sets out at the end of episode 3, and by the end of episode 4 it still has not reached Mrs. Spencer’s house. Takahata spares no ink in depicting trivial detail, striving to realize the third of Bazin’s guiding principles of the real: the reality of narrative structure. In this way, the integrity of the event is respected.

Oshii later spoke once again of Takahata’s influence on him:

“I cannot say how much Anne of Green Gables taught me, and Chie the Brat (Jarinko Chie, 1981) benefited me enormously as well, because I watched it more times than I can count. As a director, I don’t think any work has been as helpful as that one, and everyone in the industry says the same. Let me say it again and again: the Takahata of those days was a super first-class director. … He was one of those rare people who could properly employ the axis of time in direction from the standpoint of the film as a whole, and I really did once study his works desperately.” (15)

To analyze Oshii’s works with Takahata as the coordinates would be another complex but fascinating topic.

Reality and Sign

In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin writes: “Perspective made it possible for painters to create the illusion of three-dimensional space, within which things could appear to resemble our direct perception of them… Since the picture was painted by a human hand, doubt about the image could never be dispelled. In the passage from baroque painting to photography, the most essential phenomenon… is a psychological one: photography completely satisfies our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction from which man is excluded.” (5)

This is the key to Bazin’s ontology of the cinematic image—“the image is identical with the object photographed in objective reality”: “mechanical reproduction alone, with man excluded.” The perfection of photographic technology thereby surpassed, once and for all, painting’s resemblance and realist painting’s pursuit of resemblance, “freeing the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.” Painting thus turned from “imitation” toward “representation”—toward what Nelson Goodman calls “denotation,” which carries no requirement of similarity to a real counterpart.

If, then, the realism of animation—its pursuit of the sense of reality—takes its stand on animation as an art, it should never be a pursuit of likeness, even where its realist directing methods partly resemble those of live action.

Painting is, first of all, a combination of man-made visual elements (an “addition”), including form (concrete figures, geometric shapes, and so on), color effects (tonality, shadow, transparency, and so on), and spatial setting (the flat plane, or a deep space produced by perspective); we may perhaps call these visual elements signs.

Animation, compared with static painting, adds the dimension of time: the obake (dynamic distortion drawings) that express high-speed movement, the changing speed lines, and even timing (the speed and rhythm of a single action) and spacing (the change of an object’s position from frame to frame within that action), along with the time sheet written out by the key animator—all of these can be regarded as signs of a kind. Just as the perspective picture is an “illusion of three-dimensional space” in reality, timing and spacing are an “illusion” of real time: with a given distribution of exposures (koma-uchi—shooting on ones, twos, or threes), through the changes in an object’s position and the linkage between frame and frame, time is born, and comes under free control. Norman McLaren, on the basis of this very property of animation, went so far as to define it thus: “What happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame … Animation is therefore the art of manipulating the invisible interstices that lie between frames.” (20)

Concerning these sign-characteristics of animation, Tatsuyuki Tanaka writes: “Isn’t the attachment to, the taste for, ‘sign’ expression in itself—the fetishism for ‘the expression of a pattern’ in itself—the very essence of drawing in manga and animation?” (21) The wonder of animation does not lie in imitating reality; it lies in the representational capacity that the sign itself carries within it, and in its capacity for free transformation as protoplasm—creating another world of illusion through the body’s cognition, articulation, and imagination of the real world (whereby the sign naturally acquires a latent “corporeality”). It is worth analyzing plainly, at this point, how viewers “see” signs. We might say that the viewer within the illusion undergoes what Bergson describes as the two-way process of memory and perception; below is his famous diagram of the “memory cone”:

One key to this diagram is that “the present moment is always the meeting-point of a double, opposed movement: perception ceaselessly sinking into memory, and memory ceaselessly becoming perception.” (16) Within the illusion of animation, the viewer “recollects” experiences from the real world; but through watching—for instance, drawn nabiki (fluttering), explosions, walks, runs, and the rest—the viewer also comes to know the real world anew.

