Summary, "Weather Child" - From the Perspective of Tokyo Theory / Weather Fantasy / Post-Disaster Film [Re-Animate for the Post-Heisei World, Part 4

In the fourth installment of "Re-Animate for the Post-Heisei World," a series of articles that attempts to capture the landscape of the modern era as the Heisei era gives way to the 2025 era, we focus on this summer's biggest hit movie, "The Weather Child!
(There are a lot of spoilers in this article, so please read it with prior consent.)

A look back at the KyoAni arson case and the impact of "Weather Child" on its first day in theaters.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

That's how everyone who cares about Japanese animation must feel when they think back to July 19, 2019, the day "Weather Child" opened to the public.
The news of the horrific arson attack on Kyoto Animation Studio 1 on July 18, the day before, shocked those who had been waiting for the arrival of a new "national anime film" and cast a large shadow over the mood that greeted the work.

For the author personally, as mentioned at the end of the last issue of this series, the timing of this article came just before the publication of my article on the prospects of "Weather Child," in which I compared "Promea," "Kaiju no Kodomo," and "Kimi to, Naniwa no Nororitara (If I Catch a Wave with You). It was as if the motifs of "arson" and "flames" as representations of artificial maliciousness, which I had deciphered in "Promea" and "Kimi-no-ha" in this article, had materialized in the worst possible way.

While the expression of Japanese animation after the 2011 earthquake had begun to confront the subject of malice amplified by echo chambers in the modern information environment, the degradation of the reality that the creativity itself was destroyed by the direct violence of the lives of 35 bearers is just indignant.

With the shock still fresh in my mind, my plans to see the first screening of "Weather Child" at the newly opened Grand Cinema Sunshine in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, were disrupted, and the writer was sent to be a commentator on a morning wide show on a commercial key TV station. Perhaps it was because the more professional experts who were closer to the animation industry were more shocked than those who were not in a position to speak out in the media.

Therefore, at that time, the author decided to do his utmost to suppress information that would contribute to the terrorism effect by overstating the character of the perpetrators and their motives, and to do his utmost to help the victims and support anime culture by spreading the word about the achievements and history of the KyoAni studio. I decided to do my best to help the victims and support anime culture.

Although my own role in this unfamiliar TV appearance was very limited, I was impressed by a female commentator specializing in neuroscience who, when asked to analyze the motive of the murderer, said, "I feel as if I have been denied the very act of creating..." She choked up. ..." She choked on her words and burst into tears, and for a brief moment, the place was enveloped in a silence that deviated from the wide-show formula.

It was a reminder that what this incident took away from the victims was the source of deep emotional memory and the possibility of experiencing the future as a "personal matter" for each person who received the work, unlike common street crime or indiscriminate terrorism, which are only "other people's affairs" to those who are not directly related to the victims, It was an event that made us keenly aware of the possibility of future experience.

In retrospect, more than two full months after the incident, the media coverage that favored the narrative of the perpetrators did not escalate as much as initially feared, due in part to information control by the authorities and appropriate calls for action by concerned intellectuals and fans. However, the subsequent Aichi Triennale However, the chain of malicious intent to stifle dissenting expression through violent threats, such as that inspired by the blackmailers in the subsequent Aichi Triennale, has certainly undermined our society.

If this situation continues, the meaning of the year 2019 may be imprinted as a turning point toward an era in which the reality that irreversible outbursts can occur against specific expressive activities will cover the cultural space from a collection of insignificant malicious intentions one by one. Moreover, unlike cases such as the 2015 "Charles Abbud attack" in France, this incident, which became a unique cultural terrorism worldwide, is troubling because it was a purely stochastic event that relied on the individuality of the perpetrators, with no political or religious claims to establish anticipation.

What is needed to avoid this is, without a doubt, the enhancement of crime prevention measures and victim support on a practical level. On the other hand, it is also time for the targeted animation industry to take a serious look at the nature of such malicious intent and seek to confront it at the level of expression. The only thing that can resist the malice against the act of creation itself is the act of creation itself.

