The Cat Remembers

METALEPTIC NOSTALGIA IN WHISPER OF THE HEART, THE CAT RETURNS AND IBLARD JIKAN

To explain the subtitle right off the bat, ‘metalepsis’ refers to the crossing of conceptual boundaries in works of art – the most obvious example is when a character looks out and talks to the audience and thereby acknowledges that a wider real world exists beyond its own fictional one. It can also be applied when we have a fiction-within-a-fiction: in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose Of Cairo, a character steps off of a cinema screen to spend time with a young woman that repeatedly comes to see the film. The other characters stand around within the world of the film, unable to continue until he returns. Here, metalepsis is about traversing through different fictional ‘levels’.

Nostalgia is probably an easier concept – though I will be talking about two different kinds. The first is a collective nostalgia, a commonly held idea about the ‘way things were’ at a particular time. Our ideas about the 60s, 70s or 80s are shaped by a shared belief in what it was like, rather than the reality of each decade. The second is personal nostalgia, which we can think of as a particular rose-tinted memory of something that happened to us, often triggered by some stimuli in the present (a smell that reminds us of a great-grandparent’s kitchen, an episode of a television show that we haven’t thought about since early childhood, etc.). What both forms of nostalgia have in common is a kind of mental editing; nostalgia is a positive perception, one that results from remembering the good aspects of a period or event and forgetting the negative.

In the Isao Takahata film Only Yesterday, the film shifts the original source material from one type of nostalgia to another. The original Manga on which the film is based is an episodic story of the experiences of a young child Taeko in the 1960s. The setting conjures up a collective nostalgia of the era, but when adapting the story Takahata added a framing device set in the 1980s, where Taeko is a young woman travelling to the countryside and remembering her youth. The framing device shifts the nostalgia from a shared idea of the 60s into the specific personal memories of an individual. Thus there are two kinds of nostalgia functioning simultaneously – the collective nostalgia felt by the audience and the personal nostalgia of the character.

Whisper Of The Heart, written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Yoshifumi Kondo, evokes nostalgia in a slightly different fashion. On one hand, the film will create a sense a collective nostalgia from audiences today as it captures the feel of the mid-1990s, but at the time of production it was a contemporaneous story. The opening creates another kind of nostalgia, the use of the song Take Me Home, Country Roads not only conjures a nostalgia for the time that the song was originally written and released (the 1970s), but also the song’s subject matter is one of a nostalgic longing for a long passed childhood home. (And, in fact, for me, the song evokes a personal nostalgia for old school music lessons from when I was 9 or 10)

But there is also a strange kind of near-nostalgia shown in the film, a kind of ‘nostalgia for the present’. Whisper Of The Heart is a slice-of-life narrative about a young girl named Shizuku who, in-between preparing for the new school term, follows a cat that she sees sitting on a train. The cat leads her through small alleys and up to a tucked-away neighbourhood where she discovers an antiques shop (that she was unaware even existed) which contains a beguiling cat doll. She also discovers love for the first time in the form of Seiji, a young boy who has already decided that his life’s goal is to make violins. Inspired and a little frightened by the clarity of his ambition, Shizuku resolves to write a short story. 

In the brief glimpses that we get of her story-in-progress, in the form of raw imaginative daydreams, we see a strangely vague but familiar world identified elsewhere as 'Iblard'. When Shizuku conjures up these images, she is viewing her surroundings in a positive light, emphasizing the good and ignoring the bad, applying the same kind of ‘mental editing’ that nostalgia does to the past.

Iblard is the creation of artist Naohisa Inoue, who has created several hundred paintings of this nostalgic landscape. These paintings were eventually partially animated by Studio Ghibli to create Iblard Jikan, a half-hour direct-to-dvd piece that evokes a strong sense of familiarity rather than otherness in its strange multicoloured landscapes. Iblard is less of a clearly defined fantasy world and more of a frame of mind, a way of looking at our own world. Indeed Ghibli co-founder Miyazaki talks about the ability to see the world ‘through Iblard eyes’, a means of rediscovering the mundane everyday world as something new and magical.