For the convenience of concrete analysis, let us take as our example one element of painting: the inner and outer contour lines. (Another reason for this choice is that they will be one of the focal points of the discussion of Takahata’s work to come.) Things in reality possess no lines; the contour line of a painting merely traces the edges of “surfaces” in reality. Yet the contour line, able as it is to “trace” reality, became in turn one of painting’s chief means of stirring our recollection and imagination. Whether simple or complex, a contour rich in representational power lets us swiftly “recollect” the corresponding experience in reality; our memory, summoned by the “perception of contour,” descends from the latent memory plane $AB$ to the apex $S$ and turns into present perception. Or, to put it another way, this is the psychological mechanism of projection: we mobilize our memories and project them onto the pattern before our eyes.

At the same time, the contour line naturally possesses polysemy—painting exists as a sign released from the constraints of reality, and in itself it can freely arouse the viewer’s imagination and thought, or set the “metaphor” in motion. Herein lies the latent plasmaticness of the sign. Let us take the famous duck–rabbit figure as an example:

“The point of the figure is that it can be seen under more than one aspect: the same picture may be seen as either a duck or a rabbit. Though the aspect changes, what is seen remains unchanged; the same picture is now a duck, now a rabbit.” (23) Such illusion-pictures continually mobilize our capacity for projection: we continually recall our experiences of reality and put forward all manner of readings. In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s vocabulary, this arouses our capacity for “aspect-seeing”—that is, the capacity to “see” something “as” something. This capacity of “seeing-as” requires our imagination, and equally requires our culture, our knowledge, and the conventions of signs (or, one might say, the latent plane $AB$). Moreover, from the duck–rabbit figure we realize once again that behind the convincing illusion we see stand signs—form, line, shadow, color—bearing multiple latent possibilities of meaning, from which we make out the various images the painter wished to express.

It should be pointed out that the representational power of the contour does not mean accuracy. As noted in the section “Shot and Space,” linear perspective can be discarded for the sake of visual verisimilitude, and scattered perspective adopted according to the feeling of the human eye—which will alter the contours of objects, stretching or distorting them. A convincing contour need not be “accurate,” nor should any standard exist for it. Ernst Gombrich comments thus on the painting of Paul Cézanne: “In his ardent search for a sense of depth without sacrifice of the brightness of colours, for an orderly arrangement without sacrifice of the sense of depth—in all his struggles and gropings there was one thing he was prepared to sacrifice if need be: the conventional ‘correctness’ of outline.” (24)

We find that in the painting above, Cézanne warps the perspectival relations—the rim of the vessel, for instance—and uses contour lines that appear and vanish by turns to strengthen the clarity of the objects, fixing their forms amid unstable air and light. This is that pursuit which the early Impressionists neglected: the pursuit of “the solid and durable shapes of nature.” Roger Fry points out in Cézanne: A Study of His Development:

“For the pure Impressionists this question of the contour was not so insistent. Preoccupied as they were by the continuity of the visual weft, contour had no special meaning for them… But for Cézanne, with his intellectual vigor, his passion for lucid articulation and solid construction, it became an obsession. … The contour is continually being lost and then recovered again. The pertinacity and anxiety with which he thus seeks to conciliate the firmness of the contour and its recession from the eye is very remarkable. It naturally lends a certain heaviness, almost a clumsiness, to the effect; but it ends by giving to the forms that impressive solidity and weight which we have noticed. … At first sight the volumes and contours declare themselves boldly to the eye. They are of a surprising simplicity, and are clearly apprehended. But the more one looks the more they elude any precise definition. The apparent continuity of the contour is illusory, for it changes in quality throughout each particle of its length. There is no uniformity in the tracing of the smallest curve. … We thus get at once the notion of extreme simplicity in the general result and of infinite variety in every part. … In spite of the austerity of the forms, all is vibration and movement.”

From this we can make out the latent corporeality of the sign. The contour line is nothing other than the manifestation of inner bodily sensation—just as in Cézanne’s own credo, “nature speaks in oneself, and completes itself”: the image of the body concentrated at the apex $S$ is the starting point of all perception and the center of action. Cézanne felt at once the solidity and order of form and the infinite variety of nature; and through the contour line, clarity and infinity are conveyed together. Deleuze’s understanding of the “body” in painting is more radical still. He writes:

“At one and the same time I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other, one in the other. … And at the limit, it is the same body which, being both subject and object, gives and receives the sensation. As a spectator, I experience the sensation only by entering the painting, by reaching the unity of the sensing and the sensed. … This was Cézanne’s lesson against the Impressionists: sensation is not in the ‘free’ or disembodied play of light and color (impressions); on the contrary, it is in the body, even the body of an apple. Color is in the body, sensation is in the body, and not in the air. Sensation is what is painted. What is painted on the canvas is the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but insofar as it is experienced as sustaining this sensation.” (25)

Sensation turned toward the subject (the nervous system, vital movement, “instinct,” “temperament”) and sensation turned toward the object (“the fact,” the place, the event) cannot be separated: this is the phenomenological view of “Dasein” as dwelling amid things. What is painted in the painting is nothing other than “my body.”