Therefore, in order to avoid making 2019 "something that wasn't meant to be," I would like to start over again. Another reality with a tag removed, and yet another reading to override the fictional side of what anime has depicted.

From earthquake disaster to abnormal weather

Despite the tragic incident, "The Weather Child," which was fully booked as the "mainstay" anime film to be screened this summer, has steadily increased its box-office sales to over 12 billion yen in the first month and a half after its release. This has firmly established Makoto Shinkai as a post-Ghibli "national animation film director" in both name and reality.

As the vast number of reviews have already been written about his previous work "Kimi no na wa. (2016), which aimed for open entertainment with a thorough control of emotional lines, this film is regarded as an issue-posing work that returns to the director's original independent auteuristic style, and this has caused controversy on both sides of the aisle.

In other words, "Your Name. is a revival of the "Sekai-kei" style of filmmaking that directly links the minimalist internal problems of the adolescent boy protagonist with the problems of the world of science fiction and fantasy, which was considered to be Makoto Shinkai's signature before "Kimi no na wa. In this area, it can be seen as a response to the old fans' reaction to the unexpected major hit, "This is not our Shinkai Makoto, who sold his soul to the masses," and as a way to use the free hand he gained from the success of his previous work to pay homage to his core fans (see the following section). The core-fan type view is represented by a blog post that became a hot topic on SNS immediately after the film's release. ( Such a core-fan view is exemplified by a blog post that appeared on social networking sites immediately after the film's release.)

However, the main point of interest in this series of articles is the use of the motif of weather to delve into the issue of "artificiality" and "natural intention," which also applies to other films released in May and June of this year ("Promea," "Kaiju no Kodomo," and "Kiminami").

Kimi no na wa. was based on the memory of the Great East Japan Earthquake and depicted a large-scale disaster in a local area on a millennial scale, while "Children of the Weather" depicted more normalized weather anomalies. In particular, it evokes the experience of frequent natural disasters that Japanese people began to experience around the time of the previous film's release, such as the Kumamoto earthquake in 2016, the flooding caused by Typhoon No. 10 that caused extensive damage in Hokkaido and Iwate, the torrential rains in western Japan in 2018, and the torrential rains in Kyushu just a few days ago.

In this sense, it can be said that this film was indeed a film that attempted to update the problem set as a "national film" that runs parallel to the reality of the "post-2016 world" held by many Japanese people.

In other words, Shinkai's words throughout the film, "I want to make the people who were offended by 'What is your name? In other words, contrary to Shinkai's public declaration throughout the film that he wants to further anger those who were offended by "Kimi no na wa. he actually attempts to nervously respond to the major criticisms of "Kimi no na wa" without compromising its entertainment value as a major work.

It is a reversal of the critical reception of the previous work, ......, in which the disaster that befell Mie and her friends living in the countryside was made into an emotional pornography from the viewpoint of Taki, a Tokyoite, and "never happened" through the manipulation of the time axis.

The conflict between the animate of "Rain" and the lyric of "Light."

Let's take a step-by-step approach. First, "What is your name? the relationship between the two couples is reversed: Hotaka Morishima comes to Tokyo from Kozushima Island in the Izu Islands (which is part of Tokyo in terms of administrative division), and Yona Amano lives in Tokyo.

It is suggested from the beginning of the film that the two are bound together by the experience of aiming for the "light" that shines through the clouds in the sky in their respective circumstances.

For Hōtaka, this is depicted as a guide to the other side of the sea from a remote island, as if in self-reference to the landscape of Tanegashima depicted in "Cosmonaut," the second episode in "5 Centimeters per Second" (2007), which is considered the culmination of Shinkai's early work. In contrast, for Yona, the situation of witnessing a "puddle of light" descending from the window of the hospital room where she visited her dying mother to the rooftop shrine of an abandoned building in Yoyogi is tied to the inevitability of her being chosen as a "sunny maiden" as a shrine maiden on the shore above the clouds.

