The Art of Animation Direction: Rediscovering Takashi Anno and Naohito Takahashi

This essay received honors at both the Eve Festival and the After Festival of Lab on Roof’s Rags Drum 2022 call for submissions.

Away from realism! This was André Bazin’s admonition to animation, born of his abiding attention to animation made through an individual artist’s manual labor. Animators must invent animation anew in their own hands, continually freeing it from inherited concepts and techniques so that it may distinguish itself through new and manifold singularities. What, then, are we to make of the enormous commercial apparatus of Japanese animation, which seems always to revolve within the magnetic field of pseudorealism? If, as Bazin argued, the technical apparatus demanded by an almost invariably figurative, narrative, and illustrative pseudorealism has confined animation’s originally vast horizon and fenced in thought itself, how should we confront the panic and astonishment that seize us when, in an instant, the reassuring sense that “this is animation” collapses as we watch a Japanese television anime or OVA? This essay attempts to discover and face an astonishment that has not become past merely because it happened in the past, but persists as an experience of the “present.”

I. Takashi Anno and the Mourning of Time

1. Magical Emi, the Magic Star: Semishigure

The broad, heavyset Koganei rushes down the stairs to ask his subordinate Kokubunji about a proposal. His memory has plainly failed him: only moments earlier, he rejected the proposal and told Kokubunji to rewrite it. Once he realizes his mistake, he turns away and begins reciting a nursery-rhyme-like mnemonic, rummaging with his thick hands through the pockets of clothes made cumbersome by the summer heat, checking his belongings against his list of tasks. But then another thought seems to flash across his mind. He hurries back and shouts for Kokubunji, only to find himself unable to say what he wants. “Nothing? Nothing at all …” He turns away again, muttering in baffled suspicion. This inconspicuous, even drearily ordinary interlude stands out all the more in Magical Emi, the Magic Star: Semishigure (1986; hereafter Semishigure), a work built almost entirely out of trivial incidents. Anyone can see one of the OVA’s defining traits: delay and hesitation break apart the sensory-motor circuit. Its characters’ lapses of attention are often read as portents of change—that is, as announcements arriving from the future. In this scene, however, Koganei seems to be toyed with by the past. He vacillates again and again. At the most immediate level, the sequence approaches the entanglement of memory and the failure of recollection, like déjà vu: “I cannot remember it, but it must have been somewhere …”

Set during several summer days before the finale of the Magical Emi television series, in which Mai returns the magic that lets her transform into Emi, the OVA Semishigure repeatedly depicts signs of her approaching separation from the fairy Topo. No one would dispute that this is its story. When Mai’s mother asks her to deliver something, Takashi Anno initiates a sequence rich in symbols and intimations. Long shots generally capture Mai’s tiny figure crossing an immense, bleached-out town. These images are loosely threaded among parallel glimpses of the lives of everyone else within that town. If Mai passes through a town of time, the lives of the others seem scattered through time in such a way that they might compose an organic whole. Or perhaps this is a town of memory: the images’ loose arrangement is memory’s disorderly appearance, while Mai, too, enters the record of the town-mirror … Let us suspend such fantasies and retreat to the safer ground of plain description. Mai dons a hat and a little dress for her delivery. The journey out and back (Figure 1a–d) reuses the same background paintings. Just as her circular route returns her to the point where it began (Figure 1d), something wholly unexpected happens: music, completely forbidden since the appearance of the title, begins to flow. On streets she has already walked innumerable times, she suddenly loses her way (Figure 1e).

Mai’s passage thus becomes a functionless wandering. She has taken a wrong turn outside the routes of everyday life, into an unpeopled realm where the endless summer resounds with incessant cicadas. Tangling an impossible cat’s cradle, she passes a broken warning sign (Figure 1f). Soon afterward she confronts a wall and the words dead end. The detour ends; the melody stops (Figure 1g). At this symbolically decisive moment, when the road has reached its end, why does Koganei once again begin to recite his peculiar mnemonic, the incantation with which he summons his own memory? We are captured by an ambiguous sense of displacement created through the proximity of images, by this obscure openness to interpretation. If, as Anno seems to suggest, we take the succession of images as a form of simultaneity, then as Mai simply leaves, laughing, humming, and keeping time—and as her back, reflected in the sign’s convex mirror, recedes into the distance—Koganei, chanting his mnemonic while tidying the documents, knocks over the cup he has just set down. It falls. It shatters. The fragments slowly blossom open.

Koganei crouches, picks up the shards one by one, and places them in his palm. We are drawn to this fundamentally strange gesture, and soon see that he has carefully arranged them on the desk. Outside the window, rain has begun to fall. Spatially, it passes through the entire town, through all its lives. Immediately after Koganei’s scene, Anno inserts a succession of empty shots of the rain (Figure 1h–k). Reversing the earlier order of Mai’s journey (Figure 1c–f), he decomposes the rain’s simultaneity into successive images. The shower retraces Mai’s route and arrives at the park where she shelters beneath a tree. After Shō gives her a tiny, glittering shell ornament, she looks past the shell in her hand and suddenly notices the rain washing away the picture of Emi she has just drawn on the ground. In an instant, the rain clears under a luminous wind. This is unmistakably a revelation tinged with mysticism.

Mai stands still, staring blankly at the world as it suddenly comes alive after the rain. But when she sees a rainbow in the distance above the town, she cannot help running a few steps forward, leaving Topo behind. We recall the title sequence and the miniature rainbow casually sprayed by a length of hose lying on the ground. One can only marvel at how Anno, a writer-director who delights in carefully arranging and structuring systems of symbols, seeks to give such seemingly adjectival components of the image a more fundamental standing. Mai calls to Topo, who lies utterly still upon a tree. At that instant the cicadas rise into audibility: unlike the sound before, their calls are sparse and faintly desolate, as though announcing summer’s end. The image seems to align our position with Topo’s. Facing the camera, Mai excitedly points toward the rainbow. The wind stirs ginkgo leaves and rainbow-colored droplets upon the railing. A drop falls. On the ground lie the vanished drawing and the damp trace it has left behind. The essay “Fragments from Takashi Anno’s Direction: The Transcendence of Everyday Life” offers a splendid account of this moment: “Now even the dullest spectator becomes like Topo: hearing, sight, and touch all grow acute; experienced time stretches without limit, and every movement in the surroundings becomes perfectly clear …” Amid the cicadas’ sustained song, Mai stands ahead of us, while Topo and we remain immersed in the minute stimuli of changes occurring at that instant. For a while, we cannot even make out what she is saying. Only after some time do we hear her shout to us: “If you don’t hurry up, I’m going to leave you behind!”

