Mechademia
Image from STEAMBOY
I have now finished Mechademia, and there are two good essays in it. One is a brief and somewhat fragmentary commentary by Ueno Toshiya (one of only two Japanese academics represented in the journal) that questions whether the linear “storyboard” or series of successive images (in film or animation) does or does not match the way people view their surroundings when they are not watching a film. That’s a neat question. Obviously it doesn’t have a single answer. The other good essay is actually a great essay, “The Multiplanar Image,” by someone from McGill named Thomas Lamarre, who takes the backdrop technique used in Steamboy as his starting point and then moves on to a host of issues: Disney, the invention of the multiplanar camera, Miyazaki, Murakami and the “Superflat” esthetic, and ultimately the history of the use of perspective in visual art and the link between Murakami and the ukiyoe “floating world” school of Edo art. There’s actually more than that; it is a tour de force essay with the best description of “superflat” I have ever read—much better than Murakami’s own explanation and also key to seeing in a flash that much of traditional Japanese painting and art was superflat by esthetic choice.
Here is Lamarre’s definition of superflat:
First we need to ask how something apparently uniplanar (flat) becomes superplanar (superflat). Superflat implies that something is not simply flat but very, very flat—complexly flat. To make something look superflat, you have to begin with layers that introduce the possibility of depth and then crush it. … You achieve superflatness only by having complex layers and making them all appear equally on the surface, and equally important visually. In other words, backgrounds or intermediate layers don’t fade away, allowing themselves to be overlooked. On the contrary, they push to the fore. Oddly enough, very flat backgrounds—say, a background of a single color or one composed of speed lines—often appear as important as the figure that they highlight. Depth comes right to the surface even as it serves to direct attention to the character. Foreground and background become equally striking.
This is the basic idea of superflat: no element within the image is more important than any other element. The result is a visual field without any hierarchy among elements. You could also call this a distributive visual field, since elements are distributed rather than hierarchized. … When everything comes equally to the surface, you still make connections, you will still orientate yourself, but those connections and orientations will not be guided by depth cues… you are orienting yourself in a densely packed distributive field—a sort of information field. Rather than simple flatness, you have complex superflatness.
It’s funny in a way that Murakami has always promoted Superflat as an art revolution when, in addition to some traditional art, ordinary maps are superflat by definition.
