With the release of the film version of ghost in the shell, its theatrical animation prototype, which is a classic of science fiction, has once again entered the public’s field of vision. It has been found that Japan’s "second element" is not only a commercial and entertainment industry full of exquisite pictures and bloody stories, but also a large number of excellent works that have reached a high level in artistry and ideology.
Below, let’s take a look at these sci-fi milestones in Japanese animation.
Worship of machinery: the "ingenious" interpretation of huge machinery
Due to the experience of rapid westernization in modern times, Japanese culture has an inexplicable love for huge industrial machinery. This emotion has evolved into a persistent interpretation of giant weapons in animation after being strengthened by the thinking of "weapons only" and "decisive weapons" during World War II.
The beginning of mechanical worship is nothing more than the Cosmic Warship Yamato, which was broadcast in 1974. In this film, the super battleship "Yamato" of the old Japanese navy set sail again as a space warship, and single-handedly entered the base camp of the interstellar invaders, completing the grand task of saving the earth. The main gun of the Yamato completely hit the hearts of the Japanese audience in the Showa era and achieved great success. The concept of "Yamato" even influenced many later works. The main gun of the human space battleship in the famous game StarCraft was called "Yamato Gun".
In 1979, a sci-fi film "Mobile Suit Gundam 0079", which reflected the "war of independence" between the space colonial satellite and the earth, appeared on the screen. This time, the huge machinery has become more anthropomorphic, and steel giants such as "Gundam" and "Zagu" have simply become the physical extension of the driver’s will. "Gundam" has since become a long-lasting industrial brand, and today, it continues to introduce new works to adapt to the new era. Compared with Yamato, which triumphed all the way, Gundam’s depiction of the war is more real and profound, depicting the great damage caused by the war to the lives of the people on both sides of the war, instead of blindly rendering "justice".
At the same time, some animators began to reflect on this "mechanical worship", so the work "Mobile Police" appeared. Although the film takes the "special car two lessons" of driving police robots as the leading group, the film no longer highlights the giant humanoid machinery, but focuses on depicting the ups and downs of these "grassroots policemen" in their daily lives. This "naysayer" deconstruction, relying on the story of "grounding gas", also won the love of a large number of viewers.
Although this mechanical worship of Japanese animation has a slightly paranoid thinking foundation, it is also thanks to this "ingenuity" that Japanese animators have designed a large number of beautiful and exquisite sci-fi mechanical settings. Even Avatar, the top American blockbuster, is full of "Japanese-style" precision beauty in mechanical settings.
Armageddon: cruel aesthetics under the consciousness of hardship
As well as "ingenuity" deeply rooted in Japanese culture, there is also their sense of hardship, which can be seen in film and television works with the theme of "destruction" such as The Sinking of Japan and Godzilla. In animation, the first screen show of Miyazaki Hayao, a Japanese animation master, is an epic depicting the struggle and coexistence between the remaining human beings and nature after the destruction of civilization — — Valley of the Wind. Nausicaa, the heroine in the film, bravely leads her people to survive tenaciously on the destroyed land. Wearing a blue dress and flying in the sky with white wings, she became a memory of a generation in Japan.
After entering the 1990s, with the collapse of the economic bubble, Japanese society fell into an unprecedented depression. At the end of the century, TV animation with strong religious elements to render the end of the world — — The Gospel Warrior in the New Century caused a sensation in the whole Japanese society. The boys and girls in the film are driving biological robots from human beings and fighting desperately with the "apostles" who intend to destroy human beings. The film uses a large number of shocking lens language with psychological implications, which successfully synchronizes the complex inner world of teenagers with the devastated external world and presents a cruel aesthetic feast for the audience. The heroine Ayanami Rei, who has almost no self-personality, has become a new generation of animation goddess after Nausicaa. Compared with his heroic predecessors, Ayanami Rei’s gloomy temperament clearly reflects the changes of social times.
After entering the new century, with the haze of the cold war and economic crisis gradually dissipating, the conflict of social thoughts has become a new contradiction. The theater animation Harmony released in recent years is such a work. The highly developed future of science and technology in the film, under the seemingly beautiful and harmonious appearance, is a gentle strangulation of human nature, which has to be said to be a wake-up call for Japanese culture. At the end of the film, human beings completely give up self-awareness, and the whole society is integrated into a whole that "does not distinguish between you and me". Although this kind of destruction has no "big scene" of landslides, it has more realistic symbolic significance and deserves reflection from all people in modern society.
Dolls and people: a grim prospect of artificial intelligence
With the revolution of electronic technology, the interpretation of artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and other technologies has become a new theme of Japanese animation. Osamu Tezuka, the founder of Japanese animation, is most famous for Astro Boy, which tells the story of intelligent robots seeking themselves. Then another classic with great international influence — — Robot Cat is also based on an intelligent robot from the future — — Doraemon is centered on it.
However, when it really touches the core of these technical issues, the style of Japanese animation has become more and more cold. The comic classic "gunnm", which describes the semi-mechanical girl Gary’s self-pursuit in the battle, has been bought by the famous director Cameron and is making a film. The animated film Yukikaze, which tells the coexistence of human pilots and artificial intelligence fighters, completely abandons the "anthropomorphic" artificial intelligence that is often depicted in most artificial intelligence science fiction works. As the soul of a high-performance tactical reconnaissance plane, the artificial intelligence "Yukikaze" in the film is endowed with an out-and-out "inhuman" attribute by the author. She has neither worldly desires nor love/hate, but she has a completely different thinking ability from human beings. In the critical air battle, she has repeatedly made decisions and behaviors that are completely beyond human beings. Looking back at this forward-looking animation now, we will find that the agent most similar to Yukikaze is the artificial intelligence AlphaGo that is sweeping the world of Go.
Another classic that has to be said is the sci-fi animation classic — — Ghost in the shell. This work has five versions: comic book, theater animation, two TV animations and live-action movies, but it basically tells the story of "Nine Public Security Courses" led by Grass seed, a fully mechanized reformer, to crack down on high-tech crimes. Among them, two theater animations directed by Mamoru Oshii, an animation master who is equally famous with Miyazaki Hayao, are the most classic. The film deeply discusses the alienation and evolution of human nature in a high-tech society with an increasingly high degree of integration between human beings and machines through long and even empty shots, supplemented by a large number of symbolic pictures. The film is permeated with a kind of transcendental "super-humanism" atmosphere. As the protagonist, Suzi even completely abandoned the concrete body in the film and gained freedom and rebirth in the torrent of information network. At this point, it is an understandable regret that the live-action movie version failed to fully carry out these discussions in order to take into account the audience and rhythm of commercial movies. The TV animated version, at the beginning of the century, foresighted the social problems we are facing now, such as the spread of network memes and refugee crisis, which is also a rare classic.
After decades of development and accumulation, Japanese animation is full of a large number of commercial works with bright appearance but lack of connotation, but it also produces a large number of outstanding works with profound humanistic and artistic feelings, including many sci-fi masterpieces. These excellent sci-fi animations have artistically imagined and interpreted the development of science and technology through the unparalleled picture expression of animation, which deeply reflects the ideological trend of their times and has far-reaching influence. Limited by space, there are still many excellent Japanese sci-fi animations that cannot be introduced one by one, but the unique charm of Japanese sci-fi animation can still be seen through these classic works.