The unexpectedness of this line grips us. After speaking, Mai freezes, slowly fades, and dissolves into night. This is the instant when a theme that seemed merely to pile up disconnected figures—yet in fact meticulously governs the entire construction of the animation—exposes itself directly and strikes the heart without reserve. Saint Augustine is said to have distinguished three presents: the present of the future, the present of the present, and the present of the past—the coexistence of “about to happen,” “happening,” and “having happened.” At one and the same instant, then, Mai surely tends toward the future’s “about to happen”; Koganei is submerged in the past’s “having happened”; and Topo and we occupy the present of the present, the infinitesimal fissure between them—the “happening” projected and inscribed by the image. We almost fail to keep pace with event and change, or almost manage to do so. Yet Topo’s disappearance—his being left behind—is plainly the end of the story; the end of the story is our end. We, too, will finally be left behind and cast into memory, into that ancient instant.

We can therefore readily identify in Semishigure a recurring composition that sets “about to happen” and portent against “having happened” and déjà vu. There is, of course, the adjacent placement of Mai and Koganei throughout her wandering. Immediately after Koganei calls for Kokubunji, wanting to say something but finding his memory subtly disordered, we see Emi—Mai transformed—suddenly stop, turn, and look into the distant summer sky across several shots. Before the title, everyone watches Emi’s magic show. Mai’s grandfather conceives the idea for a music box containing an Emi figurine, but we can never tell exactly what Koganei, likewise shaken by the performance, murmurs in a waking dream. He seems trapped in a confused dream composed of unstable and disordered memories, unable to close a circuit of recollection that might return him to reality. In another scene, Koganei watches Mai accidentally snap the string of her cat’s cradle. His eyes widen and he becomes motionless, as though the image of rupture has filled his entire field of vision. Once again, portent and déjà vu recur as a pair. What medium joins the broken string to portent while also binding it to déjà vu? Silently, inwardly, we can only answer: death.

The warm yet faintly melancholy instrumental melody of the opening theme has flowed throughout. Koganei holds out his broad palm to catch one spark of Mai’s handheld firework as it falls through the dim void and is about to be extinguished. Everyone rushes out of the room, worried that he has burned himself, while the camera and we remain—are left behind—in the empty interior. Only the figurine music box continues its monotonous movement until it stops. Beneath a cruelty so rarefied it becomes suffocating, we watch the Emi figurine turn into a photograph. Time congeals, clogged and unable to pass; we are pinned to our places, unable to move. The album that the adult Mai turns through is an array of corpses. Although we already understand that we will be left behind, another astonishment follows upon that certainty: Anno forbids us even a glimpse of the grown Mai. We do not know whether she became the idol she once longed to be. We cannot even see her whole face or hear her speak a single word. The room is dark. She scarcely moves. She sits quietly in place. A dull, oppressive agitation scratches at the heart.

The albums at the beginning and end trigger Mai’s memories, and the entire past is presented as her subjective recollection—this widespread commonplace must be rejected at once. The obvious fact that these summer days include the lives of others that Mai never experienced is not the only reason. Such a reading also misses the depth of photography as a motif in Anno’s work. A photograph does not summon memory; it destroys memory. In our own experience of looking at photographs, the image blocks recollection with an immense, coercive force, making it impossible to remember what happened before or after the instant when the photograph was taken. The experience cannot be converted into a concrete memory flowing vividly in the present. What truly resembles the experience of photography, then, is Koganei’s failure to close the circuit of recollection and the obscurity that can exist only as déjà vu. Cold, hard fragments lie in the hand; even a slight burning pain in the palm brings the distant sensation of loss. This touch is like the cruel experience of looking at an old, blurred photograph.

We can now see how Anno’s motifs continue into the OVA Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō (1998), which he directed. The anime is faithful to its source manga, yet the consistency of Anno’s choice of material remains startling. In the first episode, Alpha wants to photograph the sunset passing over the sea before her, but cannot cut it out as an isolated photograph. Returning home, she can only silently remember the instant in which the landscape changed. Where, then, does the photographic experience reside? In the second episode, Alpha looks out at night over the vast, glittering electrical system that still functions in a town submerged beneath the water. She weeps with an empty yet abundant love for ruins. According to Mamoru Oshii, three times likewise flow through a ruin: the past of “once it was,” the present of “now it is already,” and the future of “soon it too will be.”¹ The former splendor is gone, yet we are certain that it once truly existed. Within this helpless misalignment, we embrace and miss the virtual image of what has passed away—love’s impotence. Over there, the electrical lights have lost their function, but as pure matter they play with one another in the dark, and this play of matter at last finds expression through the medium of animation. Correspondingly, we understand at once how light once given off by people was inscribed as matter upon the silver ions of a photographic negative, and how, after long years, that material light now enters our pupils. The people in the photograph once existed. Now they are dead. And we, too, will die.

2. Episode 27 of Maison Ikkoku

The memory of an animation artist: “When I am silent, I feel full; when I begin to speak, I feel empty.” I face a blank sheet of paper and feel full before the abundant chaos it bears. But the moment my brush touches it, that abundance collapses into monotonous concrete figures charged with narrative functions. I am startled and ashamed by the vulgar baseness of my own intentions. Once completed, the result will not even be painting. It will be only a set of signs that can be subsumed within the system of a story, shamelessly crowding together to put themselves on display, clamoring until they have wholly lost the blank page’s former and plenitudinous silence. I can only labor to construct rich appearances across the page with great precision, trying to avoid every shallow relation of correspondence. Yet I discover that the seemingly unruly signs produced by all my painstaking effort remain tethered to the centralized magnetic field called story. I cannot let them play freely in a world of depth, proliferating meanings without limit. I can only bow before a storyteller, or fill the backs of pale and empty concrete figures with some thought reflected upon in advance—a full figure is always an empty figure—then pretend that this story and this thought could only have been expressed through animation. The scholar of cultural studies has me firmly in hand.

