SF Online Interview with Hagio (Part III-3)

(Continued)

Hagio:

In that story, each episode shows mysterious monsters called "Angels" being sent in, one by one. For some reason they target the same spot each time, and people fight back. But those various parts of the backbone [of the story], things you wonder why as you watch, are all left unexplained. I didn't expect that even by the very end, you wouldn't get an explanation.

Mizutama:

Ah, such questions—you would still have a lot of them after watching the theatrical releases.

Hagio:

That father, was he a spy in the end?

Sakai:

No, not really. (laugh)

Mizutama:

That father, he just wanted to find happiness for himself. (laugh)

Hagio:

Who were those shadowy people who controlled the father from behind the scenes?

Sakai:

You mean "Seele?" I am not sure, either. In the end, you don't find out anything.

Hagio:

Oh, really.

(Continues to Part IV)

SF Online Interview with Hagio (Part III-2)

(Continued)

Mizutama:

Do you have any particular type of SciFi you're especially fond of these days? Like, "I am such a sucker for stories with such and such gadgets."

Hagio:

Mmmm. Computers going insane—that's interesting to me. Ever since "2001: A Space Odyssey" I find computers interesting. In the Seafort Saga, was it? —There was a funny computer, too.

Sakai:

The one that goes insane very easily.

Hagio:

Yes, very easily and neatly. So humans calculate using various other methods, rather than computers.

Sakai:

Is it because they go insane that you find computers interesting?

Hagio:

Yes, it is. Because, if you have a computer, be it within spaceship or in a city, its existence implies in a sense that you've conceded full power to it. And if that goes crazy, what else could be more suspenseful?

Mizutama:

So it's fun to think about the possible variations, isn't it: if this happens then it leads to that, and so on. (laugh)

Hagio:

Yes, that gets exciting! (laugh) Oh, by the way, this may be a bit of a jump but I've also gotten fairly hooked by the story of "Evangelion." I saw it after all the episodes had been aired. I borrowed it from someone who highly recommended it. I watched it in sequence from the beginning. I was only told, "You will be surprised at the final and penultimate episodes."

Mizutama:

Wow, that's a very sinful bait that you got tossed. (laugh)

Hagio:

So as I watched, I was wondering how I would be surprised, like when I had been reading "Kirinyaga," thinking about the possible developments. Like, would it go this way or that way. Then at the end—I couldn't believe the ending at all.

Sakai:

Wa haahahaha

Hagio:

But I thought the settings and situation were very interesting.

Sakai:

Have you seen the theatrically released "ending?" [Note 1]

[Note 1] The "Neon Genesis Evangelion" series has three movie version "endings" and I am not sure which one Sakai is referring to. None could be considered an "ending"of the story, actually. A live action version is being produced in the U.S. and THAT is supposed to be the true "ending."

Hagio:

I have it but I haven't managed to watch it yet. Those who watched it told me, "You still don't get [the story] even if you watch it." So I don't know what to do, should I watch it and reconsider? Have you seen it?

Mizutama:

Yes, but please don't ask me to explain it. (laugh)

(Continues)

SF Online Interview with Hagio (Part II-2)

(Continued)

Mizutama:

In retrospect, "On the Porch a Girl With a Puppy…" was also SciFi, as well as "Asobidama (Marbles)" [Note 1], but I think what really established you as a "SciFi cartoonist" in the public mind was, after all, "They Were Eleven." When I read it, I instinctively sensed, "Ah, Hagio-san is paying tribute to the 'SciFi' that she grew up reading." Perhaps it was because this work appeared to contain exactly all the symbolic elements of "SciFi" that non-SciFi readers have vaguely in their mind. At least that's how it seemed to me. (laugh)

[Note 1] An early and long-lost SciFi piece by Hagio; some say it is a prequel to Keiko Takemiya's "To Terra". My husband never got to read this, to his deep regret.

Sakai:

"They Were Eleven" was about young people fighting for their survival within a confined situation, but in its sequel the theme was like society doesn't get better through mere individual efforts—it turned into a rather disillusioned, or a rather more measured story, right? Was that because of the restrained viewpoint that you've mentioned, in response to a more positive view of the future like that of Asimov?

Hagio:

No, I wasn't thinking that deeply, because the idea first came to me in my high school days. The SciFi plots I did back when I was doing "They Were Eleven" were generally in that vein; there were lots of characters like those wholesome, young, male protagonists. So I was thinking of a lot of adventure stories for such characters, but when I finally penned "They Were Eleven," the "model student"-ness of the hero really got on my nerves and I didn't see this as a good thing. So I did the sequel thinking perhaps I could do better next time, but it still didn't work out. (laugh) I thought to myself that I couldn't keep depicting those wholesome characters, and I junked all the other SciFi ideas. So I think there is timing in everything, the right moment to do things.

Mizutama:

Ah, I see. So "They Were Eleven" was from the early stages of "SciFi" addiction, when you hadn't developed any resistance and had severe symptoms (laugh), that type of "SciFi" for you. Mmmm, it wasn't completely off the mark then that I saw it as "paying tribute."

Sakai:

What are you talking about? (laugh)

(Continues)

Effect Lines and other wonderful things

If you look at the Panel 4 of Page 27 in the previous post, you see Glen Smith's figure is covered with effect lines. I assumed effect lines indicate motion, so I wasn't sure what motion it referred to in that picture, and asked my husband for help.