This "light" that relies on background art and photographic effects is a characteristic that has been discussed by many critics as Shinkai Makoto's most powerful weapon as an animated filmmaker. Therefore, the challenge of this film in terms of expression can be seen as Shinkai's attempt to recapture the expression that he has pursued as a technique close to his own identity as a narrative theme.

On the other hand, the main motif of the film, cloudy weather and torrential rain, is the setting of the situation that makes the expression of light "something to be desired. The rainfall in the film, which depicts a summer of unusually heavy rainfall never seen before in Japan's recorded history, is based on the "guerrilla downpour" that somehow became established around the latter half of the Heisei era, and is strongly animated by exaggerating its fury as a supernatural phenomenon through dynamic movement and the use of textures.

For example, the lifelike movement of "fish in the sky" falling as raindrops that Hina witnesses at the window of her mother's hospital room, or the sudden localized formation of huge, transparent, slime-like rain drops in the sky over a passenger ship entering Tokyo Bay, and the torrential downpour of water falling at once as if it were an overturned swimming pool, nearly knocking the ship's sail height down. The sequence of the rainfall is shown from the very beginning of the film.

Such a dynamic, quasi-life-oriented approach to moving natural objects is a new departure from Shinkai's traditional visual repertoire, which has focused on the lyricism of static landscapes, and is more in line with Hayao Miyazaki's tradition of fantasy expression through wind, sky, and water performances.

His previous work "Your Name. According to "Methods of Animation Creators: An Introduction to the Theory of Animation Expression in the 21st Century" edited by Koji Takase, the shift in the sense of the times, represented by the artist's name "from Hayao Miyazaki to Makoto Shinkai," which many people came to share after the achievement of his previous work "Kimi no na wa. According to "Methods of Animation Creators: An Introduction to the Theory of Animation Expression in the 21st Century" edited by Takase Kouji, technologically speaking, the shift of the weight of progress in Japanese animation as a whole from "drawing" to "shooting and editing" is symbolic of the situation in which digital technology has come to intervene in the animation production process.

In this sense, the conflict between the "rain" and the "light" of sunny intervals, which forms the basis of the visual motif of "Weather Child," dialectically subdues the conflict between the pleasure of animating through movement, as Hayao Miyazaki developed in the 20th century, and the lyricism of the fetish of editing and filming, as Makoto Shinkai developed in the 21st century, and brings the inevitable in terms of technique to the level of theme and story. The structure of the film is seen as an attempt to raise the inevitability of the technique to the level of theme and story.

This thematization scheme is similar to the quasi-life-like animations of water and fire in Masaaki Yuasa's "Kimi-no-ha" and his previous work, "Yoruake ni Okeru Ru no Uta" (2017), which we discussed in the previous issue, but the emphasis is on how the graphical Yuasa animation patterns move on the waves of artificially induced emotions (dramaturgy) in the screenplay. In contrast to the expression of "Roo" and "Kimi-no-ha" (which attempts to directly inherit and digest the pleasures of Hayao Miyazaki's style of animating), this work is based on the Shinkai style of inhuman and photo-realistic background art, while at the same time it is concerned with how to blend the movement of natural objects with a Miyazaki and Ghibli-like sense of dynamism. The major difference between the two approaches is the master-slave relationship between the two.

This is where Shinkai's attempt at a Ghibli Epigone-style juvenile fantasy, "Children Who Chase Lost Voices" (2011), went through a period of trial and error and resulted in a successful reincarnation of Hayao Miyazaki's style.

Thus, the spectacle of a world hidden in the sky and clouds reminiscent of "Laputa in the Sky" (1986) and the quasi-life-like animation of water similar to "Panda Copanda" (1972) and "Ponyo on the Cliff" (2008) were reworked using modern effects of the digital age and joined to the Tokyo landscape. This is how the fantasy of "TEN-YI" that forms the basis of this work's worldview expression is established.