Anno is not an exceptionally gifted artist. He merely follows his blueprint, seemingly to no purpose, and lists pale concrete figures over and over again. We call Semishigure Anno-like because it employs more empty shots and somewhat longer takes than other anime, avoids musical accompaniment, and gives careful thought to characterization … No. Even combined, those traits do not make a work Anno’s. The real reason worth identifying lies elsewhere: through the repetition of the list, all the work’s elements imperceptibly and spontaneously converge on an antagonistic construction, revealing another countenance in counterpoint with the story. In a single instant, emptiness and fullness reverse. The work constructs the fissure described above, and this invisible blank fissure is precisely a fissure of plenitude. The invisible blank gives the concrete figures surrounding it their true intensity. This construction expresses time, the broadest and most inexpressible—and therefore silent—of all territories.

The long production run of the Maison Ikkoku television series underwent two relatively unusual changes of direction. The first came with episode 27 (1986), when the principal staff was reorganized. Beginning with that episode, Takashi Anno served as chief director of the series; it was also the only episode for which he personally drew the storyboards. From this point, series composition passed to Kazunori Itō, character design to Akemi Takada, while color designer Michiyo Yasuda and composer Kenji Kawai joined the staff. Naohito Takahashi, one of the series’ animation directors, was so fond of the heroine Kyōko Otonashi that he adopted the pen name Ryūnosuke Otonashi. He later observed: “The first change in direction was particularly astonishing; even the character designs changed. Conditions [at the studio] were extremely chaotic then. But I think that change taught every member of the staff how to make everyday acting look more attractive.”² In fact, episode 27 contains several production errors that might even be called serious. I nevertheless choose to discuss it in detail because of how forcefully it presents itself in an Anno-like attitude—and because of the incomparably beautiful experience of animation that it gives us.

The first image after the opening theme places a plump, heavy-looking persimmon on a branch in the foreground. At the same time, far across the sky, we distinctly follow a contrail gliding upward and extending as it goes. Within the quiet flow of time, we feel the crossing of two forces: one tranquil, stable, and weighted; the other slowly flowing. From their relative strengths and the tension between them, we anticipate the coexistence of two possibilities: “something seems about to happen, though in fact nothing does,” and “nothing seems to have changed, though something has quietly changed.” This antagonistic construction of forces governs both the story’s development and the endless circular movement of everyday life.

The same combination, functioning as a sign of seasonal change, appears in episode 22 (1985) of the Magical Emi television series, often called a prototype for Semishigure. Anno arranges a small, adjectival episode: Yukiko immerses her hands in running water as she rinses vegetables and is surprised by its coldness; then she sees that the persimmons outside the window have ripened, and the image dissolves to the diagonal line of a contrail climbing upward … At the very outset, the autumn persimmon establishes the episode’s framework of narrative and memory. Despite the chaos of the production handover and the punishing schedule, Anno tirelessly makes persimmons recur eight times across the episode’s twenty-odd minutes, each time in a different form and as a detail of the landscape. Unlike the scattered fragments of the season in Magical Emi, which collide directly with Yukiko and strike her, the persimmons here merely observe from outside the story. They only declare the plain yet uncanny fact of their presence: they are here.

After a shot of flowers beside the slope stirring in a light breeze, Kyōko and Ikuko—the niece of Kyōko’s late husband, Sōichirō—walk toward us from the distance as they talk. Unlike the manga, Kyōko does not straightforwardly say that although she still misses her husband, lately she no longer seems to feel such pain and sadness. Instead, when Ikuko says that she is going home to eat with her grandfather, a timely close-up shows Kyōko take on a faintly pensive expression. In the manga, Ikuko asks why the dog bears the same name as Sōichirō, prompting Kyōko’s recollection. In the anime, Kyōko simply laughs, calls out the name Sōichirō, and runs toward Ikuko as she plays with the dog.

As a lyrical melody begins, the image cuts to an unfamiliar town in memory, dyed red by the setting sun. What follows is a sudden, brief close-up that jolts the heart: the short-haired Kyōko, who does not yet know what the future will bring, abruptly notices something. Dazed, she begins to read the shopping list in her hand: “Green peppers, chunks of pork … I feel as though I’ve forgotten something …” She is on her way home to cook after buying the ingredients. Within this sudden failure of memory, unmistakably reminiscent of Anno, she sees the silhouettes of a man and a dog climbing the high slope against a gigantic setting sun. Softly repeating Sōichirō’s name, she gives a relieved smile whose happiness we envy. Then she calls the name and runs toward them. Man and dog turn at once with an overwhelming sense of portent. At this decisive instant, their backward glance freezes, backlit and blackened by the afterglow, and the title appears: “Sōichirō Gone!? Memories Smell of Yakitori.”

“Sōichirō Gone” plainly exploits the shared name of man and dog. The manga chapter’s title, “Sōichirō Looks Back,” emphasizes the coincidence of the backward glance. The anime’s title, by contrast, enters into a deeper relation with the deleted line that symbolized forgetting—Kyōko’s admission that her pain and sadness have begun to fade—and with the figures blacked out beneath the setting sun, which at this very moment seem to intimate memory’s ambiguity and trance. What also attracts us is surely the colossal sun’s telescopic effect. Within the recollection, it stains the sky red and bathes the town in the final radiance. Here we encounter animation as a magnifying apparatus: a world that infinitely compresses distance and suppresses the law of diminution, where elements never converge upon a single point but scatter and escape toward the periphery. Do the apparently nonintersecting parallel lines of the houses behind Kyōko not radiate into the air, and does the distant town not already tell us as much? Animation enlarges faraway things and presses them against the character, constructing a town that towers around her, abundant with accumulated historical time and collective memory. We immediately recall the ranks of streetlights submerged under the sea in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō and its electrical system extending in every direction. However distant, all share the same plane. Across this plane of animation, transmitted light flows, spreads, and plays with itself as matter. Once again, we can only marvel at how perfectly this accords with Anno’s world.

In fact, the immense sunset and the remote town behind the figures on the slope recur continually in both past and present. They are like the sound of the river in Semishigure, which passes through time and persists into the present. At the OVA’s opening, we immediately encounter an apparatus that magnifies sound: from beyond the unseen window, we distinctly hear the river’s quiet roar. We hear a wind chime; Mai turning through an album nearby; children playing in the distance; a train passing … Anno constructs acoustic depth from multiple layers of sound, while the river that has nurtured people’s lives and accumulated their time and memory swells, fills, and spreads behind the image.