He explained that effect lines are not just about motion. In this particular example, they indicate that attention is suddenly focused on Edgar. Perhaps a zoom would be used to achieve the same effect in a live action film.

We had an interesting conversation about how influential these effect lines have become. It turns out that they are even utilized often in anime, where characters are obviously capable of moving for real (as opposed to requiring symbols for movement, as in comics), but the lines are a carryover from manga tradition, and are also used as extra emphasis within these anime. It is such an integral part of the visual vocabulary of manga/anime, that when an American special effects guy my husband knows suggested to a CG director at Studio Ghibli that they use a motion blur effect (standard part of Photoshop and After Effects) instead, they declined.

Another issue Japanese anime creators faced when they tried to incorporate 3D CG was line weight. Line weight (in other words, the thickness of a line) is so critical in expressing personality and an emotional tone that to avoid the necessary standardization of line weight that CG would result in, animators tend to use it only for backgrounds, which are less important in setting the mood, and continue to hand-draw actual characters.

Nostalgia and "Toki wo Kakeru Shojo"

Talking about nostalgia, I would like to discuss one topic that really interested me when I attended the "Cool Japan" Conference at MIT.

On the first day of the conference they screened "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Toki wo Kakeru Shojo, or TokiKake)" and its director Mamoru Hosoda was present to discuss this film (interesting that he has connection to Miyazaki, because I thought the style looked similar).

Unfortunately, I made the fatal mistake of not going to the screening (I hadn't heard about TokiKake), and Hosoda was at the conference only for the screening, but I heard Ian Condry, the conference organizer, discuss his interview with Hosoda during one panel discussion.

Toki wo Kakeru Shojo is based on a juvenile SciFi novel by Tsutsui Yasutaka from the 60's, and it was cinematized in 1983 by Nobuhiko Obayashi (I saw his "Tenkousei" and I liked it a lot—even went to Onomichi where this movie was shot, an old beautiful seaside town).

The future plays an important part in "Toki wo Kakeru Shojo". When this movie came out, Hosoda was probably in high school, and back then, the future meant the 21st century. We are now in the 21st century, and the "future" didn't turn out anything like what was imagined back then. When Hosoda saw the movie, the world was a hopeful place. Man had reached the moon, and science and technology promised a bright future. Despite the Cold War, people were hopeful that we would eradicate wars and medical advances looked like we would find cures for terminal diseases sooner or later. And this world view was reflected in the original story.

But Hosoda wondered how such views would be received by today's young people. We are no longer sure what the future holds. So the first thing for Hosoda to do was to rethink the whole premise of the story in the context of the present and think about what would touch young people's hearts today.

Revivals of the old hit movies and TV shows are all too common these days, and I assumed that it was all commercialism—appealing to both the nostalgia generation as well as the young audience who never saw the original—and I didn't think very highly of such practices. I took it as a sign of a lack of creativity, and seeing that many of the directors of such derivative works are of my generation, I felt a bit shamed. Yet, I also felt an unexplainable attraction to them. Hosoda's explanation finally opened my eyes—my generation is in a sense obsessed with revisiting the past and looking back into the present to fill the gap between the what we had expected for the future back then and what we ended up with.

I'm so curious as to how Hosoda answered his own questions. I'm looking forward to seeing this movie someday.

My husband's experience with "Poe no Ichizoku"

The "Poe no Ichizoku" series began with "すきとおった銀の髪" (Translucent Silver Hair) in the March 1972 issue of Bessatsu Shojo Komikku (Extra Edition Girls Comics, a companion monthly publication to the weekly Shojo Komikku), and ended with "エディス" (Edith) in the June 1976 issue, and is made up of 15 episodes of various lengths.

For those of us who read Anne Rice ("Poe no Ichizoku" predates Rice's Vampire Chronicles), it may be hard to comprehend the impact "Poe no Ichizoku" had on contemporary Japanese readers at the time. So let me use my husband as an example.

My husband caught "Edith" while he was browsing manga magazines at his calligraphy school. He was really haunted by it - it was very obvious that he caught up with the ending of a very complex saga - but he couldn't do anything about it even if he wanted to read more. A few years later he got into an argument with an older female cousin about the merits of shojo manga vs. shonen manga (boys' manga), and she reintroduced "Poe no Ichizoku" to him (it is needless to say who won the argument). He read all four volumes in a single evening, which also added to the reading of this very moody piece - it is best read at dusk, he says. He was blown away.

Now that he got this "blood" from his cousin, he also tried to recruit more people into fandom. He says that people's reactions are typically divided into two camps - those who got similarly haunted by it, and those who just couldn't understand it (regardless of sex or age), because it went beyond the conventional confines of the manga form.

Many "Poe no Ichizoku" fans talk about a similar, very special private moment when they first encountered this work, and for the first time in shojo manga history, it counted many male readers among its avid fans.

Commercially, this work and its success opened the eyes of publishers who traditionally had a narrow idea about what their readers wanted. So shojo manga became a fertile ground for story innovation and my husband says he completely ditched shonen manga in favor of shojo manga. He thinks the impact went beyond the realm of manga. Animation series like Gundam or Evangelion, which both feature very complex narrative and detailed inner worlds, would not have been commercially possible without the success of "Poe".