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.
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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.
