Master’s degree in literature; critic of otaku culture, literature, and the arts.
Follow the author on Zhihu under the same name, 红茶泡海苔.
In answer to the Zhihu question “How did Makoto Shinkai become a first-rate animation creator without formal training in animation?”:
Several respondents have answered this as a question about whether formal training is a prerequisite for becoming a first-rate animation creator. I’m not sure whether that was what the questioner had in mind. But I think their reading rests on a mistaken assumption: that Shinkai and his “animation” are legitimate heirs to “Japanese animation”; that he is the same kind of animation creator as Miyazaki, Anno, and other directors; and that his work belongs within the “orthodox history of animation.”
In Eureka’s special issue on Shinkai, Ichishi Iida wrote an essay called “Stop Calling Makoto Shinkai the ‘Next Miyazaki’ or the ‘Next Hosoda’—Once and for All” (新海誠を「ポスト宮崎駿」「ポスト細田守」と呼ぶのは金輪際やめてもらいたい). I think that is very much to the point.
We may regard Shinkai as a first-rate animation creator, discuss him alongside Miyazaki and the others, and classify his work as animation. But his “animation” is completely different in method from what we call the “animation” of Miyazaki, Anno, Oshii, and Hosoda. The experience it gives us is completely different, too.
Perhaps, then, we could understand the question this way: does Shinkai’s becoming a first-rate animation creator without formal training mean that there is something different about him, something not seen before? What is that quality?
Eiji Ōtsuka, who knows Shinkai well and has influenced his work in numerous ways since Children Who Chase Lost Voices, calls this quality “the aesthetics of layers.” Let me first offer a translation of his essay.
The Aesthetics of Layers (EYE SCREAM, October 2016 supplement, Makoto Shinkai: The Man and His Work)
By Eiji Ōtsuka
Chinese translation by Hongcha Pao Haitai
Parentheses belong to the original; additions after a slash are the Chinese translator’s.1Looking back at Makoto Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star now, I am struck anew by how thoroughly it employs a method of montage built from what we call layers. That method is precisely what keeps the work’s freshness undiminished even today.
People extract the meaning “giving life” from the word “animation,” connect it to movement on screen, and declare this the essence of animation as a form of expression. This has even led them to reject animation that “does not move.” Though this canard is scarcely credible today, the disparagement of Osamu Tezuka for introducing limited animation into Japanese television animation remains one repellent example. Animation must move: how much poorer must this form of expression become before the few who hold this prejudice are satisfied?
What astonished me when I first saw Voices of a Distant Star was its construction. Each CUT/shot combines a calculated, sharply oblique camera angle with a composition built from multiple Layer/image layers (in other words, it is designed throughout as a shot in a film). These shots are then joined into a continuous sequence through bold changes in shot scale (Blocking Size2) and camera angle. And over those images, the boy’s and girl’s voices and the melody (strange as this may sound) “overlap, layer upon layer.”
In other words, the landscape within a shot is first of all an overlap of Layer/image layers (layering within space). Next, the impressions evoked by each shot—in which stillness is, if anything, what matters—appear before us as though layers were continually being laid over one another (layering along the axis of time). Finally, the boy’s monologue, the girl’s monologue, and the melody overlap upon this flow of images (layering of consciousness, or of “voices”). Shinkai’s work is made through these multiple techniques of layering.
Within animation, Shinkai’s approach is still quite novel as a carefully worked-out methodology. At the same time, for someone like me, who lives within the expressive world of manga, it is a thoroughly familiar aesthetic.
For the aesthetics of layers is precisely what we have refined in manga. We have been making manga this way all along. Yet if we trace it back to its origins, it was actually established in this country’s animation. Historically, the aesthetics of layers was born, miraculously, in the ill-fated wartime propaganda film Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (1945).
Whenever Sacred Sailors comes up, people are captivated by the “movement” of its Disney-like full animation. In fact, it is a great experimental animated film caught up in “national policy”—an entanglement that, paradoxically, became the occasion for bringing documentary film and animation together. The aesthetics of documentary film and newsreel imagery entered animation not simply as reference material but as a way of thinking about image composition. In this respect, the film was groundbreaking. Transmitted light → clouds → fighter planes flying in the distance → the wing of the fighter plane carrying the paratroopers: these Layer/image layers are brought together through multiplane photography to form a single image.
This spatial depth does not come from conventional perspective; it was established by Eisenstein. Watch Battleship Potemkin and you will find many layered shots that could be recreated in animation through multiplane photography. Sacred Sailors did just that. Unfortunately, the convenient term “layer” did not yet exist as a name for this “aesthetic.” It is well known that Sacred Sailors, Japan’s first domestically produced animated feature, was made under the impact of Disney’s Snow White. But compare it with China’s Princess Iron Fan (1941), also made under the profound influence of Snow White: of the key techniques borrowed from Disney’s film, Japan chose multiplane photography, while China chose rotoscoping. I cannot help wondering whether this was a major fork in the two countries’ animation histories.