Next, on the basis of the discussion of signs so far, we will go a step further within the field of animation. In his conversation with Yūichirō Oguro, Tatsuyuki Tanaka spoke of the concept of “re-signification.” For the sign, Tanaka holds, reality is a springboard; re-signification means “taking the sign-based expressions of manga (and animation), re-examining and re-constructing them on the basis of reality, and proposing them once more as simple manga signs” (26). This cannot but remind us of Gombrich’s theory of “schema and correction”—though of course “re-signification” here does not mean the ordinary “matching” process by which a painter, while painting, adjusts the schema already in mind to suit the needs of depiction, but rather an experimental transformation of animation’s schemata, one of historical significance—as in the example Tanaka cites, Satoru Utsunomiya’s work on Gosenzo-sama Banbanzai! (1989), whose treatment both of solidity and of the expression of light deeply influenced those who came after, and which, together with Mitsuo Iso, began the realism revolution in the history of sakuga.

The essentials of re-signification, I think, are two. ① In the process of re-signification, reality is only a springboard: the aim is not to close in on reality but to reconstitute, on the basis of our cognition and articulation of reality, an equivalent model of relations. The transformation of the schema arises not from “the discovery of likeness, but the discovery of equivalences—equivalences that enable us to see reality in terms of an image, and an image in terms of reality. And the basis of this equivalence lies not so much in the similarity of elements as in the identity of responses to certain relationships.” (27)

② Simplified treatment can often be more effective than complex treatment; re-signification may also be described as the omission of redundant and roundabout sign-expression—the proposal of a simplification in which “one effect can serve as many.” For instance, in Gosenzo-sama Banbanzai!, Utsunomiya did not, like most animation before him, render the head’s shadow as a layered attached shadow at the boundary of head and neck; instead, treating the head as an obstacle in the path of light, he let the head’s near-circular shadow fall directly upon the body. Compared with the older practice of using shadow merely to accent a character’s details, this approach looks rough, yet it ① sets off the solidity of the head and ② directly implies the position of the light source, and so increases the effect instead. It is an extreme simplification of reality’s complex play of light and shadow, and yet it feels remarkably real—and whether or not the shadow conforms to reality does not matter in the least.

The reality-oriented work done by Takahata, Miyazaki, and their colleagues in Heidi and 3000 Leagues was likewise this: using reality as a springboard, they re-constructed animation-signs of a great skill that looks artless, giving viewers a sense of reality. Take the scene in episode 2 of Heidi in which the grandfather toasts melting cheese: the construction of the cheese as sign was unprecedented. In the illusion of the melting cheese, viewers see its smooth, viscous, soft, glistening qualities, and in their “recollection” of the real world imagine its silky, mellow taste, obtaining an experience with many layers. Toshiyuki Inoue remarks: “You cannot find a single superfluous line in the image. There are only simple contour lines, highlights, and shadows, and yet somehow that cheese looks more delicious than real cheese. Even in an image whose information has been pared down to the limit, viewers can still extract from the animation the impression of the real thing we have seen—precisely there lies animation’s advantage.” (14) We discover that our response to a single white dot on a golden-yellow mass is astonishingly complex: we seem to read the nature of the whole out of it.

In fact, cheese that melts like this could never exist in the real world—it may even be very far from it—so this is by no means a copy of reality. And yet, watching it, we understand the phenomenon of “melting” and gather from it the qualities of cheese: it successfully represents reality (the cheese and the phenomenon of melting), and even “looks more delicious than real cheese.” Dynamics included, this is a whole set of equivalent relations concerning texture. On the other hand, that our sensations and impressions can be set flowing so freely also owes to the plasmaticness animation possesses: it fabricates another reality—or rather, the reality of the body. Re-signification is a rediscovery of our inner bodily sensation.

