Love & Pop -- A Rumination
Let me set the scene for you.
You are a successful television animation director. Your most recent and astoundingly successful show, however, was conceived as a scathing indictment of the attitudes and lifestyles of the sort of people who have now catapulted its popularity to stratospheric heights. As the show went on, you made this premise more and more obvious--culminating in a motion picture climax--a portrayal of death and abhorrent personal failure. The implicated demographic goes to see it in droves.
Financially, the world is your oyster.
But creatively there is a kind of disconnect; the audience keeps having the opposite reaction to your work than you expect.
And so, director Hideaki Anno abandoned the carefully constructed world of cel paint and light tables. the iron clad control of storyboards, the tightly constricted technical limitations of budgeted animation and made a small live action feature called Love & Pop.
Now hold that thought, because I'm going to digress quite a bit.
Love & Pop is adapted from a novel by Ryu Murakami (not to be confused with Haruki Murakami) whose earlier work The Fascism of Love and Dreams had made a tremendous emotional impact on Anno. One can find the Evangelion universe peppered with proper nouns lifted wholesale from this 1984 novel.
I have personally checked two Ryu Murakami novels out of the library. The first, 69--a zany, semi-autobiographical high school tale--I was able to read in its entirety. The second, Coin Locker Babies, is a black and blackly humorous story following the lives of two men who were discovered as day old infants, locked inside separate but proximate rental lockers in a small Tokyo train station by their respective mothers. I was unable to read very far into it before academics interrupted. The Fascism of Love and Dreams is set in the same dystopic near future.
Another Murakami novel was adapted for the screen by Takashi Miike--Audition. Which the author enjoyed so much that he gave Miike the go ahead to adapt Coin Locker Babies into a film. Miike, however, was unable to secure the required funding. Interestingly enough, a much larger film adaptation is in the works for 2008. starring Val Kilmer, Asia Argento, Liv Tyler, and Tadanobu Asano. It'll be interesting to see how that develops.
End of digression.
Love & Pop is about enjo kosai among teenaged schoolgirls. "Enjo Kosai" is a Japanese term that roughly translates into "Compensated Dating". This can often mean money for sex. More disturbingly, it often doesn't.
Japan has a very, um, interesting emotional relationship with its young people.
On one hand, the whole nation has a crusty old man attitude about them writ large into national neurosis. A common low level hysteria seems to be running through the culture that the young people of Japan--people of low work ethic and crazy noisemusic who don't nearly respect their elders enough and the country will go to hell in a handbasket...blah blah blah.
On the other hand, the crazysexycool seventeen year old TV and magazine cover starlet; the ubiquitous, ephebophilic marketing strategy; the cavalcade of youth-oriented image and attitude that will convince you to eat, drink, drive, play, or apply evenly on the skin daily whatever it is they want you to buy. Well, that whole aspect to market culture is writ even larger across the subconsciousness of Japan's citizenry. Manufactured pop music idols in the West rise and fall between the releases of their first and second album. Over there, they rise and fall between the releases of their first and second singles as they are quickly co-opted by a fresher (read: 'younger looking') face.
The collision of these two cultural tropes have turned the ultimate Japanese symbol of feminine youth--the uniformed schoolgirl--into a prestige object...but a prestige object that might possibly be dangerous. This brings me back to my point about enjo kosai: Quite often perfectly normal-seeming Japanese salarymen will approach a uniformed sophomore on the street and offer her a hundred dollars to have tea with him in a restaurant. The very act of being seen in a public place with a young woman can be an unusually titillating experience--akin to riding into town on the back of a white tiger.
Anno's vision for capturing the sordid world of enjo kosai and the cultural complexity behind it was an antithesis to the medium he'd been working in for the last sixteen years of his life. Whereas the production pipeline for animated work is highly complicated, long term, and requiring the involvement of hundreds upon hundreds of individuals under a dozen different companies, Love & Pop was shot on compact, versatile Sony Handycams. Whereas animation has several stylistic limitations--especially in relation to camera movement, Love & Pop places its cameras in every conceivable space: in jewellery boxes, under soup bowls, strapped to bicycle undercarriages. And moving...always moving. Combined with a quick editing style. The film has a style that evokes both the auteurist and the amateur.