Can there be an apparatus that magnifies smell? Animation cannot, after all, photograph an odor. Yet the title “Memories Smell of Yakitori” links together a thread running through the story. The dog repeatedly searches among scattered objects for volatile, diffusing smells. With its keen nose, it recognizes the scent of the dead on a wooden clog. In this sense, it magnifies the frail details and forms of smell that remain strange to human beings. Beneath the sunset, the dog follows the aroma of yakitori to Kyōko’s home. One day, it leaves again, following the same scent as before, now extending across a great gulf of time. At last, Godai finds it in another red-tinged dusk … Godai has found “the vanished Sōichirō,” who disappeared in pursuit of the smell of the past. This is unmistakably a metaphor: it already foretells that Godai will take upon himself the weight of Kyōko’s longing for her late husband—or rather, the weight of the dead. Every element in the construction organized around the episode’s conclusion has now been put into place.

Watch these works closely and it becomes easy to see that Anno’s towns are always conducting secret rituals. A place is transformed from functional space into ritual space. In Semishigure, Mai’s walk brings her to a dead end. In Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō, Alpha gazes into the distance at streetlights lit one by one for no purpose other than to shine. The town secretly arranges a tiny miracle unknown to others. Already at the end of episode 22 of Magical Emi, Susumu—who has run away after a failed magic trick—looks from high ground in a park (the park in Semishigure is likewise elevated) toward the scattered lights of the distant town. Suddenly he remembers the second half of a nursery rhyme that he had forgotten. He leaps from a swing as though performing the magic of flight. In a bird’s-eye view, the town slowly grows larger, seeming for an instant to draw closer to him.

At the conclusion of Maison Ikkoku episode 27, the town’s ritual or miracle gives us “an experience of sweetness bordering on cruelty.” Here, one might say, Anno reaches the summit of his career. A slowly rightward-tracking shot shows flowers stirring in the breeze. Far away, Kyōko appears at the bottom of the slope, with the town behind her beneath a descending night sky and the lights of countless homes. A side-view shot shows houses in the distance bathed in sunset. Then she sees, against a gigantic setting sun, the silhouettes of a man and dog climbing the upper slope: plainly Godai and Sōichirō. She calls Sōichirō’s name. Backlit and blackened by the afterglow, the man and dog turn around at the same time. They freeze like a photograph.

Suddenly, a gale roars. In a reversal of the earlier movement, a leftward-tracking shot reveals flowers bent to the left. Kyōko’s long hair and dress stream in the same direction. Far across the town behind her, a train abruptly travels left … And if that is not enough, the close-up of Kyōko’s eyes as she stares in astonishment at the impossibly coincident image also moves left. We cannot help remembering the rightward movement in the close-up of her eyes within the recollection, when she tells the dog searching for the dead man’s scent that “Sōichirō is gone.” This reversal of direction makes us recognize that, for Kyōko, everything in the dusk amounts to a ritual resurrection of the dead.

The overwhelming familiarity of the blackened man and dog—frozen like a photograph extracted from memory—allows Kyōko to entertain a one-in-ten-million hope. This appears to contradict what I said about the photographic experience. The photograph is summoned by the town’s ritual and restored by reality: the absolutely lost past crosses every barrier of time and space and arrives, impossibly, in the present. During the long gaze, the clatter of a passing train and the streetlights switching on one by one from far to near become the rhythmic pounding of a heart in the dusk’s stillness. In the original manga, in fact, this suffocating ritual occupies only a single panel marked by the sound of a heartbeat. We do not believe that Godai will turn into Sōichirō. Yet everyone here can only hold their breath and await the eruption of words deposited at the deepest point in the passage of time.

At last the streetlights illuminate Kyōko and the flowers beside the slope. Her hair flies in the strong wind; the astonished profile of her face is magnificent. We know that this time she will call not to the dog but to the man. The name Sōichirō is already about to burst from her body, but at the decisive instant, the word catches in her mouth: the spreading light of one streetlamp illuminates Godai’s face. Only now do we understand that this was never a ritual resurrection of the dead, but the cruel development of a photograph. Sōichirō’s face can never appear here. There can be no surplus hope. His countenance at that time, too distant, is lost forever and irretrievably. The trauma of photographic development lies precisely in its inability to change itself: the instant of development means the permanent loss of every possibility. Animation’s inherent unreality and discontinuity naturalize Godai’s long immobility, while the streetlamp’s development of Godai is the instant when Takashi Anno exceeds the intention and imagination of the original author, Rumiko Takahashi.

Development emphasizes the repetition of the same, and the repetition of the same points toward the death and burial of the other. Before and after the lamp is lit, in the antagonism between living and dead, we encounter the infinitesimal fissure once more. It overturns emptiness and fullness in an instant and rules the entire episode through absolute trauma. A powerless sense of collapse governs Kyōko’s body; for a while, she cannot move at all. At the one and only moment when it could do so, a song entitled “Alone Again (Naturally)” fittingly begins.

Alone again. Alone once more. Godai and the sunset behind him, looking toward the Kyōko he has lost and recovered—or has he?—gently and desolately dissolve into the Milky Way pouring down the night sky. Following its flow, the camera descends to the clock of Ikkoku-kan. After the dusk of resurgent memory has ended, we look beyond the window’s deep blue night. There, within the town like a gaping wound, a radiant river quietly surges. Then the persimmon appears again. Beginning as a landscape detail in the seasonal frame that governs the recollection, it has recurred throughout; at the end, we return once more to this material thing. We begin again. We return to the starting point. Its relation to memory cannot be spoken; no connection can be seen. It is simply and wondrously still there, outside the entire composition yet omnipresent through its many compositions. Its self-iteration seems to interrogate the spectator about the happening and nonhappening (potentiality), the constancy and change (becoming), of this circular story of loss and recovery.

In a slowly rotating high-angle shot, the few warm drops of light at Ikkoku-kan are frail beside the town’s innumerable lamps, and this story is only one among countless small stories. Editing divides the song’s closing lines: one “Alone again, naturally” goes to Godai upstairs at Ikkoku-kan; another “Alone again, naturally” goes to Kyōko below, softly calling the name Sōichirō toward the dog—or is she addressing the dog at all? A faint smile returns to her face. Thus the episode that began with a persimmon and a contrail comes to its end. But as though responding to this story, the closing theme’s final images show Godai walking beneath the pouring Milky Way. A dog named Sōichirō suddenly appears at the roadside and accompanies him. In the boundless night, they exchange glances, and they recede into the distance.

