Image Essay: Mobile Worldviews

In cel animation and digital animation, the anime image is composed of layers. Compositing is the term commonly used to describe the process of establishing of relations between image layers. Much of our experience of movement in animation comes from compositing, and a variety of artists contribute to the mobile relations established between layers of the image. The usual point of departure and overall focus for discussions of compositing are the relations between characters and background, and there is a tendency to treat backgrounds as inert and static backdrops for action. Yet, production design in anime does not simply provide a passive space for action and emotions to be played out but plays an active role in orientating and qualifying all manner of movement, which is beautifully conveyed in the Japanese term used to describe the role of production design—sekai-kan or “worldview”—an incipient mobility that generates perspectives. Here, we propose to explore the layers of production of such “mobile worldviews,” both to impart a better sense of the dynamics of animation and to acknowledge the range of artistic contributions to anime production.

Background Painting and Design

A scene generally consists of several takes or shots, which in anime are also called “cuts.” Each cut requires a background image. Usually, the background image is painted on a sheet of paper with watercolors or gouache on the basis of the layout and image board designs. In cel animation, the sheet of paper is generally larger in format than the transparent sheets on which characters and other figures are drawn, to allow for movement of the viewing position.

Patlabor—The Movie (1989, dir. Oshii Mamoru) brought new attention to background painting in anime production. Often in animation production greater attention is paid to the movement of characters, at the expense of the background. Of course, Miyazaki Hayao’s films had already begun to employ beautifully painted backgrounds, but Patlabor introduces a new kind of focus and mobility into its design. This becomes especially apparent in a sequence in which the two detectives’ investigation brings them to the old suburbs of Tokyo, which are being demolished to make way for islands of high-rise constructions. The abandoned wooden houses that are to be demolished stand in stark contrast to the sleek, white, soaring towers. It was a combination of talents that allowed this sequence to set new standards for animation. On the one hand, Oshii allows the background to come to fore: as our viewing position follows the two detectives, they hardly speak, and their silence, in conjunction with Kawai Kenji’s music, heightens our focus on the background.

On the other hand, there are Ogura Hiromasa’s paintings. Ogura uses high contrast to express the quality of light on a summer day in Tokyo, extending the contrast to the relation between the old wooden houses and the new ferro-concrete high-rises (Figure 1). The houses are rendered with thin lines in high detail, while the background high-rises are drawn schematically, and their vertical lines fade out, implying that there is nothing to see (Figure 2). Our attention thus settles on the wooden houses in the foreground, which effectively block the vanishing point, refusing to vanish. In sum, Ogura uses different degrees of detail in order to guide attention within the image, deploying one-point perspective only to undermine its ability to structure this worldview.

In his designs for the room in which the character Ayanami Rei was “born” in Anno Hideaki’s digital rebuild Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance (2009), Watabe Takashi first generated a three-dimensional computer model. While our viewing position adheres to one-point perspective, his wire-frame rendering of the space (Figure 3) builds in the possibility of looking at the central chamber from any point within the cylindrical room. As such, rather than a single fixed viewing point, we have a sense of mobile perspectivalism.

Figure 1.

Ogura Hiromasa: background painting for Patlabor—The Movie, cut 382, watercolor and gouache on paper, 25 × 35.3 cm. Copyright...