The protoplasmic image returns human consciousness to “pre-logical, sensuous thinking” (the thinking of the infant, of the primitive), liberating people from reason and letting them temporarily “forget” logic and rationality (28). Our projection is in fact a selective recollection: sometimes we recall more, sometimes less. In this complex process of memory and perception we feel differences in the sense of reality—between, say, Hayao Miyazaki’s world and Hiroyuki Okiura’s world, even though both are called “real” and “convincing.”

Here we emphasize once again the standing of the apex $S$. The sense of reality is a product of the body, not a property belonging to reality itself. The perspective drawing produces the illusion of depth upon a plane; the micchaku multiplane technique produces a pseudo-perspective through the different speeds of different layers; for movement shot on threes, the human brain fills in a fluent motion. Compared with the camera’s mechanical recording and preservation of time and space—the body displaying itself externally—our mode of cognizing animation’s sign-expression stands at a more interior position of the body (if one wishes to be bolder, one may call it what Francis Bacon calls the “nervous system”), just as one develops a fetishism for the expression of a pattern, just as we feel a physiological pleasure in Yoshinori Kanada’s sakuga; and all the more because the images of animation’s signs are themselves constructed and reconstructed within the body’s cognition of real time and space and of the body itself—the production of animation signs is an “addition” that has passed through internalization, and the existence of time, space, and body receives in the form of the sign a certain intensification (29)—just look at Yoshinobu Inano’s rendering of the flesh in the ending sequence of Aura Battler Dunbine (Seisenshi Danbain, 1983), or look at his Lynn Minmay!

Finally, “re-signification” is a long road of development, and a road of innovation that spells pain. For various reasons—above all the commodity character animation may possess—a mode of expression tends to harden in place.

In 2010, Tatsuyuki Tanaka observed on Twitter that in recent Ghibli, “the pictorial, sakuga expressiveness has risen to a level of another dimension, but the patterns of the characters’ acting have not changed at all since the days of Heidi and 3000 Leagues—nothing has been added.” (30) It is a sharp criticism; but we can see that even with the participation of animators full of innovative temperament, such as Yoshinori Kanada and Shin’ya Ohira, the overall pattern of Miyazaki’s works has undergone no qualitative change, and their overall sakuga still carries on the Yasuji Mori–Yasuo Ōtsuka–Hayao Miyazaki style of the sixties and seventies—though in another sense this also testifies to the strength of Miyazaki’s control (and for those indifferent to the succession of expressive modes, the criticism does no great harm).

Takahata, however, in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Kaguya-hime no Monogatari, 2013), developed the work he had begun in My Neighbors the Yamadas (Hōhokekyo Tonari no Yamada-kun, 1999), thoroughly rethinking his own work in Only Yesterday (Omohide Poro Poro, 1991) and before, and turning completely toward “pictorial expression” as such. In “Why The Tale of the Princess Kaguya Is So Stunning” (31), Ryōta Fujitsu argues that in works like Heidi Takahata devoted himself to “verisimilitude,” and that the “verisimilitude” animation had pursued for more than half a century may more precisely be called “the verisimilitude of live-action film”; The Tale of the Princess Kaguya “graduates” from this tendency and turns toward “pictorial verisimilitude,” offering animation another possibility besides development in the direction of “cinematic verisimilitude.”

Fujitsu’s account is in places insufficiently detailed, insufficiently apt. First, as Eiji Ōtsuka says, Takahata’s realism (riarizumu) is not naturalistic realism (shajitsu shugi) (32)—that is, it is not the copying and duplication of reality and nature. The work of Heidi was rather a matter of “how to make the audience feel a sense of reality through artless, childlike pictorial expression” (30); as in the example of the cheese above, its crux is the problem of the sign’s representation, not a problem of live action or of likeness.

Yet it is true that the pursuit of likeness can produce a sense of reality. For animation to construct a complete, deep world in the manner of live action, the “addition” of ever more information—more likeness—seems unavoidable; even Takahata’s own later work, the character designs, acting designs, and art of Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka, 1988) and Only Yesterday, seems like a continual drawing-closer to similarity and complexity. If I were pressed to name a shortcoming of Grave of the Fireflies, it would be this: the image’s quantity of detail, multiplied by the sign’s effect of intensification, produces a reality-effect so intense as to make one’s hair stand on end—and this can in turn impair the calm lucidity of Takahata’s direction.

