Anime in the 21st century
Contains spoilers for: Kimi No Na Wa (Your Name), Koe no Katachi (A Silent Voice), Devilman Crybaby, Sora yori mo Tooi Basho (A Place Further Than The Universe).
A few weeks ago, I rewatched Koe no Katachi (A Silent Voice) with my mom. She asked me why all of the characters had “x”s on their faces and I tried to explain the metaphor to her before realizing that I didn’t know what to say–perhaps there was an emotional understanding that had yet to put itself into words.
The film is about Shouya Ishida who used to bully a deaf girl, Shouko Nishimiya, in elementary school. With his unusually cruel actions towards Shouko, Shouya is cast as a flawed character from the start. Although the class joins in on the bullying, when the teacher seeks out the person responsible, the class unanimously names Shouya as the culprit and denies their own participation. He quickly becomes the target of bullying afterward. Already, Shouya has become more real than most other main characters I’ve seen or read about–that is, flawed and not necessarily likeable. And, already, we see what comprises society: the students who do nothing, the students who join in and then deny involvement, deaf Shouko who fails to belong, and Shouya who falls out of the class’s favor and never recovers his “belonging” in the class.
After a flashback to Shouya’s past as a bully, the film returns to present tense where Shouya is a high school student about to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. When my mom asked the question about the x’s on the character’s faces–a visual representation of Shouya’s inability and refusal to listen to others, of his outcast status, of his self-imposed isolation out of fear, self loathing, and protection–I felt that she was also asking “Why is he so miserable? Why does he want to commit suicide?” Shouya becomes a loner, unable to repair the relationships with his classmates after they turn on him. In the film’s present time, several years have passed since elementary school. Between elementary school and now, nothing happens or changes; time passes, the other students move on and the outcast life becomes normal for Shouya. Rather than numb Shouya’s emotions, the distance of time gives Shouya an opportunity to wallow his guilt and isolation. The film doesn’t have much screen time for the period between Shouya’s elementary school and high school years–we only get a few clips of his failed attempts to reach out to his classmates–but that is enough content to draw our attention to this downward spiral of life playing itself out.
The gradual progression of seemingly nothing but the festering of internal emotion to Shouya’s decision to kill himself is ruthlessly grounding. Suicide doesn’t need to be the result of a strict set of causes and effects or a snowball reaction as depicted in Jay Asher’s novel 13 Reasons Why. To my parents, from a generation where earning money and getting food on the table was the biggest concern, Shouya’s actions would be unfathomable–as good as killing yourself over nothing.
Where I (and others my age) identify with Shouya and my mom can not, morality, hardship and “worst” experiences are constructed through perspective more than anything else. Generations are characterized, at least to some overgeneralized extent, by that perspective. And what do you know, Koe no Katachi opens with the song My Generation by The Who.
Durarara!!’s Rio Kamichika from episode 2 “Highly Unpredictable” presents an alternative view of suicide. After discovering that her father is cheating on her mother and that her mother is aware of her father’s actions yet does nothing, Rio is shaken that her family life remains the stagnant and begins to wonder if she truly matters to her family–driving her desire to disappear from the world. In retrospect, the two ideas–that maintenance of stability despite partners being aware of cheating and Rio’s questioning of her self-value–are disjoint. However, Rio’s contradictory actions–to make her mother aware of her father’s cheating by sending photographic evidence, but unable to directly confront either parent–exacerbate her feeling of smallness and unimportance. Overwhelmed and consumed by her own thoughts, Rio believes there is truly nothing to left to lose–the kind of blind sightedness that allows life to be defined by a moment and is a near universal experience for most of us. In the final scene of the episode, Celty, the Headless Rider, saves Rio mid fall from a building and tells her, “The world isn’t as bad as you think”–words that adolescent anime protagonists, and similarly, most people in reality, fail to hear but nonetheless (pardon the cliché) hit the nail on the head.
