The
Shinkai Makoto story really starts with the surprise release of the iconic Hoshino Koe, It must be close to a decade since I saw that, when it was the hot
new thing, much-lauded for being made almost in its entirety by one person –
and since Shinkai has become one of the auteurs of anime, alongside such
prestigious names as Miyazaki Hayao, Takahata Isao, Satoshi Kon, Hosoda Mamoru
and Yuasa Masaaki. I don’t snap up his works as they come out, I must admit – I
still haven’t seen 5cm per Second, let alone Hoshi-o Ou Kodomo –
as somehow they always strike me as needlessly slow, pretentious and uninspiring
in terms of story and character, which for me takes precedent over art or individual
effort.
But
before that beginning was this little vignette, a five-minute animation that
won minor awards and had some in the know sit up and pay attention. Who knows?
Perhaps without this, Hoshi no Koe wouldn’t have been taken seriously…
It
really shouldn’t work. The black-and-white short film full of oblique angles,
rain and a sombre, overly poetic narrator is such a cliché of French arthouse
film that even the hook – that the narrator is a cat – has been used in viral
send-ups of the genre such as Henri 2, Paw de Deux, which does similar
things to this short but in the choleric rather than melancholic mode. And I’m
fairly sure it was not influenced by She and Her Cat. In animation
terms, it is horribly transparent throughout that this is an exercise in how to
make almost no animation look like motion, and one gets a little sick of the
camera panning across a still image to give the illusion of movement. There’s
some very nice exterior shots, but it’s very obvious what we’re looking at is
essentially a photograph that’s been traced for animation – and the same goes
for most shots of the kanojo in question. The cat itself is amusingly
incongruous, a cutesy blob that screams Japan ,
and generally it feels almost disingenuous, how many shortcuts are made in a
blatant attempt to masquerade as finer animation.
And
yet, oddly enough given my objections to Makoto’s other films, it works because
it is subtle and heartfelt. It’s clever and simple and doesn’t have to spell
everything out. The cat’s simple love and adulation, its childish pride in
believing itself so much more adult than its little feline girlfriend, its
inability to understand how anyone could make its owner sad and its simple life
are pitched perfectly so that they are adorably naïve yet not sickly sweet like
Chii in Chii’s Sweet Home.
There
is much to criticise in artistic terms here, but of course a person making
their own little animation as a personal project will want to make the most of
the little they have. And the key is a script that doesn’t mind its
unoriginality and lack of subtlety – yet spins things in a way just vague and
yet adorable enough to make the short work very well. More than either of the
longer animations I’ve seen from Shinkai, this makes me want to see more.
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