Animation can certainly achieve particular directorial aims through likeness—but where does that road end? More pointedly, where along it lies animation’s own advantage over live action? How is animation to avoid being regarded as live action’s inferior? Takahata presumably recognized the danger lurking in his own work, and so changed course with My Neighbors the Yamadas. He completely discarded “external,” “false” realism: the likeness that sits “on” the image. The characters moved closer to manga, boldly adopting four-head-tall proportions. He also absorbed the fruits of Utsunomiya’s realism revolution, employing animators such as Shin’ya Ohira, Shinji Hashimoto, and Masaaki Yuasa on My Neighbors the Yamadas, and Osamu Tanabe, Shinji Hashimoto, and Norio Matsumoto on The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. What he pursued was the reality “between” frames, the persuasive movement produced by the lines’ rich, delicate tremor. Its conviction comes from the key animator’s perception and articulation of the rhythm, force, and weight of real movement. Exploiting animation’s plasmaticness to the utmost and exercising an imagination all their own, animators convey that perception through timing, spacing, and other corporeal signs. This is an “internal” reality. The fullest realization of Takahata’s thinking can be found in Shinji Hashimoto’s work on My Neighbors the Yamadas and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya: the father peeling and eating a banana, and Princess Kaguya’s frenzied run beneath the moon.

Take Kaguya’s moonlit run. How is it that, from the weaving and knotting of lines, we can recognize that Kaguya is running? And how is it that, as the lines shudder and tumble, we find the strings of our own hearts shuddering violently too? Here, if we pull a single line out of a single image, we may well fail to recognize its meaning and its function; the lines (and even the movement of the lines) are indeterminate and polysemous (33). This is not the camera’s “spatialization” of time, which divides the world cleanly into an array of frames—even if in form it resembles such an array, the single image, having cast off nearly all “external” likeness, loses most of its meaning when isolated.

The meaning of the single image lies in the relation of mutual “interpenetration” between images. This “penetration” is by no means a precise, strict causal relation (in a certain sense, this polysemy and interpenetration may even be said to exceed “articulation”), and yet it truly conveys force and rhythm, letting one feel, in the trembling of the lines, complex and turbulent emotions—rage, sorrow, madness—and making the passage an organic whole. This closely resembles what Bergson calls “durée”: “a violent love or a deep melancholy takes possession of our soul: here we feel a thousand different elements dissolving into and permeating one another, without precise outlines, without the least tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another” (34). Watching the animation-sign (the movement of lines), the viewer undergoes an experience of continuous, free change (that is, plasmaticness). May we not say that the animator’s experience of temporal flux has been conveyed to the viewer—or that the body’s intuition and recognition of durée and of the flow of life has been returned to the body?

It should be noted separately here that Hashimoto’s work proves that no clear dividing line exists between the orientation toward the real and expressionism. In his conversation with Hashimoto (35), Yūichirō Oguro tried hard to establish when Hashimoto’s orientation toward the real first appeared, but the two men in fact understood “the real” differently. In the conversation, Oguro also kept pressing Hashimoto on points of detail—the length of the reference footage, whether he watched the video frame by frame, whether he used it as reference frame by frame, and so on. I suspect there may be a current of this kind: out of an excessive regard for the animator’s independent powers, some viewers indiscriminately look down on sakuga that uses live-action or 3D reference. But this only shows that such viewers can analyze the question solely from the angles of form and the complexity of movement, without realizing that the key animator’s personal feeling is not necessarily dissolved by “reference”—just as Hashimoto used a great deal of live-action reference on My Neighbors the Yamadas, which in no way diminished the excellence of his work; even Miyazaki praised it lavishly. More importantly, we find Hashimoto mentioning how much he values the feeling of his body performing the movements when he films himself for reference; and we know, too, that Mitsuo Iso, when drawing Asuka’s battle, even knocked holes in his desk and his wall.