II. Naohito Takahashi: Gazing into the Pupil

1. The Surface That Forbids Penetration

Countless points of light floating in the dark form a wound. It follows the river through the entire town and persists, tenderly and cruelly. Through the identical repetition of a long, motionless backward glance resembling the dead, this persistence is torn open and exposed within the town’s deep blue night as mourning for time. We cannot say that Semishigure did not already intimate this wound. There it took the form of a structural repetition splitting the three simultaneous presents. Even before Mai’s identity as an idol has died, the wound is already present in the work. With Naohito Takahashi, this fundamental dimension degenerates into the pure repetition of a surface called the image.

In episode 12 (2002) of Figure 17: Tsubasa & Hikaru, the northern sky’s thin, empty nothingness cannot fail to move us. Hikaru, Tsubasa’s inseparable double, knows that they must eventually part and begins to avoid her from time to time. When Tsubasa stands alone in the snow, a low-angle tracking shot shows stark branches in the manner of Shichirō Kobayashi surrounding a sky without contour, as though dark ink has bled across the paper. Then a boy sees the girl waiting alone at the bus stop. They stand side by side without their eyes meeting. “I have important business today, so I’m taking the bus,” he explains, defensively choosing words rather grand for an elementary-school child. He glances at the girl, who has kept her head bowed in dejection, and immediately looks away.

The image cuts once more to a sky encircled by branches, almost indistinguishable from the earlier one. A lyrical melody begins. This time the shot does not track; as though drawn into the heavens, it continually magnifies an emptiness containing nothing at all. During their silent wait, the two children hear the wind roaring through the distant woods. Their hats catch the snow drifting down ceaselessly from the sky. The snow lies thicker on the girl’s hat and scarf because she arrived first. At last, with the abrasive sound of tires grinding across ice and snow, the bus arrives. They sit together in the last row, and the mountains of the snow country slide slowly by in the distance. Even inside the bus, we see the vast sky from a low angle through the window.

“I hear you’re going back to Tokyo.” Once again it is the boy who first breaks the silence. Only now do we discover that the shared space and time of their brief encounter—the snow country’s somber heavens and landscape—has quietly taken on the ritual character of a farewell. Although the boy speaks, he does not look at the girl. She turns to look at him, but lowers her head before he looks back after finishing his sentence. The continual missed crossings of their gazes are woven into the dialogue with great naturalness. One cannot help admiring Takahashi as a director who knows how to stage conversation. He places characters with extraordinary precision, rigorously constructs the relations between sight lines and the moments when they shift, and attends delicately to the orientations and turns of bodies and heads. He can therefore make full use of the narrative economy and efficacy of a look. Only when the boy rises slightly to press the stop button and prepare to leave do the two, caught from a wide-angle position as though secretly glancing at one another, come close to meeting each other’s eyes for the first time.

During the conversation on the bus, the sky seen at a low angle through the window recurs three times, filling the pauses in their silence with an emptiness in which nothing can be seen. Takahashi’s negative expression—passive, recessive—is certainly characteristic of his repetition of thin surfaces. But it would be a profound mistake to think that this exhausts his repetition. We soon discover something far less reasonable. Near the end of the same episode, Hikaru and Tsubasa stand in the woods and suddenly notice a few fine flakes of snow. The gentle music fades, leaving only the howl of the wind. As they rise and look upward, a tilt from above to below briefly reveals a gray sky surrounded by branches. Is this not the same sky as the one at the station? Because we see it for only an instant, we provisionally retain our doubts. But the identical drawing stubbornly recurs a second and then a third time within the sequence. We can only stare dumbfounded at this knowing transgression.

No comparable tilt connects the two children at the station to that sky. If Takahashi were to ask why the station sequence must use a different drawing, we would have no answer. No—only after seeing this sky does Tsubasa find the courage to ask Hikaru about the separation that she has gradually begun to perceive. Filmed in a fixed shot, the firmament wordlessly watches the tiny pair embrace and sob in the snow. Has it not become an eternal pattern that recalls the heavens above every person who has ever parted from another? It reveals itself completely as a thin surface and says nothing. We can no longer reduce it to a particular place. It persists as an impenetrable planar pattern in its own right.

Rhythmic animation and editing that harmonize with music or are driven by it have been practiced without end because animation grants them such a high degree of control. At times, these practices surrender without resistance to spectacle or to other cheap means of giving spectators reassuringly simple effects. Yet animation is a medium profoundly adept at silence and stillness. With Naohito Takahashi, within the repetition of an utterly silent surface, a motion as fine as gossamer comes into being in an invisible form. Takahashi is never an artist who inflames his audience in step with music or whips them into frenzy through story. He insists on the chain from one shot to the next, through which animation’s subtle sensibility gradually takes form.

Yet cultural-studies scholars who understand neither live-action cinema nor animation privilege montage as they inflate what is merely one technique of arranging and editing shots. At the same time, they remain indifferent to the concrete forms by which actual shots are chained together and to the images themselves. They therefore cannot understand the unfreedom, impotence, and impossibility of the moving image. Takahashi’s negative expression is deeply rooted in precisely this impossibility.

Episode 8 of To Heart (1999) quietly sustains the space across which Akari and Hiroyuki’s eyes cross; the two scarcely ever touch. The distance between the figures seated opposite each other is, of course, a necessary condition for the gaze to exist. Conversely, their gentle looks make an originally delicate and ambiguous awareness of distance lucid and inviolable. Contact is forbidden, yet with their bodies they quietly feel the presence of the other body across the interval. Their dispassionate mutual gaze confirms once more their shared possession of this private, tranquil space-time. According to Shigehiko Hasumi, the closest union can occur only by strangling the eye’s function, while the gaze can exist only when distance intervenes. The repeated shot/reverse-shot pattern at the end of episode 8, which carries the antagonistic relation between gaze and contact through to its conclusion, cannot therefore be understood merely as a delay intended to emphasize an everyday life in which “something seems about to happen, though in fact nothing does.”

