I'm so excited! This is the first serious contribution to the content of this site. Tim Henderson has written a thoughtful piece about how animation can, and occasionally does, move us to tears. From Final Fantasy 7 to Porco Rosso, Tim shares his thoughts about how animated films can deliver some of life's great memories.
"At age fifteen, Final Fantasy 7 made me cry. I'm sure that I don't have to point out what brought the tears on, but it may be worth underscoring something that perhaps intensified the impact for me (and probably for scores of others who were discovering the laws of Japanese narrative for the first time): this was my puberty game. It caught me at that stage in my life where my balls had dropped, hair had began to grow in places it previously hadn't, and I was starting to sound like a fast food worker from any random episode of The Simpsons.
Alongside all of this came a new degree of empathy. As a child I watched the original Star Wars trilogy all the way through and never felt so much as a twinge of sadness, a shred of hope or even much by way of a rush of excitement. In fact, I was bored most of the time. I stuck with it only because I thought that the combination of swords with lasers was just about the coolest thing that mankind would ever dream up, and because my parents seemed to think that I should watch it. To a young child, most of the feelings that I was supposed to feel were missing entirely, as I expect they were with many others exposed to the trilogy at an early age.
I'm not going to go so far as to say that young children lack emotions, but I might be willing to suggest that the scope for a complete pallet of empathy is locked away until such an age as the body begins to take its adult form. Owing to this fairly swift awakening, the media that is first consumed at this stage in a person's life is likely to resonate a bit more strongly. Braveheart evoked a similarly unexpected emotional response from me, and it was during this same period of my life that I first introduced that particular bit of re-written history to my VCR.
All of which makes me wonder just how poignant that scene from the conclusion of FF7's first disc really was. It may be seeped in the lore of modern videogames as a defining moment for many, but most of us who wrote that lore were young and naïve and caught completely off-guard. Could such a low-tech piece of rendered animation and a smatter of simplistic gameplay have the same power over me today should my memories of the past be washed away tomorrow?
Just how did this scene make me so terribly sad?
There are arguments to be considered for writing and characterisation - to say nothing of Nobuo Uematsu's musical contribution -, and they no doubt have a tremendous amount of validity to them, but for the moment I wish to focus primarily on the aesthetic form.
Some years ago, American film critic Roger Ebert admitted in an interview that he was “moved just about to tears” by Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies. Again, there is much that could be said for the writing and characterisation in this film, to say nothing of the mere premise of the events, but the whole point of what he was saying was to explain a specific fact about the power of animation - that had Fireflies been a live action production, then it would have succeeded only in providing the image of starvation; as a piece of stylised animation, it was instead able to cut through the distraction of actuality and go a step further to present the idea of what was happening to these two children.
Of course, he's also made some rather cold comments in regard to videogames and gaming, something that may seem a little counter-productive to the interview paraphrased above. Or maybe not – let's just see where all this takes us for now...
Some years later, a writer for the rather excellent Japanese film site, Midnight Eye, tore the CG movie sequel to Final Fantasy 7, Advent Children, to ribbons so tiny you might mistake them for strands of a spider's web. My initial reaction towards this was to recall my memories of playing the game and to suspect that the review had been written by a critic who shared Ebert's superiority complex when it comes to the interactive medium. Truth be told, however, finally watching the film for myself taught me two important things: firstly, that I should never make such strong assumptions, and secondly that while I liked Final Fantasy 7, I was hardly obliged to like what it had evolved into.
But it's something that I already knew, and was being reminded of, that is of the greatest importance here. That being, that there's a definite line between the cutting line of technology and genuine craftsmanship, and while one can certainly be enhanced by the other, only one can really stand on its own.
I came to understand the gripes in the Midnight Eye review quite quickly after I removed the DVD from my player, but I continued to have an issue with one very specific comment – a comment that was on the right track, but ultimately felt demeaning nonetheless: “acrobatic feats are not impressive if they are not being performed by a human being.”
One will probably assume that this comment is intended to highlight the importance of the true spectacle of human feats, the genuine sense of energy that they can elicit from the spectator, and the admiration that must be given a body that has been exposed to such rigorous and intense training, and I would mostly agree with this. However, while there was certainly a big problem with the animation in this particular movie, animation in and of itself isn't to blame and shouldn't be labeled as inadequate.
The problem lies with craftsmanship, and in a learned understanding of cinema.
Advent Children is a highly competent explosion of technology, but it suffers heavily by not understanding its audience. By 'the audience', in this case at least, I don't mean the specific hoard of Final Fantasy loyalists for whom the movie was designed to sap yen from, but rather the general, physical space that any and every film viewer occupies. In spite of its relentless action scenes, Advent Children was one of the least visceral films that I've ever seen.
As a piece of presently chic vernacular, the term visceral has become at once overused and misunderstood. It's become a steadfast member of the club of adjectives that get strung together to describe almost any action movie or series that may please any number of critics who need some quick and easy zest to spice up their sentences. The main problem with this is that it is too frequently used to talk about what's happening on screen, as if the simple act of showing somebody getting punched in the face or sliced in half is enough to stimulate our viscera.
It's not, and for a very simple reason: we relate what we see on screen to our innate understanding of the way the world around us works, and depiction alone is not enough to quantify a visceral moment. Sin City was a visceral experience for me not because it featured sliced limbs, but because I left the theatre feeling like I was suffering from internal bleeding. A mixture of lighting, sound editing, performance and some clever digital trickery combined to communicate not just a series of events, but the very physical power of those events.