The world that she conjures up in her mind reflects the surroundings that she is used to; we often see the landscape from high up, looking down at a cityscape that merges with trees and vegetation. 

Thus, Shizuku’s flights of fancy in Whisper Of The Heart are not a young girl’s escapism, but rather a way for her to find something new and exciting in a world that she had previously only ever thought of as containing school exams, annoying elder sisters and friends with romantic problems. Falling in love and discovering a passion for writing allows her to see the world through Iblard eyes, to be nostalgic about the here-and-now.

The finished story that she herself writes is never depicted or described in detail on screen. We know that it involves the figurine of an anthropomorphic cat as its main protagonist, Baron, and that it strangely parallels events from the youth of Seiji’s grandfather (who later recounts this story to Shiziku). But the story did find its way to being told many years later, in the form of the Studio Ghibli film The Cat Returns, directed by Hiroyuki Morita.

The Cat Returns is the story of young Haru, who does not consider herself particularly good at anything, and has recently discovered that her highschool crush has a girlfriend. While walking home she saves a cat from getting run over. But the cat is no ordinary feline; it is in fact the prince of the Cat Kingdom – and now his father the King has decided that Haru must come to their realm and marry the prince. Desperate to find a way out of this situation, she is directed to the Cat Business Office (or Cat Bureau depending on the translation). She discovers a large white cat waiting for her, which leads her through various backstreets and upwards until they finally reach a small, magical courtyard, where Baron waits for potential clients in his small antiques shop.

The Cat Returns is sometimes criticised for being more ‘lightweight’ than other Ghibli films but this can be explained when we view it not as a film, but rather as a film-within-a-film, the story that Shizuku will eventually write after the events of Whisper Of The Heart. We can see the aesthetic shift in Shizuku's imagination – from the baroque and fantastic Iblard to the simpler, streamlined look of 'The Cat Returns' – as resulting from the process of Shizuku polishing and refining her story. Her raw imagination is vibrant and excessive, the finished story is clear and concise.

Both Whisper Of The Heart and The Cat Returns feature sequences where young girls follow white cats upwards through unknown backstreets, eventually leading to a circular plateau that contains a quaint antique shop with Baron the Cat waiting inside. Arguably, Shizuku is 'present' in both moments. In Whisper Of The Heart, the event is happening to Shizuku, while in The Cat Returns it is happening as Shizuku remembers the original event.

Taken on its own, The Cat Returns is not a nostalgic story. But when we watch it in the context of Whisper Of The Heart (and Iblard Jikan) it is possible to see that Haru’s adventure is itself a nostalgic memory of what was arguably the most significant day in Shizuku’s life. And here is where the nostalgia becomes metaleptic. For an audience, watching this sequence in The Cat Returns evokes a collective nostalgia for the film Whisper Of The Heart, reminding us of the original sequence. But because we are aware that Shizuku is somehow 'there', behind the scenes, writing the event that we see, it also functions as a communication of the character's personal nostalgia. Like the character stepping off the screen in The Purple Rose Of Cairo, Shizuku's nostalgia moves from one narrative layer to another, linking the past events of Whisper Of The Heart, our memories of watching the film, Shizuku's memories of that period of her life and the present story of The Cat Returns into a single nostalgic experience.

                                                                                                             - P. S.

Depiction and Fiction: An Epilogue

As an afterthought to that post, I thought I would quickly add one more example in the form of the ‘Dreamland’ amusement park – a fictional fairground that exists within the world of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. It was one year ago today that I first posted on the subject of Depiction and Fiction in relation to this film, as a tribute to mark the death of Kon. He has now been gone for four years and as such I find this particular moment all the more pertinent.

The story of Paprika is about a machine that allows one to enter into another person’s dreams, and so we can read the name of the park ‘Dreamland’ as a play on this. Like the rides of Pooch Island, what we have here is a fairground that exists only as a depiction, with its rides and attractions only appreciable on the aesthetic rather than experiential level. But if we look at the mascot figures appearing on the sign, the story becomes more conceptually complex.