Outcasts in Anime
There is no shortage of loners in anime. Perhaps the most well known is Hachiman Hikigaya from My Teenage Romantic Love Comedy SNAFU (Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru). He is best known for his cynical outlook on society and his quotes such as:
There are no inherently bad people. Everyone believes that, myself included. I don’t doubt the existence of virtue. And yet people bare their fangs when it seems they can profit. People will rationalize their own behavior whenever they become tainted with evil; they’re not supposed to be evil. In order to preserve their own twisted integrity, the world becomes twisted. Someone you praised as “cool” until yesterday is “stuck up” today; someone you respected as “smart and knowledgeable” is now scorned as someone who “looks down on bad students”, and “energetic vigor” becomes “annoying and overly carried away.”
and
Youth is a hoax. It’s evil. People who make a big deal of their “youth” are just inviting trouble. They try to keep everything going on around them. For them, if there’s something that has to do with their “youth”, they jump at it without a second thought. From normal daily life, to rebelling against the view of society. If you fall in with them — lies, secrets, failure, and even crimes await you. But for them, it’s just a spice of life. And if failure is also a mark of “youth”, then isn’t it ironic, that a person who failed to make any friends, is also technically leading his “youth”? Though I wonder if they would agree. Everything runs on their schedule. Let me be clear. The people who enjoy their “youth”, will eventually fall apart.
And my personal favorite (how’s that for not going to prom mom):
“The important thing is to take part.” Famous words spoken by Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin during a speech. However, this quote tends to be frequently misused and serves as kind of a threat to force participation. There are tons of wild-goose chases in this world, y’know. If the most important thing is to take part, then surely one could find meaning in not taking part as well. And if everything’s worth experiencing, then there’s little doubt that the feeling of not experiencing something is, in itself, worth experiencing. In fact, you could even call it a valuable experience to not experience something everyone else does.
As bitter as some of these quotes may seem, Hachiman is not angsty–at least, not the morbid-poet type of angsty. From a viewer’s standpoint, he is refreshingly practical in navigating the social scene, but also portrayed in such a way that his viewpoints are both relatable and witty (at least in the first season of the show; the second season gets more serious). In fact, the Chinese anime community calls him 大老师, or teacher, for the wisdom he imparts on other teens and twenty or thirty-somethings. He is an idealized loner who doesn’t seem to care for his status or social appearance when, in reality, he hides from these insecurities by shunning social interaction in its entirety.
Despite his cynical bystander-esque behavior, Hachiman values genuine relationships and fears the phoniness he sees in other’s interactions so much that he struggles to make his own friendships, as that puts him at risk of partaking in these false relationships himself. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People emphasizes that people like to talk about themselves, so the key to their hearts is to talk less and listen to them. But if you yourself would rather talk about yourself, isn’t being quiet and listening to someone else a contrived interaction? It is impossible to interact in society without putting on a face.
To Hachiman, social efforts are unnecessarily expended energy, but when he takes the brunt of the consequences of others’ actions throughout the show–often for those characters to preserve their own images, it is clear that his actions are not the result of energy conservation. In his quest for genuineness, he paints a dishonest image of himself: someone who rejects friendship under the guise that it is a waste of time. But the faces that we wear in society do not have to be considered lies; they are another facet of ourselves. When Hachiman makes social commentary in the form of dry monologues at the beginning of episodes, we find that these comments aren’t mere outsider-looking-in observations but rather opinions hardened into a protective shell, spoken by someone jaded by society’s constant rejection of his attempts to interact. Hachiman’s desire to build a genuine relationship, despite his contradictory and self-preservative actions, puts him at odds with society, but is perhaps the most pure thing in the show.
Hachiman’s character appeals to a lot of similarly aged viewers I know. Especially for a generation often criticized for being privileged, he is an outlet that allows people to feel as though they are understood by someone who also knows that the world can be bitter and unfair even if it is just in the “real-world-insulated” high school. Every generation comes with its own cynical outsiders and whether they are acknowledged by the rest of the world remains questionable. But Hachiman is a breath of honesty — someone onto whom the self-proclaimed loners, outcasts and misfits, can project.
Technology in Anime
Social constructs are hard to characterize by generation for fear of generalization, but smartphones are undeniably a thing of the modern era. More and more anime works feature detailed smartphones in their artwork. The smartphone, like in reality, has become an instrumental mechanism of expressing a character’s identity. The best example that comes to mind is the use of iPhones in Kimi no Na Wa. The main characters Mitsuha and Taki stay in contact with each other across a dimensional difference (how is that for long distance relationship?) by leaving diary entries in each other’s smartphones. Their use of emoji and the links to weird articles that they send each other not only liven the interaction on screen, but also makes tangible connections to our lives. When I saw Mitsuha navigating Tokyo while staring at a map on her phone, I could imagine myself doing the same thing. (A few months after watching the movie, I was indeed staring at my phone trying to navigate Tokyo). Without the search engine and his phone, Taki would never have been able to identify the location of Itomori village.