With astonishing courage, Takahashi arranges wholly identical still drawings within a brief span. After repetition approaches complete stoppage, we see Akari suddenly raise herself ever so slightly in an otherwise identical bust shot of Hiroyuki over her shoulder, only held for a little longer. Gentle music begins. Hiroyuki lifts his head in response. We discover that Akari has been silently watching him, and the image slowly magnifies her wordless gaze … By bringing space-time infinitely close to arrest, the shot/reverse-shot sequence clearly gives their meeting of eyes at this instant precedence among the innumerable glances exchanged in an ordinary life. Akari’s gaze is at first a form of waiting, or an indication to herself that she is waiting. But absolute silence and immobility make it impenetrable and infinitely ambiguous. Within suspended space-time, her waiting is no longer confined to this instant. Unexpectedly, it expands across the entire history of her relation with Hiroyuki. Or perhaps precisely because this is only one glance drawn from countless everyday encounters, the gaze endlessly projects its own meaning back onto those other ordinary glances. Akari’s look consequently occupies a privileged place throughout the television series.

Takahashi, however, can only film the two people looking at one another simultaneously and futilely from the side, or break the encounter apart and edit their looks as alternating shot and reverse shot. Even if the camera revolves endlessly around the center of the sight line, as it does in Mamoru Oshii’s Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984), it cannot frame both faces from the front at once. In other words, the camera cannot capture both looks simultaneously. Hasumi precisely identifies the miserable condition in which the camera, confronted by two people facing one another, must either film helplessly from the side or intervene and destroy their simultaneity. In a sense, he pronounces a death sentence on the filming of an encounter between eye and eye. This impossibility is obvious on a live-action set, but the same despair and unhappiness inhabit animation.

Mediocre artists ignore the danger of a collision between eyes. They join eye to eye carelessly, repeating shot and reverse shot day after day, merely changing camera positions in an effort to flee their own mediocrity. Perhaps it was in awareness of this fact that Oshii advised cutting as much useless shot/reverse-shot footage as possible from dialogue scenes. In the difficult situation of constructing the gaze, however, Naohito Takahashi risks an almost obtuse repetition of the surface and makes the gaze a central motif of his images. Subtle difference is generated from absolute stillness and repetition; paradoxically, change occurs by maintaining the same.

Episode 13, which makes To Heart indisputably the furthest pole of romance anime, obstinately attempts to represent the meeting of eye and eye. During a scene in the gym, we hear rain pattering continuously outside. Following Akari’s gaze from where she stands against the wall, we see Shiho lined up with a group of girls in the distance. The camera continually pushes toward Shiho, who faces right. A close-up of Akari inserted midway stresses the gaze’s sustained pressure upon her. Suddenly, after long immobility, Shiho seems to sense something—or can no longer bear the look. She turns her head slightly and glances at Akari. After a cut to Akari’s mild surprise, Shiho quickly turns back and lowers her head in a fixed shot whose angle has not changed, while the camera begins to push toward Akari.

One can only admire Takahashi’s refusal to change the camera angle. Instead, in a relay or an exchange of passes, he turns a push-in into a fixed shot and a fixed shot into a push-in. Although the editing remains successive, it intimates the still more ambiguous change that follows a distant meeting of eyes. For Akari, this change is not conveyed by a facial expression corresponding to a mental state; after her surprise, her face remains no different than before.

This insistence on repeating the thin surface becomes still more evident in the visit Shiho pays to Akari at the episode’s midpoint. Anyone would marvel at the incomparable beauty of the shots that compose this interior scene. The wavering, monotonous sound of a kettle persists through time. Akari sits on the bed and Shiho beside it, their bodies oriented not at right angles but along an acute angle approaching the same direction. When they turn their faces and bodies slightly toward one another, light from the window behind them falls upon their cheeks. When they turn back, their cheeks sink into shadow. We cannot help surrendering to the image’s delicacy, watching the soft lines of shadow on Akari’s ear, cheek, and neck tremble faintly as she speaks.

Hasumi argues that the “psychological face” fabricates the fictive depth of a psychological shadow, while the “face of the image” exposes the shadow itself upon the surface. The expressions of Akari and Shiho, continually repeating an alternation of light and shade, are undoubtedly “faces of the image.” Shiho twice denies that she likes Hiroyuki. The first time, she avoids Akari’s eyes and turns her face into shadow. The second time, she stands, turns toward Akari, and says that she does not like a guy like him at all. Light illuminates both her face and Akari’s; from this instant until the scene ends, no face ever enters shadow again. We feel an inexplicable sadness and a measure of relief. Lyrical music begins as the kettle fades away. Under the transparent and protracted pressure of time, within the historical eloquence of Akari’s bedroom as a stage apparatus, we understand Shiho’s inescapable defeat.

The eye, like the shadow, exposes itself wordlessly upon the surface. Another astonishing feature of the scene is the silent shot/reverse-shot passage after Akari asks whether Shiho likes Hiroyuki (Figure 2a–d), which captures an almost dangerous mutual gaze between them. Although this look appears to penetrate deeply, and although it settles accounts in their relation, we cannot tell what it reveals or what it conceals. Has the eye not already displayed itself as an empty plenitude? It is never a window onto the soul, but a mechanical force upon the surface that repels every attempt to probe the depths. Only now do we suddenly understand: the pupil is the strongest defensive wall of all.

Mutual gazes shown through repeated shot and reverse shot are hardly rare in live action. Consider the sequences in Tai Katō’s Blood of Revenge (1965) and Norifumi Suzuki’s Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Challenge (1972), shown in Figure 2a′–d′ and a″–d″. In both, however, the actors’ expressions, the angle of the shot, and the framing all shift subtly. To put it another way, animation’s discontinuity is a disadvantage beside live action’s continuous movement. We have said that discontinuity naturalizes Godai’s immobility; we can equally say that the arrested gaze cruelly reveals animation’s peculiar unnaturalness and unfreedom. Through absolute repetition that fundamentally prohibits motion and renounces every change of angle, Takahashi creates total severance and rupture. He turns absolute disadvantage into nourishment, driving the repetition of the empty, plenitudinous surface toward its limit.

