Kumo no Muko, Yakusoku no Basho" - Makoto Shinkai's Utopia Interweaving "Vertical" and "Horizontal" [Nostalgic Anime Memoirs Vol. 57

Makoto Shinkai's new film "Weather Child" is now in theaters. Kumo no Muko, Yakusoku no Basho" (2004) is Shinkai's second commercial film.
The setting and development of the film are somewhat difficult to understand, but let us briefly summarize the story. The setting is a slightly different parallel world from the one we live in, in which Hokkaido is ruled by a giant nation called "Union," reminiscent of the former Soviet Union, and is called "Ezo. The protagonist, Hiroki Fujisawa, is a junior high school student living in rural Aomori Prefecture near the border. He and his best friend Takuya Shirakawa are secretly assembling an airplane, while admiring his classmate Sayuri Sawatari. They are building a plane to fly to a mysterious tower built by the Union in the land of Ezo.
Takuya inadvertently tells Takuya, and Hiroki and Takuya's plane becomes known to Sayuri. Having shared their secret, the three have a good time while assembling the plane. However, Sayuri falls ill with a mysterious disease that keeps her asleep without waking up, and Hiroki gives up building airplanes and goes to a high school in Tokyo. Takuya works at a research institute related to the tower and discovers a deep connection between Sayuri, who keeps sleeping, and the tower.
Later in the story, Hiroki returns to his hometown and flies to the tower to awaken Sayuri.

Of the 91-minute running time, only about 30 minutes of the first half of the film is spent by the three former country junior high school students having fun. For the remaining hour, as is usual in Shinkai films, the hero and heroine are attracted to each other but are divided for absurd reasons. Only the first half hour is a beautifully ordered, boxy utopia.
So how is the order of this little utopia maintained?　The clue is the union tower that Hiroki looks up at, and the commuter train. The tower stretches vertically and the train runs horizontally.

Poetry stands perpendicular to history.

I was always looking up at that tower. I felt that something very important was waiting for me there. Anyway, I felt impatient," Hiroki says near the beginning of the film.
While the monologue is playing, a two-car train crosses the screen by the sea. As the camera pans upward, a tower piercing the clouds rises into the setting sun.
In "Sonoheno no Mondai," a collection of dialogues between Ramo Nakajima and Shinji Ishii, the words of Ashiho Inagaki, "Poetry stands perpendicular to history," are introduced. The tower of the Union stands perpendicular to the time spent by Hiroki and his friends. In the latter half of the film, the tower is linked to Sayuri's dream and puts her to sleep, so we can say that it is a transcendental presence that vertically divides the characters' "time.

What about the single-track commuter train used by Hiroki and his friends?
When Hiroki recognizes Sayuri across the platform, the train enters the screen and creates a distance between them. Or, Hiroki and Sayuri are late for club activities and get on the same train, and they stand side by side in the car, conversing intimately. In the scene where Sayuri tells Takuya about her dream, the box seat on the train is also an important place for confession.
In other words, the train provides space for the characters. The horizontally running train forms the field in which they live, and at the same time, defines the scope of their activities. The space spread horizontally by the train is a small but well-ordered utopia.

Destroying Vertical Towers from Horizontally Expanding Space

As mentioned above, Hiroki, Takuya, and Sayuri fall apart in the latter half of the story. At the same time, trains rarely appear on screen.
However, after Hiroki returns to his hometown to awaken Sayuri, the single-track, two-car train he used in middle school reappears. The small train passes through a railroad crossing by the sea. The picture of this railroad crossing is actually the exact same composition as the scene in the first half of the film where Sayuri comes to see the airplane for the first time.
Hiroki is regaining that small utopia, the space he once spent with Sayuri. This is clear from the composition.

Takuya then brings Sayuri, who is still asleep, to the abandoned station where the airplane is located. Their plane is rigged on top of an abandoned railroad track, and when it takes off, it glides over the track.
What Hiroki and Sayuri are aiming for with their plane is a tower that stands vertically, which is incompatible with their lifestyle. They fly horizontally and aim for the vertical. Furthermore, they destroy the tower standing vertically. Through these ritualistic processes, the real time with Sayuri and Hiroki, who are finally awakened, begins to move. The vertical tower was, so to speak, a wedge driven in to stop the characters' time.

Shinkai's works tend to be emotional and mood-driven, but there are times when symbolic and iconographic compositions are incorporated into the story like a framework. If you pay attention to this, you will find new value.


(Text by Keisuke Hirota)