First published on the author’s Bangumi blog, this article appears in the Lab on Roof column with permission and very slight changes. We hope to see more from the author; if you enjoy the article, please follow them.
As usual, a few brief remarks first. I’ll leave the larger structure aside for now; if there is anything genuinely interesting, I’ll discuss it separately after finishing my second viewing. The failure of Concrete Revolutio can be said to be the failure of Sho Aikawa’s chosen narrative strategy: the episodic narrative shifts its focus back and forth between two temporal layers, centered on Shinka 42 (1967) and Shinka 47 (1972), respectively. The five years left aside between them leave an enormous blank in the characters’ development. The “detours” that might otherwise occur within social space, along with the rich motives for action, are compressed in time and projected into a mere twenty minutes of animation. On a crude reading, the result is ludicrous. Seen in full, the story is not without substance. Yet arbitrary selections from either end of the time axis can still yield only monsters, seemingly neither one thing nor another, in individual stretches of the story. Is it the audience’s fault that they see this monster? Plainly, it is Aikawa’s fault. The second season’s ending-credit visuals capture the predicament nicely—jump around in time too casually, and things will go wrong.
Aikawa’s insufficient control over time exposes his weakness in narrating social life. In fact, although he has always been regarded as a “socially engaged” screenwriter, this does not mean he is particularly good at depicting society. It merely means he is a screenwriter who still persists in doing so. This insufficient control over time is more immediately apparent in his handling of space; after all, time is only a sign used to describe spatial states. Yet when we turn our attention to space, we find that although the characters’ clothes differ between Shinka 42 and Shinka 47, the setting remains the same. This spatial similarity—or rather, sameness—heightens the audience’s temporal confusion. Behind the accusatory “Have we jumped in time again?” in the danmaku—the viewer comments overlaid on the video—there is undoubtedly a vast muddle.
The initial critique was meant to identify this shortcoming; the reconsideration will expose the material conditions behind it. Let us first return to the Japanese special-effects films, or tokusatsu, on which Aikawa built his reputation—a medium that has undoubtedly had an enormous influence on animation. Tokusatsu films have two core elements: suit actors and destructible miniatures. As the camera follows the suit actor, the miniatures that enter the frame as background become objects to be destroyed. The reality of the suit actor and the falsity of the miniatures (the background) emerge as a contradiction. This contradiction is intensified in the next day’s performance: the suit actor appears with new skills learned or injuries sustained the day before, showing time growing on his body, while the miniatures are restored—and in this way banished beyond space and time.
Let us look more closely at the subtle “inversion” we have unearthed. Archaeology is a science that reconstructs the state of a society at a particular time by examining material culture, attending to artifacts and to their relations in space and time congealed within strata. This widely accepted scientific paradigm means that in everyday life we trust a material record of space and time. In tokusatsu films, however, everything is reversed: the falsity of the props makes them inadequate to anchor time, so our understanding of the story can rely only on an “archaeology of the body.” Thus we see suit actors in tokusatsu films acquire ever more skills, scars, and transformation forms; descriptions of bodily states become a new source of our sense of time’s progression. In new tokusatsu feature films, too, audiences often use characters’ bodily attributes (skills, scars, forms) to judge where the story falls in time. And the external material markers? The external material markers have been abandoned.
The same predicament exists in animation: characters that “move” and backgrounds that “do not.” And the problem carries over. Cutting corners on backgrounds is not (only) cutting corners on the background layer (a lack of expressive power), but also on animation’s social background (a lack of awareness). This deficiency in animation itself is precisely what “socially engaged” animation must first overcome. Reconfiguring the spatial background means shifting the narrative focus, turning toward a broad social space “above humanity” and entering a realm of objective material laws operating of their own accord. The previous focus had undoubtedly been fixed on the characters through technical means, consciously and unconsciously alike.
If we start here and look back at post-2000 sekai-kei1 and the “invasion” of anime interpretation by psychoanalytic approaches, we discover that the stagnation of social space makes many stories susceptible to an “it was all a dream” explanation—a change that occurs only in a character’s mental state really is just a “dream.” Of course, I am not saying that stream-of-consciousness techniques capable of extending a single day indefinitely are bad. But on the other hand, works by such well-known directors as Hideaki Anno, Kunihiko Ikuhara, and Masaaki Yuasa are all regarded as stream of consciousness. Even Akiyuki Shimbou’s works, which divide time through interludes, are taken, because of their temporal ambiguity, for a kind of “stream of consciousness that’s drunk itself into a blackout.” This points to a certain technical tendency shared by animation directors. And when we return once more to Concrete Revolutio, we discover that its English name is actually Superhuman Phantasmagoria. Phantasmagoria refers to the phenomenon of one’s life flashing before one’s eyes just before death.2 It is often given concrete form as a filmstrip laid out flat, and is itself a phenomenon of consciousness. Here we see technique playing its tricks. Animation is a medium.
Editor’s note: The following passages are selected from the author’s further discussion in the comments and supplement the original article.
(… discussing) the larger structure. The question of subjecthood in the transformation (of Japanese society) that Aikawa designs around political actors; the psychoanalysis of that transformation. Such discussion undoubtedly emphasizes human subjectivity and agency. What it loses is objectivity and objecthood. So-called “socially engaged” work still faces the problem of society being rendered insubstantial. This cannot simply be attributed to Japanese animation being limited animation, because every medium is limited. Writing is not writing but deletion—that is, “writing under erasure.” This concerns the allocation of discursive resources. Once Japanese animation makes a habit of allocating its most precious resources to characters, a psychoanalytic discourse is (or can be) established. Synchrony rather than diachrony takes precedence, and this in itself limits certain forms of expression. Why call Aikawa’s narrative strategy a failure? Because it conflicts with Japanese animation’s form as a medium. Space deliberately left blank becomes mere blankness. The audience’s bodily habitus tells them: history without characters is no history.
In the end, Concrete Revolutio also abandons the sense of the “Shinka” era it initially tried to create, retreating into the more generalized question of personal growth—territory more familiar to Aikawa. Universality itself presupposes that different kinds of human society occupy the same evolutionary plane, and that a shared structure of domination exists once history has left the stage. It discusses the human condition while denying the specificity of the (social) background.
Editor’s note: Concrete Revolutio deserves further discussion.