Reflections upon Setsuko's dressing scene

The first time I watched Grave of the Fireflies, one particular scene caught my attention. I think it was the scene after the beach, where both siblings have a nice day by the sea. Anyways, the thing is that after their day out, we can see a brief scene of the little sister, Setsuko, putting on her more traditional dress. Even though the moment is brief, it still caught my attention that they would so carefully animate such sequence and give it screen time.

The truth is that anime in general is filled with this kind of scenes that add nothing to the plot and tell us nothing new about the characters, but nevertheless are carefully crafted. They are the kind of scenes that you would expect in an Italian film, where the camera not only immerses in the fiction but acts as a documental witness of the reality it builds upon. Traditional cinema can have these shots easily by just filming what’s happening, but in animation they need to be crafted artificially; there’s a will behind there mere existence. So, why would a director take the time, money and skills to have them included in the movie?

Roger Ebert talks about what he calls Pillow Shots. He bases in traditional Japanese poetry, where they use a Pillow Word that represents a sort of musical beat between what comes before and what comes after. It adds to the pacing of a work and gives the reader/listener/audience a little place of contemplation and reflection between actions. I like this concepts, and it is plausible when reviewing many animes, but I’m more interested in analyzing thins phenomenon in the lights of the added realism.

Realism seems like a contradictory term when it comes to animation. After all, almost everything in this medium is artificial. Not taking into account the few exceptions, the norm in animation is that all everything done is created for the media. Even in the aforementioned Grave of the Fireflies, the character design is traditionally stylized anime-style, instead of a more realistic approach.

When I began to read about animation, I used to visit John Kricfalusi’s blog a lot. He has an in-depth analysis about cartoony animation and how deformity adds expression to the final works. He takes a great variety of examples from the Golden Age era to nowadays. His final thesis being that, in animation, the more plastic you get, the more expressive the end result will be.

It is a useful theory for some kind of works, but it completely dismisses the expressive value of works like Grave of the Fireflies, 5cm per second or maybe even Persepolis. It would be easy to dismiss the quarrel as a typical discussion between Shape vs. Substance, but I think this wouldn’t be fair to any of the sides as, in the end, shape and substance should work together to give us meaningful works.

Let’s take a short I’ve watched recently called Old Fangs. The work itself is highly stylized. By no means is it cartoony, but it often takes it liberties with proportion, light and other stuff to works on its expression. Look at the two wolves, how intimidating is the big one and how empathetic is the small one. There is a silent violence throughout the short that is condensed in the differences between the two characters. There is no need for an actual for an actual shot because the violence is all around the place: in the curly fingers of the wolf holding the cigarette, in the crude lines of the broken bookshelves, in the cracking background noise, the ominous music, in the word-less montage of the final minutes. The information of violence is there for your brain to gather, even without the overflow of violent imagery.

Now, let’s go back to Grave of Fireflies. The movie is based on an autobiographical novel of Akiyuki Nosaka. In fiction based on true story, the will to translate the reality of the facts is often enhanced by the inclusion of scenes or phrases from everyday life, without plot value beyond that. I think Barthes called this something like Reality Effect, a sort of gimmick used to create the effect of realism. This, of course, adds to the empathy with the characters, as we feel more inclined to identify with their struggles if we find them verisimilar. In the end, scenes like the one with Setsuko dressing up are, in the end, not a departure from the expressiveness of the final product, but an enhancement.

Expression can be achieved by a myriad of different ways. Sometimes by Plymptom-sized deformation or Kricfalusi-esque characterization, or it might be by detailed realism, detailed backgrounds (think about 5cm per second), music, sound or whichever way you might find. The important thing is to keep in mind is that shape and substance are meant to complement each other, even by dissonance. There is a great way to tell your story, and a great story for your style to tell. Just keep your eyes open and look for the shoe that fits.