Japan’s animation chose multiplane photography—in other words, it adopted the aesthetics of layers. Yet people have forgotten this important history. At the end of the Ghibli Museum’s displays on animation history, the first floor houses a peepbox (an Engelbrecht theatre), a device originating in seventeenth-century Europe, in which flat pictures of scenery are arranged inside a box as Layer/image layers, from foreground to background. On the second floor is a replica multiplane camera. The reasons for this arrangement deserve thought. Building on its aesthetics of layers within each shot, Sacred Sailors also joins these layered shots through montage, as cinema does. Though the film does not use monologue, its wartime characters are depicted with expressions full of sorrow and longing—even in an age when individuals had an “inner life” that could not be expressed in film, and “military songs” had to stand in its place. Eisenstein, in fact, called this combination of sound and image “vertical montage.” In other words, he made his “films” through three kinds of montage: montage of Layer/image layers, montage between CUT/shots, and vertical montage. After the war, Tezuka brought this thinking into “manga,” and “cinematic manga” was refined over the course of our history. So when I saw Shinkai’s animation, I felt that a natural product of our history had appeared before me.
In fact, after seeing Voices of a Distant Star, I could not help thinking that Shinkai ought to be able to make manga, and I commissioned a manga from him. He drew what was very nearly his first manga for my little magazine.
The view that the “aesthetics of layers” is an essential characteristic of Japanese animation has a stronger hold in North America than in Japan itself. Take the Wachowski sisters’ Speed Racer (2008). Although it is a live-action film, the people riding in the car, the objects close to it, and the foreground, middle distance, and background beyond it were deliberately filmed separately and then stacked as layers. Movement is produced through the same technique as “引きセル/cel sliding.” The reason they attempted this baffling digital version of limited animation is precisely that such images “look like Japanese animation.” This equation of Japanese animation with layers has now even become an accepted view in North American animation theory. The most influential animation scholar, Thomas Lamarre, puts forward the difficult concept of the “animetic machine” in his study of Japanese animation, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (2009). Once you work through it, the concept really amounts to the “montage of layers” described above. Lamarre’s claim is that the aesthetics of layers—the animetic machine—is rooted in Japanese manga and animation, and differs from the spatial aesthetics of Renaissance perspective and the aesthetics of moving images. Lamarre gives the impression that he wants to connect this aesthetic to Japanese tradition. But as we have seen, it was Eisenstein’s aesthetics of layers, received by wartime animation and thereby brought into Japanese subculture, that we had never explicitly articulated in language and animation. Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star quietly accomplished that unfinished task. For this alone, it deserves a lasting place in the history of the moving image. Shinkai’s novelty lies in reintroducing “monologue”—the “inner speech of consciousness”—as vertical montage, organizing space, time, and consciousness each into layers. The characters in Voices of a Distant Star therefore have no need at all for “movement” on screen. I loved the unaffected quality of Shinkai’s character drawings then, and that has not changed with my move from manga editor and story writer to teacher. As someone who has spent years looking at the drawings of beginning manga artists, I can say with certainty that his drawings should have grown beautiful enough to take one’s breath away. Someone who can weave words of their own can also use those words to give their drawings greater depth.
But Shinkai expressed this “language” through “voice.” When “voice” is organized into layers, “vertical montage” also takes the leading role. Takaaki Yoshimoto had already discussed the idea of layering language in Masu imēji ron—A Theory of the Mass Image. He discovered it in shōjo manga—girls’ manga—and called it “the differentiation of language into phases.”3 For readers of shōjo manga, this was already an old device. When I was young, I had no idea what Yoshimoto found so astonishing. How stupid of me.
What matters is what Shinkai wants to do with this “aesthetics of layers.” It is plain that he wants to use it to express interiority.
Shinkai layers his own consciousness, that of his characters, and sensory awareness. First, he constructs in layers the space as the protagonist—or the viewer—subjectively perceives it. Landscape is not merely background: it is a projection of interiority, a means of externalizing consciousness. It is not background art whose purpose is to explain where the protagonist is. There is therefore nothing wrong with keeping the depiction of figures to a minimum. The landscapes are then joined through montage as a flow of consciousness. Over this comes a montage of layers of the boy’s and girl’s words and voices. Shinkai turns not only the characters in the work, but also the subjectivity and consciousness receiving them, into layers, and combines them through montage. Our consciousness is first interrupted by the landscape’s layers, then recomposed through the layered landscape, the connections between images, and the overlapping dialogue tracks. This is the method by which the work captivates its viewers.