In one of the more poignant scenes in Kimi No Na Wa, where the diary entries that Mitsuha had left on Taki’s phone begin to disappear, we see an identity being erased. And indeed, in that scene we learn that Mitsuha has been dead as of three years ago. Where the film falls short in being grounded because of its heavy dependence on abstract concepts like fate and love (which are effective in their own right, but that’s neither here or there), it makes up for that by its cultural realism–so even if we can’t see ourselves as star-crossed lovers traveling across and overcoming the dimension of time, we can see ourselves as people wandering in Tokyo or wanting to escape the one place we’ve lived in from K-12th grade.
Social Media
In Netflix’s Devilman: Crybaby, social media is an expression of absurdity. When Miki, a celebrity track runner, accepts that her childhood friend Akira is a demon, her testament of bravery is her social media post about her continued faith in Akira’s human soul despite the overwhelming public opinion against all demons. The following scenes show hate messages appearing on her social media platform, extremity fueling itself, not unlike what fills many Facebook and Twitter news article comments. Miki’s post ultimately contributes to her demise by rallying hate against her despite her best intentions. The social media-fueled hate that leads to the public destroying her home and savagely dismembering her body is a gruesome and effective way to leverage social media as an insight into humanity and its self destruction.
Social media, chatting apps, and smartphones facilitate many interactions and often act as shortcuts to instigating more exciting, action-packed scenes. For example, why have characters meet up and discuss what they will do the next day, wasting another few minutes of the viewer’s time, when they can do that with a text or two? Not to mention, you can get a lot about a character across through their texting habits.
Social media is also possibly the closest we’ll get to a “universally understood” phenomenon in anime. The entire plot of Yuri on Ice!! is catalyzed through an upload of Japanese figure skater Yuri Katsuki’s routine to social media and Russian figure skater Victor Nikiforov’s response to the video. The rest of the show regularly features characters scrolling through their Instagram pictures, a unique but also realistic way of tying together the diverse cast of international and geographically disconnected figure skaters who fight to compete at the Grand Prix.
Several pre-smartphone age anime do have devices that closely resemble the technology we have today. For example, Serial Experiments Lain, a 1998 science fiction anime about a girl who finds herself unable to tell a virtual world called the Wired apart from reality, eerily predicts the deeply Internet-connected world we live in today. Ghost in the Shell, a 1989 manga and later anime and live action film, features cyborgs and humans who can interface their biological brains with various networks. Both of these works use technology to raise philosophical meta questions, but what they on the most part don’t do is use technology to make the audience empathize with an individual character.
Sora yori mo Tooi Basho (A Place Further Than The Universe) tells the tale of four high school girls journeying to Antarctica. The twelfth episode masterfully uses technology to complement its otherwise straightforward themes and characters. The scene where Shirase opens her mother’s computer and watches all of the messages she had sent her mother load in email builds up from the previous episodes where we see Shirase sending regular life update emails through her phone. Leading up to the moment, Shirase is detached from her past–her mother’s body never found in the blizzard in Antarctica and death never truly confirmed in her mind. As Shirase lifts the laptop screen open, we are greeted with the familiar blue Windows 7 login screen. It is only here, where unread emails pop up at the top of the mail application (undeniably a Microsoft Outlook imitation), then automatically scrolling to make room for more unread mail, that Shirase faces her mother’s death at the hands of Antarctica’s blizzards head on. Of every way the show could have portrayed Shirase’s confrontation with reality and her emotions, the directors chose the hope of an unread email–that there might be a response–and the weight of an unread email–that there may never be a response.
In Koe no Katachi, the moments that evoked emotional responses from me were those such as Shouya’s mother’s discovery of her son’s attempted suicide. But in Sora yori mo Tooi Basho, all it took was watching emails load (that’s right, Outlook made the eyes water). It’s the small things–like one character anticipating a text from a crush or the brief mention of Facebook or a glimpse of a iOS app icon on a character’s phone–that make me feel as though anime is growing up with me.
And so.
I describe a lot of the anime as indicative of a generation, but in reality, the individual connection that the work evokes is what holds any value. It occurred to me while writing that Koe no Katachi was one of the few films I’ve seen with such genuine emotional expression, undiluted by cheap comedic cuts and contrived drama. The end scene, where Shouya lifts his hands from his ears and the “x”s fall off the other character’s faces, implying that Shouya is ready to face other’s words, represents a tremendous overcoming of the self. Shouya’s struggle was painful and cathartic to watch–most certainly due to the superb animation direction and subtle but effective soundtrack, but also because this 2D animated film is a piece on empathy not just between characters, but also between me as the viewer and the show as a whole.