To return to The Tale of the Princess Kaguya—this is Takahata’s return, after animation history’s long development of “addition” upon the “surface” of the image, to simple animation-sign expression, to a movement (between the images) that has cast off “appearance.” More important than the “quantity” of information—which one can hardly avoid mentioning when speaking of animation—becomes the “quality” of information. And not only in movement: by carrying the watercolor-on-paper style through the entire film, stressing the simple touch and texture of the drawn line, and boldly leaving blank space within the image, Takahata provided a directorial strategy for achieving “subtraction” in animation. In other words, “the idea arrives where the brush does not”—as Wang Wei’s Secrets of Landscape Painting has it: “A pagoda’s crown may pierce the sky without the hall being shown, as if there and not there, now above, now below; fragrant knolls and earthen banks half-reveal their eaves and granaries; grass huts and reed pavilions may be merely hinted at in outline.” It is precisely such blank space that most fully mobilizes the viewer’s mechanism of projection, mobilizing the viewer’s memory and experience.

Another essential point of this methodology lies in the abandonment of the cel-animation mode. Takahata understood early that the cel mode had a weakness—what Tatsuyuki Tanaka calls the irreconcilable difference between layers, “the characters are line drawing, the background is in an oil-painting style” (26)—which inevitably affects the sense of reality. Thus in Chie the Brat (Jarinko Chie, 1981), Takahata adopted backgrounds in a pen-drawing style close to the colored original art of manga (36), giving both characters and backgrounds contours; but even this could not bridge the difference in material texture between the character and background layers. It was by adopting the watercolor style throughout in My Neighbors the Yamadas and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya that the textures of character and background attained unity.

In the present day there exists a current in the animation world of painting backgrounds ever closer to photographs of real locations, so that the textures of the layers split ever further apart—whereupon one tries to bridge the gap with photographic techniques resembling live action (filter effects, lighting effects, the introduction of depth of field, and so on). For example, Kyoto Animation’s art director Mutsuo Shinohara, speaking of Sound! Euphonium (Hibike! Euphonium, 2015), said:

“The instruction we received for the backgrounds was ‘aim for the real,’ but in the first season we overshot the mark—it ended up looking just like live action. Too much is as bad as too little; since this is animation, I feel it must in the end come down to pictorial expression. We had to make backgrounds that suit the characters’ movement, and in that respect the first season fell somewhat short… With that reflection in mind, I took special care in the second season, and conveyed as much to everyone in the department.” (37)

Shichirō Kobayashi points out that the present age is “an age of the loss of tactility”: this is why, even in a medium like animation, images that look as though a camera had shot them can be so widely accepted (38). This too is a sharp criticism. “The verisimilitude of live-action film” is by no means without value as an important route and methodology; but what must be considered is this: while animation strains with all its might to approach the effects of live action, are we not gradually losing our bodies?

In an essay appraising Kobayashi’s art, Osamu Dezaki says outright: “In any case, I have from beginning to end rejected the attitude that merely copies the object down correctly. The sense of reality lies not in realistic depiction but in the essence of things”; “Cel drawing and background painting cannot be considered entirely apart from each other… only when the two become one body does something begin to exist as a mode of expression” (39). These blunt statements are all the more profound for their directness, and they echo our earlier discussion. Of course, the “essence of things” Dezaki speaks of here refers, more precisely, “not to the essence of the physical world, but to the essence of our reactions to it” (27); what matters is not the cause in reality but “the mechanism that produces a certain effect.” Just as the making of The Adventures of Gamba (Ganba no Bōken, 1975) set out from the question “how do the mice see the world,” Dezaki writes: “For the mice, more essential than the overall shape of a rock or the like is the pitted, uneven texture of the rock surface pressed close against them; which means that, to give an example, even if they came to ‘Gunkanjima,’ what would first leap before their eyes would be the rusted surface of the steel.” The “essence” here is the mice’s bodily sensation. At “the unity of the sensing and the sensed,” we come to identify with the painter—and with the mice.

It is worth mentioning that, in an echo of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, in which Takahata cast off “false” realism, Sunao Katabuchi—deeply influenced by Takahata—likewise adopted, in In This Corner of the World (Kono Sekai no Katasumi ni, 2016), a manner of drawing characters close to their manga images, and likewise achieved an effect of vivid, lifelike reality.