As many of the previous posts on this subject would have pointed out, we have a multilayered complexity to the mascot figures; they are animated depictions of model depictions of fictional characters – doubly-fictional characters in the diegesis of Paprika. But eagle-eyed viewers will notice that these figures are the lead characters of Kon’s last – still unfinished – film The Dreaming Machines. The moment is designed as an inside joke, a reference to a film still in preproduction, but it turns Kon’s film into a text-within-a-text, a fictional film that the characters of Paprika might go and see.

The fact that the film will probably never be completed makes this moment all the more bittersweet – our only glimpse of Kon’s final work will always be nestled within another fiction, a depiction of a film appearing in his actual final film. This makes the end of his career, quite fittingly, a little like a cinematic ouroboros, always conceptually folding in on itself, much like the subject matter of his work.

                                                                                                                             - P.S.

Depiction And Fiction: Toys & Cars

I have previously written about the difference between created imagery (animation and paintings) and recorded imagery (live-action film and photography), claiming that the former is far more complex than the latter on an aesthetic level and yet far simpler on a fictional level. That is, in animation a character will always have a dual status as an image; they will always be both the character and a depiction of the character. Yet at the same time, as a fictional being, the animated character is more ‘true’ than the live-action character – Michael Corleone from The Godfather is the character and Al Pacino purporting to be the character, while Mickey Mouse is always ‘really’ Mickey Mouse. When we apply these ideas to the Pixar films, we can see that there are a multitude of levels of understanding at work in even the most straightforward of moments.

The early Pixar films in particular – both shorts and features – can be seen to form something akin to a ‘meta-franchise’ in that they are linked in a variety of extra-textual ways. While some argue that all of the Pixar films take place in one consistent universe, attempting to cohere everything into a single text (http://jonnegroni.com/2013/07/11/the-pixar-theory/), I would argue that this is a) stretching it a bit, and b) far less interesting than viewing the films as distinct texts that have a range of interpretative relationships to one another. Put another way, the references, cameos and in-jokes in the Pixar films do not unify them but create highly complicated interactions between them, turning some works into fictions within other works of fiction. The first character animation by the Pixar team (though not under that name) was the short The Adventures Of Andre & Wally-B, a fleeting chase cartoon between the vaguely human Andre and the antagonistic bee Wally-B. In itself, the film is a straightforward narrative taking place within its own diegetic reality. As an animated character, Andre is both the diegetic figure and a depiction of the figure. But in their third short film, Red’s Dream, the first in-joke reference adds even more layers to the depiction and fiction of Andre.

On the wall of the Bicycle shop where Red the unicycle lives a clock can be made out as portraying the character of Andre, his arms indicating the hour and minute. As an inside joke, we can take it on the same level that we take the floor pattern within Red’s fantasy (emulating the ball in Luxo Jr.) – a reference to entertain the animators and anyone else eagle-eyed enough to notice. But the nature of the reference is more complicated. The fact that the clock is a clear reference to the famous Mickey Mouse watch of yesteryear, means that we can interpret the clock as a piece of Andre & Wally-B merchandise, casting those characters as fictional characters within the diegesis of Red’s Dream. We could take the appearance of the clock as evidence that the unseen Bicycle shop owner is a fan of Andre & Wally-B and has bought this piece of memorabilia; making the clock a depiction (within the cartoon) of a depiction (on the face of the clock) of a depiction (of the original character). Andre & Wally B therefore is both a film in its own right and a story-within-a-story as part of Red’s Dream.

This approach is continued in the first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story. When Woody gathers everyone around to discuss the impending influx of new toys on Andy’s birthday, we can make out behind him the spines of several books – including Andre & Wally-B, Red’s Dream, Tin Toy and Knick-Knack. Once again, this is an inside joke that renders all of these earlier works as fiction within the world of Toy Story. Red the unicycle is not a diegetic character, but rather a doubly-fictional character akin to Buzz Lightyear.

When I say Buzz Lightyear, of course, I am not referring to the character of Buzz who we follow through the film, but the concept of Buzz Lightyear, the character that Buzz thinks he is, the – as Woody puts it at one point – ‘Real Buzz Lightyear’. Initially, much of the comedy in Toy Story stems from this confusion in terms of depiction and fiction. Buzz thinks that he is the real thing, not a depiction of the real thing. The ‘real’ Buzz Lightyear is a doubly-fictional character within the world of Toy Story, the main character of the Buzz Lightyear Of Star Command franchise (which begins life as a fictional franchise, but then became an actual franchise when Disney produced an animated series by that name). This is true of most of the toy characters appearing within the films.