The amateur tone folds in nicely with both A) The film's motif of amateur photography (the protagonist always carries her snapshot instamatic and is heavily, heavily into a 'photographing feet' phase) and B) A cinéma vérité sensibility--giving the impression that one is watching a particularly insightful documentary being photographed by an overly emotional cameraman.
Our protagonist, Hiromi Yoshii, a high school student, likes doing all the normal, shallow teen things. Hanging with friends, eating out, and clubbing. Occasionally she indulges in enjo kosai. Not because she needs to eat, or to pay the rent--she lives with her parents and all her personal income is disposable--but because hanging with friends, eating out, and clubbing costs money. Japan's market-society-on-nitro has resulted in spoiled teen girl consumers renting out their sexuality to varying degrees in order to finance their participation in a consumer culture of manicured nails, makeup, clothes, and pictures which is promoted by that self-same sexuality; an odd symmetry.
As Hiromi comes to obsess over a particularly expensive item she wants to buy, she allows herself to fall deeper and deeper into the underbelly of the enjo kosai scene in order to purchase it--leading to an explosive meeting with a man who goes by the name "Captain EO". He is played with incredible emotional precision by Tadanobu Asano (the unforgettable Kakihara in Ichi the Killer).
Many of Anno's stylistic touches come into play throughout the film, despite the change in medium: The love of trains and electrical infrastructure. Voiceover monologue. Onscreen text--in particular his use of titles to denote the progression of time towards a deadline led me to make a connection to Agnes Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7.
Watching it, I couldn't help but be fascinated throughout its entire running time. Both the picture's style and narrative content inform the other and create an intentful whole, which speaks volumes of Hideaki Anno's intelligence and creativity working in a medium he is almost altogether new at. In short: Love & Pop is a challenging movie, a captivating movie, an enjoyable movie. It is a great film.
You are a successful television animation director. Your most recent and astoundingly successful show, however, was conceived as a scathing indictment of the attitudes and lifestyles of the sort of people who have now catapulted its popularity to stratospheric heights. As the show went on, you made this premise more and more obvious--culminating in a motion picture climax--a portrayal of death and abhorrent personal failure. The implicated demographic goes to see it in droves.
Financially, the world is your oyster.
But creatively there is a kind of disconnect; the audience keeps having the opposite reaction to your work than you expect.
And so, director Hideaki Anno abandoned the carefully constructed world of cel paint and light tables. the iron clad control of storyboards, the tightly constricted technical limitations of budgeted animation and made a small live action feature called Love & Pop.
Now hold that thought, because I'm going to digress quite a bit.
Love & Pop is adapted from a novel by Ryu Murakami (not to be confused with Haruki Murakami) whose earlier work The Fascism of Love and Dreams had made a tremendous emotional impact on Anno. One can find the Evangelion universe peppered with proper nouns lifted wholesale from this 1984 novel.
I have personally checked two Ryu Murakami novels out of the library. The first, 69--a zany, semi-autobiographical high school tale--I was able to read in its entirety. The second, Coin Locker Babies, is a black and blackly humorous story following the lives of two men who were discovered as day old infants, locked inside separate but proximate rental lockers in a small Tokyo train station by their respective mothers. I was unable to read very far into it before academics interrupted. The Fascism of Love and Dreams is set in the same dystopic near future.
Another Murakami novel was adapted for the screen by Takashi Miike--Audition. Which the author enjoyed so much that he gave Miike the go ahead to adapt Coin Locker Babies into a film. Miike, however, was unable to secure the required funding. Interestingly enough, a much larger film adaptation is in the works for 2008. starring Val Kilmer, Asia Argento, Liv Tyler, and Tadanobu Asano. It'll be interesting to see how that develops.
End of digression.