And as the story proceeds, the two characters’ words cannot reach each other; they overlap only on the Layer/audio tracks. The technique of layering and vertical montage resonate even with the work’s theme. When method and theme resonate, a miraculous masterpiece is born.
I still miss the original version of Voices of a Distant Star. In that version, there was not only a montage of his characters and landscapes, but also a montage of the living voices of Shinkai and the woman beside him. Above all, that version, composed through a montage of consciousness, corresponded to Shinkai’s way of being at the time: making animation alone, like an I-novelist.4
Perhaps, then, we can say that by giving the characters in his work consciousness, Shinkai ultimately achieved a kind of “giving life” entirely different from that of “moving images.” The proof is that the inner life of everyone who has watched the work has also been “given life.”
So, to be honest, I was somewhat surprised when Shinkai eventually adopted studio production, became adept at using movement on screen, hired character designers and professional voice actors, and chose the path of a professional filmmaker. Of course, I would never dismiss the countless challenges he has overcome. I even feel tenderness toward a “failure” such as Children Who Chase Lost Voices. Writing this may hurt him, but I still sometimes think that the absence, at the time, of an environment capable of properly understanding his extraordinary achievement did affect the choices he made afterward. And that environment has scarcely changed.
Compared with the equipment and software Shinkai assembled in Akihabara back then, we can now buy more powerful alternatives for less money. Yet hardly any young person in this country has emerged as a second Shinkai, wielding the aesthetics of layers to make animation alone. What is quietly standing in their way?
Back then, I seriously thought that Shinkai’s arrival would awaken more creators; that “authors” like him would keep appearing on the web; that animation and manga would unite there, and everything would be turned upside down. But now it seems that nothing has changed.
I look back fondly on that fantasy now, but I have never thought it was wrong.
As Ōtsuka says, Shinkai’s method—his aesthetic—was born in wartime Japanese animation. It was the very essence of Japanese animation, yet was forgotten before it had even been theorized. Within the capital-H History of animation, devoted to character “movement,” Shinkai is really an outsider: he makes animation through another kind of “movement,” another way of “giving life.” Far from becoming an obstacle to his success, his lack of formal training gave him an important opening to explore and theorize this method of multilayered montage.
The respected commentator @马小褂 once teased Shinkai for “churning out music-video medleys,” inadvertently touching on the essence of his animation method. Consider the unexpected use of “soundtrack-led storyboarding” in Your Name. Shinkai’s emphasis on multiple kinds of montage means that, when making animation, he pays close attention to the resonance and rhythm among images, dialogue, music, transitions, and the consciousness of characters and viewers. This quality really does resemble the shooting and editing of music videos. That is why Hiroki Azuma and the critics around him call Shinkai’s method “postmodern,” “eroge-like”—resembling erotic games—or “MAD-like,” resembling Japanese fan-remix videos. But as Ōtsuka explains, Shinkai’s montage derives not from France in the 1960s, but from wartime Japanese animation’s reception of Soviet film theory. His montage/collage of layers is not postmodern collage but Dada collage: the collage of wartime “photomontage” and “New Photography.” In other words, Shinkai was not simply influenced by eroge and MAD. Often, his work even belongs to the prehistory of these modes of expression, exerting some influence on the forms later works would take. Falcom, in fact, has its own embarrassing history of making strip games, and Kazuhiko Tsuzuki—the manga artist and ace Ys illustrator—is also a master of illustration for “**” devotees and of CG drawing.
One explanatory panel at the Shinkai exhibition tells us that a scene of falling cherry blossoms in 5 Centimeters per Second was made by combining thirty-five layers. In Your Name., when “Zenzenzense” begins to play, the montage of alternating images and images combined side by side in split screen gives viewers the illusion that two people separated by three years are living in the same moment. At the end of Voices of a Distant Star, the voices and consciousness of two people separated by tens of light-years nevertheless meet on the soundtrack, giving viewers a distinctive sense of space.
And the montage Shinkai creates through overlap is not confined to his animation. There is a scene like this in the novel version of Your Name.:
In this passage, Mitsuha’s あの男 (“that man”) and Taki’s あの女 (“that woman”) curiously overlap on a single shared は……！5 The two utterances become one, giving the reader an unusual sense of space and meaning in which one plus one is greater than two. This technique is precisely what we call montage.
Montage of layers across space, time, and sound—words and inner consciousness: this aesthetics of layers was forgotten by the “orthodox history of animation” stretching from Miyazaki to Hosoda, only to be unearthed by the outsider Shinkai. Perhaps this is the most important quality that allows him to rank among first-rate animation creators, even though he still cannot be considered a competent animator.
Editor’s Note
To avoid misunderstanding, a clarification: when the author places Shinkai outside the capital-H, “orthodox” history of Japanese animation, the intention is not to rank one side above the other, but to identify Shinkai’s innovative vision and its force.