At critical points in an image, Naohito Takahashi will unexpectedly sever the relations of motion within a drawing and suspend it in the air, outside time. Episode 28 of the wordless miniature masterpiece The Adventures of Mini-Goddess (1998) opens with a girl sitting alone on a veranda, staring blankly at the rain. Her eyes meet those of a crow perched above. Twice, the sequence repeats the motionless girl’s composed gaze. The crow’s abrupt, ominous stare—its head turning with the unnaturalness of a mechanism—is startling. More startling still is the girl, who shows no surprise, as though she had expected it all along. When the crow flies away, she even seems to want it to remain.

She then wanders through a deserted city in the rain, and the camera repeatedly returns to her wordless gaze. A desolate atmosphere suffuses the images: rain darkens the lifeless world, while a flooded river and the ocean waves move without end. It is as though these three sounds alone fill the space of this world; only the wingbeats of crows and gulls escape beyond the rain. On the shore she sees a decaying tree trunk and a doll abandoned by someone unknown. Her eyes silently contemplate these dead objects and recur twice, just as before, in a construction that compels us to connect the crow with the lifeless things. Then she approaches a flock of gulls strangely motionless upon the ground. They abruptly beat their wings and rise. At the same instant she reaches toward the sky, but we cannot see the sky as it appears in her eyes. Where does she want to go?

No—the answer is already plain. We gradually understand that the ominous crow is a device connecting this world to the realm of the dead, while the gulls are messengers crossing between the two shores. If we consider Takahashi’s treatment of the collision between eyes, the crow at the beginning is inviting the girl to die. Or, conversely, her composed gaze is the gaze of a suicide. We cannot but shudder before Naohito Takahashi, who does this in animation as though it were nothing at all. At the end, a gust blows away her umbrella, seemingly the only bright color in this world, and the crow appears once more. Her slow, resolute steps toward it make the heart sink. But the arrival of her companions warms and brightens the world in a single brief instant. Even as we are moved, we think silently of how precious an artist Takahashi is: he joins the gaze, that fated limit of the moving image, to solitary death.

2. From Touching the Untouchable to Seeing the Unseeable

Animation cannot represent flesh: flesh on the verge of falling from the bone; an eye gouged out of a skull and thrust into a vagina; a penis that expels semen and urine alike. Put differently, animation cannot represent the color of flesh. In animation, the material of the body is always covered by a structured spatial organization called the line. It therefore cannot let flesh, that “zone shared by man and animal,” truly escape from structure and present itself as flesh, swimming in a violent space that abolishes every distance and touches the untouchable. It can only become a deformed and structural grotesquerie. Tatsumi Kumashiro, meanwhile, is said to have argued that the close-up of Taiji Tonoyama’s withered penis in Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976) surpasses all acting and expresses human existence in its totality—as comic, shameless, sorrowful, and more. On that basis, we can only say: there is no penis in animation.

The OVA Stainless Night (1995) is the copulation of color-trace lines and black contour lines. The two kinds of line entwine and lick one another. This is the eroticism of lines belonging to the surface. Folds of clothing and patterns of light and shade—even the minute wrinkles in the sheet crushed beneath a body—become genuine parts of the body through their contact and coordination with it. Or, conversely, as lines covering the flesh, as the texture of a surface, they are themselves the fundamental and erotic existences. A body can be seen only when something covers it. The moment we speak of the body in animation, we already confront a perversion: suggestive covering is what is fundamental. Consider how the ends of the hair hang against the body and separate into strands. This is an attempt, by every possible means, to use the surface’s texture to intimate that something “is there.” But is it not precisely the fully exposed texture itself that fascinates us—as trompe-l’œil suggesting another thing behind it, as an appearance that gives us another appearance? The suggested body, the “there is” behind the image, is often reduced to a boring sign. Texture, by contrast, gives us an experience that never stops flowing. In this sense, we once again arrive at the surface that forbids penetration.

It must be from such an awareness that Naohito Takahashi lights the two most important sex scenes so intensely, making light and shadow tremble and change continually across the body. This is a modulation of light and shade that never stops transforming. It is not molded into a stable form, but remains in motion and responsive. The penis—which we can only call a false penis—becomes translucent, light passing through it as liquid surges inside. I will not enumerate every expressive feature shared by this work and Kagami (1997), the second installment of the OVA Yūwaku Countdown. The false penis, however, is the most conspicuous feature connecting them.

As noted above, animation cannot penetrate from the movement of lines covering the surface into the tactility of flesh. Yet even as a visible image, the cel is too smooth. Hidden within its almost impurity-free cleanliness is a profound doubt about such purity—or such naivety. What of the background painting? Confronted with a background that cannot be changed continuously, the camera has only three impoverished means at its disposal: movement, enlargement or reduction, and stillness. Within a painful and cruel self-interrogation of this unfreedom, Takahashi’s Kagami is an exceptionally rare practice of animation’s decadence, and therefore a work whose name must remain in the history of animation.

If Belladonna of Sadness (1973), of which Takahashi dreamed, is animation beyond animation, then in this sense Kagami is not animation at all. In the former, led by art director Kuni Fukai, the problem of flesh is effortlessly abandoned as the film optimistically pursues animation’s collapse, induced by the multiplicity and freedom of the line. The latter reveals the fiction of simulating the fleshly touch through animated lines: in its everyday scenes, discontinuous estrangement and a self-prohibition that freezes even the cel’s lines expose the simulation. Indeed, the story directly takes the taboo of the untouchable as its theme. When animation confronts this contradiction head-on, it loses the premise sustaining its existence; in that decadence, animation itself collapses.

Even the sex scenes, which must display sensual touch in contrast to the anticipations and delays manipulated through still drawings in the everyday scenes, never show the actual point of penetration. The texture used to simulate vagina and penis remains far removed from the body’s tactility. In the sex scene at the end of episode 2, even the bodies become motionless; only transmitted light licks the lower body of the heroine, Kaname. Takahashi never depicts ejaculation—or, rather, he implies the absence of ejaculation within sex itself.

It is easy to see that densely arrayed, elongated lines appear frequently in the background almost only when the protagonist, Kagami Amayo, is with his older sister. The texture or touch carved out by these scratch-like lines represents the relation woven between Kagami and his sister since childhood. More simply, the scratches covering the background represent the sister’s command over touch within their relationship. In episode 2 she pierces Kagami’s ear and initiates a kiss; in episode 3 she stands and places her palm against the seated Kagami’s cheek. In each instance, does the background not transform in a flash into a space where fine lines proliferate at furious speed?