Recently, in a conversation on the works of Satoshi Kon in the August 2020 special issue of Eureka, Toshiyuki Inoue observed acutely:

“Kon was, from the start, someone who sought the new in image-making, and I think this had both merits and faults. A detailed drawing is not necessarily a good drawing; the pursuit of detail, while one cannot call it wrong, also carries many negative factors for animation. … Once you can draw to a certain level, you come to understand that the mere pursuit of detail and correctness can never produce a drawing’s appeal. … So now, re-examining the pursuit of detail and correctness that has advanced since Kon’s debut, I feel strongly the need to return to the origin and reconsider what the appeal of a drawing is. Isn’t Japanese animation standing at precisely such a turning point right now?” (40)

And Takahata—leader and great promoter of the last century’s animation realism—underwent just such a momentous turn within his own career. The radicality of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is not a regression to the animation dawn of the 1960s; it can be traced back to the picture-scroll expression of the Heian period (31)… The meaning of this deserves to be pondered again and again.

Takahata’s contributions to animation history go far beyond what has been discussed above, and I believe the legacy left by The Tale of the Princess Kaguya still deserves to be digested slowly and repeatedly by the animation world. For China, the ink-wash animation of the last century’s Shanghai Animation Film Studio is an art form that can stand beside Takahata’s works—one of the few forms through which our nation’s distinctiveness can be expressed in animation, for example The Cowherd’s Flute (1963). Yet this great legacy seems not to have flowered or borne fruit in today’s animation world. Under the development of modern technology, works like The Tale of the Princess Kaguya have appeared, achieving a classical temperament with the newest techniques—how much possibility is there, then, for the revival and renaissance of traditional ink-wash painting in Chinese animation?

Conclusion

In the above, we have attempted to take Isao Takahata’s realist animation as a point of entry for exploring the problem of reality in animation. At the beginning, we tried to find answers in Bazin’s handling of the problem of cinematic realism. We found that Takahata’s direction can indeed be compared with Bazin’s film theory: the methodological question “how does animation represent reality” can find objects of reference in live-action film and absorb them. But we also found that animation possesses many characteristics of its own that differ from film; therefore, even where animation and live action are close in directing methodology, their modes of expression and inner natures are profoundly different. Animation’s “orientation toward the real” does not mean the copying of reality; animation is not an “asymptote of reality.” The source of its “sense of reality” is more complex, bound up with the ways human beings know the world: for “space,” with the image the eye’s vision generates in the brain; for “time,” with the way human beings come to know time from movement.

In the section “Shot and Space,” we placed our weight on one great foundation of Takahata’s methodology—scene design, or, one might say, Hayao Miyazaki’s layout. Miyazaki’s design method, based on the feeling of the human eye, exerted great influence on the animation world thereafter; and through it we also glimpsed animation’s power to fabricate another reality—the reality of our bodies. In the section “Movement and Time,” we spoke mainly of three things: ① Takahata’s respect for real time and his demand for complete movement (sakuga design, acting design); ② the time that flows while characters stand still; ③ the reality of narrative structure—Takahata’s respect for the integrity of the event.

Finally, “Reality and Sign” is the core of this essay, occupying half its length. To explain the question that concerns animation’s very nature—“how is animation able to represent reality?”—we have borrowed several concepts, including Bergson’s “memory cone” and the psychological term “projection,” and have had to introduce a little knowledge of painting. I hope these concepts have not obscured the direction of the argument. The main points are clear, though they interconnect and pull upon one another: ① the representational capacity of the animation-sign and its freedom to transform like protoplasm; ② the latent corporeality animation-signs naturally possess; ③ animation grounds its reality not in likeness or similarity, but in the development of equivalences—in the study of bodily reactions and sensations. These ideas run through almost the entire section, recurring as they are expanded and deepened.

But, limited by the length of this essay and the breadth of what it touches, what I have been able to offer are only some plain explorations; and in fact this piece constitutes only the first half of what I had envisioned—merely the foundation of the latter half’s content, or, as the title says, a set of “coordinates.” Yet because this “first half,” beginning from material I had first meant to dispatch in five thousand characters, kept multiplying and extending itself, gradually coiling over the entire plan like a monster, I was forced to cut away the framework of the latter half wholesale. If this unworthy essay can nonetheless be of some help and benefit to its readers, that will be my greatest happiness.