Woody differs from Buzz because he knows full well that he is a toy, a depiction of a generic Old West Sheriff. But this in itself becomes a complicated point in relation to how we understand the diegesis of the franchise. In the sequel, Toy Story 2, we learn that Woody is actually a depiction of a specific character from an old puppet TV serial Woody’s Round-Up. Woody therefore becomes a depiction of a toy, which itself is a depiction of a TV puppet, that is a depiction of the fictional Woody. But, unlike Buzz, Woody is initially ignorant of the fiction that he depicts; he only knows that he is a depiction. How is it possible for Buzz to know his fictional back-story so well that he actually believes it to be true, while Woody is oblivious to the fact that he is merchandise from a TV show? Why does Woody define himself so overtly through his relationship to Andy when, as a toy from the 1950s, he must surely have had owners decades before Andy was ever born? These texts-within-texts complicate how much sense the story makes.

In a later Toy Story short Small Fry we are treated to a slew of new characters that exist, seemingly, to indulge the filmmakers’ love of ridiculous puns. Sidestepping the glorious silliness of Tai-Kwon-Doe or Beef Stewardess for now (though I’m sure I’ll return to them in a future post), let us focus on the fact that each of these characters have been given the same kind of doubly-fictional contexts. In the audio commentary, director Angus MacLane states that every toy appearing in the ‘happy-meal’ toy support group belongs to a franchise that, like Woody’s Round-Up, only exists within the world of Toy Story. For instance, Franklin is a depiction of a character from an animated film that tells the history of America using anthropomorphic birds. On the level of fiction, Franklin is simply an abandoned toy that can’t understand why he doesn’t appeal to kids. But on the level of depiction, the character is infinitely more complex because of this context. Franklin is a depiction of the Pixar character, who is a toy depiction of a non-existent animated character, who is a depiction of the fictional character of Franklin who – we might surmise – is supposed to be Franklin D. Roosevelt (or maybe even Franklin Pierce), the real historical figure depicted as a bird.

This idea of depicting characters as something introduces yet another layer to our understanding of depiction and fiction. The world of the Cars franchise is more complicated than that of Toy Story; the toys exist within a human populated world, they are created objects that lead a secret life of their own. But the cars and other vehicles exist in their own world that functions on its own laws, it is much like the real world but seen through a kind of ‘car-o-vision’ (in the same way that Franklin is Roosevelt seen through ‘bird-o-vision’). This makes Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater double-depictions, but in a different way to Woody or Buzz. We understand the characters as people, but we see them as cars. In Cars 2 we glimpse John Lassetire, the ‘car-ified’ version of Pixar founder John Lasseter, a perfect example of a ‘real’ person that we see depicted as a vehicle.

The first Cars provides us with clips from A Bugs Life, Monsters Inc. and Toy Story, but with the characters all reimagined as cars. Unfortunately, Lassetire is not introduced as a maker of animated films within Cars 2, so we can’t attribute these movie clips to him, as productions of PixCar studios.

But nevertheless the appearance of Woody and Buzz as toy cars is particularly interesting, when we consider the fact that these characters were released as toys in the real world.

So: The character of Woody is a human sheriff living in the Old West, thwarting villains that poison the waterhole and so on, but he is depicted by a puppet in the show Woody’s Round-Up. This puppet is then depicted by the toy of Woody that we meet in Toy Story; and because this toy is also a character with its own distinct personality he is both a depiction and a character. But because he is an animated character he is still yet another depiction (a depiction of the Pixar character). In the Cars clips, the characters are seen through the ‘car-o-vision’, making them depictions of the depictions of the Pixar characters. And in the real world, therefore, the Woody Wagon and Buzzmobile toys are toy depictions of animated depictions of car depictions of animated depictions of toy depictions of puppet/animated depictions of fictional characters…

Phew!

                                                                                                                        - P. S.