The work depicts with painful force a predicament in which Kagami Amayo is trapped within the tactility of lines and cannot reach the climax of flesh, the sacredness of animality. Watching people lose themselves in physical contact across the cityscape, Kagami says, “Bodies are the only things joined together anyway.” The line sharply identifies the sorrow and decadence of the body of lines. Kagami’s name—“mirror”—and the mirrors that repeatedly appear do more than suggest that he is imprisoned in a circuit of mirror images with the sister whom he resembles, unable to look away from the virtual image and see another person. They also directly reveal the virtual space beyond the mirror as an absolutely untouchable depth. This placeless place is animation’s intolerable taboo. Kagami’s hand, extended into the void, cannot touch the plenitude beyond the glass; the school uniform he caresses, which once covered his sister’s body, is its opposing emptiness.

Because of the regulations of the time, however, Naohito Takahashi could not realize the source manga’s incestuous conclusion.³ Let us imagine what would be required to preserve the consistency of the theme of touching the untouchable. Brother and sister, similar in appearance, would have to fall blindly and turbidly from bodies of lines into animal flesh. In copulating across the taboo, they would touch sacred violence. This could only be their mutual violation through intense pain, an ecstatic self-offering and destruction of limitless expenditure, a dazzling counterfeit death and loss of consciousness surpassing the pleasure of lines. Even if the false penis were abandoned for a real one, and the smooth cel discarded so that we saw the sister’s obscenity and decay drenched in excrement, urine, and semen, it would still be difficult to claim that the moving image had truly exceeded the concept, achieving through a vivid image the force of something approaching literature. Kagami’s thematic migration from touching the untouchable to seeing the unseeable can thus be called a necessity of image theory. The result is a necessary inversion within the work’s double structure: from the real penis to the nullification of the phallus; from the movement of animal copulation to that of angelic copulation; from animal flesh to the angel’s eye.

One need only watch the opening of episode 1 to understand that seeing and touching coexist as twin themes. In a church at the highest point of the town, a close-up shows colored light and shadow from the stained-glass saint covering Kagami’s pupil. He looks upward, but the saint inclines its head and does not look at him; he cannot know the vanishing point toward which it gazes. We immediately discover, however, that the saint’s second incarnation on the ground behind him is looking at him. This surreal sight line, in turn, vividly indicates the emptiness and impotence of our own looking—or the blindness that can face only a visible object before it and cannot open itself to the invisible. Then Kagami extends a hand to touch the void and says, “I’m so thirsty.” This confession concerning the poverty of existence within the cel is a crucial instant upon which animation theorists and cultural-studies scholars ought to fix their eyes.

At the bottom of animation’s endless decadence, Naohito Takahashi, as obstinately as Takashi Anno, attempts to acquire a third eye that might be born in the fissure: an eye that no longer sees only what is seen. Once we understand this, the repeated shot/reverse-shot passages in which Kagami and Kaname gaze at one another at critical points in episodes 1 and 3 (Figure 3) plainly cannot be overlooked. Through this structural repetition, is Takahashi not calling upon the spectator to see invisible difference? If the surface repetition of Kagami’s expressionless face in a–c means that he has seen, yet in truth has seen “nothing,” then α–γ reverses the relation: he has looked at nothing, yet seen “something.” This is the eye’s own transgression. The visual order collapses. The eye can directly experience the other’s existence itself, and a gaze alone can bring a person to orgasm. The third eye is the eye of experience.

We had already sensed this. Kaname immediately recognizes the cross-dressing Kagami, his hair loose, before the church. The visual fact of Kagami’s cross-dressing never becomes a question that she raises, even at the end. On closer examination, moreover, only Kaname and Kagami possess eyes that can detach themselves from their bodies for an instant and cease to belong to a functional structure. Her former boyfriend, by contrast, does not even possess eyes.

There is a photograph of Kagami’s sister on the desk in his bedroom, while a drawing lies on Kaname’s desk. In the drawing, two angels mirroring one another—or an angel and its mirror image—seem about to kiss. The motif is no longer the siblings’ superficial resemblance, but an identity of inner essence. The eye has broken through the surface and violated the interior realm; it no longer distinguishes itself from its object. What remains here of sexual organs invading and being invaded? It is difficult to discern any trace of the phallus. Kagami never removes his feminine clothing; the skirt covers his penis from beginning to end. We can only call this a complete nullification of the phallus. What looks like an embrace between two women is no longer intercourse in the ordinary sense, but nonsexual intercourse.

Angels, higher beings than humanity, are said to possess bodies in the shape of a sphere grown around geometry’s most perfect organ: the eye.⁴ The movement of angelic copulation cannot therefore be the mechanical thrusting of animal sex, but must be the revolving and rotation of planets. Through this erotic perversion, Takahashi successfully removes all mechanically tiresome back-and-forth repetition from the animation. Kagami and Kaname orbit each other and rotate upon themselves; only within this sexless rotation does Kagami reach orgasm for the first time.

Yet for us, who do not even possess eyes, this angelic copulation is only a miracle falling like snow on a holy night beyond a glass door that reflects our virtual image. It immediately melts in the palm of our hand of lines, like a lonely tear falling as a dream ends. And so, as in live action, because no one has eyes, no one needs good animation, and frowning over bad animation will do no good. Yet to escape from the body of lines, we must live within this collapse that ought to collapse.

References

1. Makoto Sumii, “Far from Realism: André Bazin’s Theory of Animation,” André Bazin Studies 5 (2021).

2. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981).

3. Shigehiko Hasumi, Lessons in Seeing: Special Lectures in Film History (Kobunsha Shinsho, 2020).

4. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985).

5. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980).

6. Shigehiko Hasumi, What Is a Shot? (Kodansha, 2022).

7. Shigehiko Hasumi, The Film Madman: In the Margins of Ozu (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2001).

8. Eureka, October 2017 special issue: “Shigehiko Hasumi” (Seidosha).

9. Shigehiko Hasumi, Shigehiko Hasumi’s Mythology of Film (Tairyusha, 1979).

10. Shigehiko Hasumi, The Mnemonic Apparatus of Cinema, new edition (Film Art, 1997).

11. Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye (1928).

12. Film Director Tatsumi Kumashiro (Kokusho Kankokai, 2019).

13. Shigehiko Hasumi, Director Yasujirō Ozu, expanded edition (Chikuma Shobo, 2003).

14. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957).