Love & Pop is about enjo kosai among teenaged schoolgirls. "Enjo Kosai" is a Japanese term that roughly translates into "Compensated Dating". This can often mean money for sex. More disturbingly, it often doesn't.
Japan has a very, um, interesting emotional relationship with its young people.
On one hand, the whole nation has a crusty old man attitude about them writ large into national neurosis. A common low level hysteria seems to be running through the culture that the young people of Japan--people of low work ethic and crazy noisemusic who don't nearly respect their elders enough and the country will go to hell in a handbasket...blah blah blah.
On the other hand, the crazysexycool seventeen year old TV and magazine cover starlet; the ubiquitous, ephebophilic marketing strategy; the cavalcade of youth-oriented image and attitude that will convince you to eat, drink, drive, play, or apply evenly on the skin daily whatever it is they want you to buy. Well, that whole aspect to market culture is writ even larger across the subconsciousness of Japan's citizenry. Manufactured pop music idols in the West rise and fall between the releases of their first and second album. Over there, they rise and fall between the releases of their first and second singles as they are quickly co-opted by a fresher (read: 'younger looking') face.
The collision of these two cultural tropes have turned the ultimate Japanese symbol of feminine youth--the uniformed schoolgirl--into a prestige object...but a prestige object that might possibly be dangerous. This brings me back to my point about enjo kosai: Quite often perfectly normal-seeming Japanese salarymen will approach a uniformed sophomore on the street and offer her a hundred dollars to have tea with him in a restaurant. The very act of being seen in a public place with a young woman can be an unusually titillating experience--akin to riding into town on the back of a white tiger.
Anno's vision for capturing the sordid world of enjo kosai and the cultural complexity behind it was an antithesis to the medium he'd been working in for the last sixteen years of his life. Whereas the production pipeline for animated work is highly complicated, long term, and requiring the involvement of hundreds upon hundreds of individuals under a dozen different companies, Love & Pop was shot on compact, versatile Sony Handycams. Whereas animation has several stylistic limitations--especially in relation to camera movement, Love & Pop places its cameras in every conceivable space: in jewellery boxes, under soup bowls, strapped to bicycle undercarriages. And moving...always moving. Combined with a quick editing style. The film has a style that evokes both the auteurist and the amateur.
The amateur tone folds in nicely with both A) The film's motif of amateur photography (the protagonist always carries her snapshot instamatic and is heavily, heavily into a 'photographing feet' phase) and B) A cinéma vérité sensibility--giving the impression that one is watching a particularly insightful documentary being photographed by an overly emotional cameraman.
Our protagonist, Hiromi Yoshii, a high school student, likes doing all the normal, shallow teen things. Hanging with friends, eating out, and clubbing. Occasionally she indulges in enjo kosai. Not because she needs to eat, or to pay the rent--she lives with her parents and all her personal income is disposable--but because hanging with friends, eating out, and clubbing costs money. Japan's market-society-on-nitro has resulted in spoiled teen girl consumers renting out their sexuality to varying degrees in order to finance their participation in a consumer culture of manicured nails, makeup, clothes, and pictures which is promoted by that self-same sexuality; an odd symmetry.
As Hiromi comes to obsess over a particularly expensive item she wants to buy, she allows herself to fall deeper and deeper into the underbelly of the enjo kosai scene in order to purchase it--leading to an explosive meeting with a man who goes by the name "Captain EO". He is played with incredible emotional precision by Tadanobu Asano (the unforgettable Kakihara in Ichi the Killer).
Many of Anno's stylistic touches come into play throughout the film, despite the change in medium: The love of trains and electrical infrastructure. Voiceover monologue. Onscreen text--in particular his use of titles to denote the progression of time towards a deadline led me to make a connection to Agnes Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7.
Watching it, I couldn't help but be fascinated throughout its entire running time. Both the picture's style and narrative content inform the other and create an intentful whole, which speaks volumes of Hideaki Anno's intelligence and creativity working in a medium he is almost altogether new at. In short: Love & Pop is a challenging movie, a captivating movie, an enjoyable movie. It is a great film.