Makoto Shinkai’s scenery porn

Whenever someone mentions scenery porn as a commonly known trope, the idea that comes into my mind is that of compensation. When speaking about films, in general, I can picture wildly stylized photography of natural landscapes striping the attention from a lazy script layout and shaky narrative direction. Think about those films that were just gorgeous but a little flimsy plots, think about Aronofsky’s The Fountain, the watered-down Buddhist approach of Ki-Duk Kim’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring or Singh’s The Fall. It seems as if the directors were prioritizing eye-candy in an attempt to distract us from how thin the plot is spread, and it feels kind of dishonest and cheap. But luckily for us, this is not the only use of breathtaking scenery, and animation is a great place to start the discussion.



Now, this is a broad subject, so I won’t be covering it completely. There are great examples from all over the spectrum: from Bakshi’s Wizard’s citadel of the mutants to the Thief and the Cobbler’s chasing scenes, from the Celtic The Book of Kells to the urban dystopia of Akira and the noiresque feeling of Batman, The Animated Series. But let’s focus today on Makoto Shinkai’s backgrounds and what they add to their peculiar narrative.

Not long ago I talked about realism in anime and the special efforts put into this industry to create effective realism within their stories. Scenery, being the quite protagonist that it is, can enhance this particular effect greatly. This is no science. Think about Genshiken’s first season. The attractiveness of this anime comes from its attempt to be an accurate portrayal of the Otaku fandom’s everyday life, without romanticizing its aspects. This kind of slice-of-life approach to storytelling, pretty common in anime, works on the identification of the viewers, disregarding every rule of narrative about conflict or even plot progression.

But this rather comes as strength to them. For some strange reason, we’re wired to think that, in reality, nothing happens to people. It is easier to believe a story where there is no action, no intrigue, no development than to believe something packed with moral dilemmas, catastrophes and surprises. It is easier to believe, but not so much to care. We’re so divorced from the notion that our own lives have weight, significance, that we need a sort of fiction-indicator in order to develop attachment to a story, to relate to what’s happening to its characters. And, strangely, that’s where Shinkai’s backgrounds come in.



Generally speaking, Makoto’s movies tend to have almost no conflict pushing the plot forwards. She and her cat is about a cat and his owner, and that’s it. Voices from a distant star is about a couple separated by war, sending each other messages that every time get longer to reach their destiny. 5 cm per second are three segments about love stories that just won’t happen. They’re built around the anticipation of an action that just won’t happen. All this stories are complemented by Makoto’s hyper-realistic background design. His style is so precise and saturated that its characters feel unreal in comparison, almost as intruders in an immutable world.

The end result accentuates the alienation of the characters within their own worlds. It paints its protagonist as making dues in a cold, static world, a world of objects so perfect and filled with detail that makes its inhabitants strange. It is a lonely world that makes its characters relationship matter by comparison. If they can’t relate to their surroundings, then, even the most fleeting and superficial of relationships gain weight and significance by contrast.

By paying this exquisite amount of attention to the background, Makoto actually develops characters. Not only that, but he also puts us as viewers in the shoes of his protagonists. It’s not only them who are lost in the overwhelming details of the worlds he creates, but us. In the end, he creates not only a believable world through narrative and backgrounds to create an effect of reality, but also takes that realism and makes it engaging through the contrast of bereft narrative and detailed background. You don’t believe me? Take a look again at 5 cm per second. Watch that last segment and tell me if it doesn’t leave you feeling a little emptier, as if you just lost something important but couldn’t really point what it was, even though its mostly backgrounds and unrelated shots.



Like I said before, the subject of backgrounds is really a lot wider than this short presentation. It not only sets the characters to their spatial location, but also defines the relationship between a character and its surroundings, giving us a better understanding of the characters themselves. I’d like to invite you to tell us in the comments which background works caught your attention. But, please, don’t even mention Hanna-Barbera’s looping backgrounds!