This is the most important place where Advent Children comes unstuck. At the most basic level, the animators, or maybe the technology team, do a terribly inadequate job of communicating any sense of the planet's gravity. As amazingly detailed as Advent Children's visuals are, the experience of watching it is still comparably to watching some particularly intricate string puppets dancing about. This is only compounded by a directorial team that behaved like a young child who has just received his or her first camera for Christmas. The DVD special features contain extensive excited babble about how CG provides such amazing visual freedom, about how you can easily film countless shots from angles that would be just about impossible in a live-action production. the problem with such freedoms is that it's easy to forget just why you're doing certain things, and instead simply focusing on the fact that you can.
The result of this attitude was that the fight sequences in Advent Children were a dislocated mess: the camera flailed around like an out-of-control ball on chain, showing an absolute minimum of respect for rules of filmed cinema that have been developed over many tedious years of trial and error, and leaving an impression of wild key-framing rather than precise, intentional filming. Within the context of a script so laden with cod-philosophy that it actively smelled of fish, these sequences may as well have had the whole world upon their shoulders, and in a way it's a shame that they didn't. A little modest grounding, and a much greater sense of tactile weight to the character animation would have gone a long way to give this film at least some kind of impact other than that of fanservice.
Strange, then, that for all their simplicity, the stylised cut-scenes in the actual Final Fantasy 7 videogame carried with them a far stronger a sense of energy. Perhaps it's easier to make a character appear weighty when they're less detailed - this would hardly be surprising, as it does indeed seem that the narrower the gap between the art and the actual is, the wider the uncanny valley becomes. Whatever the case - and I expect that there was a huge, ironic benefit found in the restraints of the technology of the time - there is more expressive power in this short cut-scene than there was in the entirety of the movie sequel that followed roughly a decade later.
And it's here we get to what both the Midnight Eye review and Roger Ebert's comments about Grave of the Fireflies shy just short of acknowledging: that at its finest, animation - still typically hand drawn animation - offers the most precise, stylized, intentional and expressive performance that can be put to screen. Just because the action scenes in Advent Children could rightly be criticized as lacking the breath-stealing quality that a flesh and blood performance might provide doesn't mean that animation itself is incapable of this. Likewise, just because animation can cut through the actuality of the image and present something closer to a purer idea, this doesn't mean that it can't enhance its own potential through a sense of corporeality brought to life by a man or woman skilled in their craft. Sin City made me feel its violence despite an overload of CG, and more importantly, Studio Ghibli films are some of the most physical pieces of cinema I've ever had the pleasure to experience, and this may not be despite their prolific reliance on traditional illustrated animation - it may, in fact, be because of it.
Porco Rosso is a personal favourite film of mine. It is simultaneously Miyazaki's most self-indulgent mainstream work and the one that is most frequently ignored. At last check, there was only one essay on the Nausicaa.net database that focused meaningfully on the film, and considering that I wrote that essay while at University, I feel somewhat justified in calling this film overlooked.
This is a shame, because while Miyazaki's self-service to many of the things he loves is indeed palpable, there is no paucity of love given back through his depiction of these things. Indeed, it contains several components that define the quintessence of what can make animation so powerful, and so enchanting to watch.
It was amid the sweaty panic of a looming University deadline that I noticed the way that Gina - the mature and strong-willed love interest of Porco Rosso's story - blinked. It was the most graceful blink I had ever seen. No real person could possibly move their eyelids in such a fluid manner, but this one blink said more about Gina's character than several pages of exposition might manage. Like Ebert suggested, it cut right through the crap and presented the idea: here was a woman who was elegant and world-weary, but not without humour and a kind of nostalgic sense of hope, and it was all summed up in her blink, and further enhanced by the way she moved. Again, Gina's movements aren't entirely plausible and border on hyper-reality, but that's perhaps the whole point: being a series of stylized drawings, she is free to move in a manner that is nothing if not expressive, and the audience is able to accept this without a second thought. Furthermore, her movements are so precise, and the drawings so intentional that there is an undeniable sense of corporality to her. She may not be a real person, but it would take a very closed-minded one to deny that she has presence nonetheless.
Perhaps this is why Miyazaki has so stubbornly checked each and every frame of animation in his films personally. We can toot and hoot on about the ultimate supremacy of story all we like, but despite what we may choose to think, story is nothing but cold thoughts without expression, and the literal depiction of the abstract and the physical is something that has offered cinema an expressive edge for as long as it has existed. In this world the artist may be nothing if he is not also an artisan.
And so, when the story's pudgy lead, Marco, sets sail in the skies, it's entirely possible to feel that no greater love could be expressed for flight and for the craftsmanship of the aircraft that granted mankind this phenomenal privilege without actually sitting there, beside a pilot who loves nothing more than what he does, and the world that his work allows him to explore. Many of these scenes are timeless - carrying through each frame a fragment of the effort that Miyazaki forced from himself and his team to express his love - and all of them are breathtaking. And, although polygonal CG will no doubt eventually develop to the point where similar scenes can be reproduced without looking entirely like model planes on strings, I will be more than a little sad if this ability comes at the cost of the death of skill with a pencil. As an element of a story, flight may be little more that moving from A to B, but in the eyes of Miyazaki it has always been an experience to be shared, and his illustrations have allowed him to share these things in a way that few will ever be able to approach."
written by Tim Henderson for The Cartoon Gallery. Please feel free to leave comments about this article in the Forums!
