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Keywords
Cyberpunk
Dungeon
Anti-Utopian Architecture
Giant Sublime
Narrative aesthetics of anime footage

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On this page, I want to explore how the language of anime narrative is used in contemporary artworks.  How visual aesthetics such as cityscapes, ruined landscapes, giant objects, multimedia complexes and cyborgs are in turn absorbed and utilised in contemporary paintings.

Mamoru Ojin's Ghost In The Shell is a masterpiece of cyberpunk animation. The audience must be impressed with the view Kusanagi sees from her boat in Minato City - an aqueduct running through the city as a canal on the edge of a highly developed future city. Buildings from an earlier era are intermingled with giant silver screens, where citizens who remain in the flesh are exiled.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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         Ghost In The Shell

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This is a world in which human civilisation is in decline, a place of illegitimacy. Post-90s must be familiar with such scenes, as in Akira, where motorbikes speed past the edge of the city. Life is devoided except for the unusually high central base in the heart of the city.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Akira

 

If the early science fiction films of the last century were still curious about the social of alien civilisations in the centre of the earth and outer space, it was from the 1960s onwards， that only the urban landscape in the future can bring a different sense of excitement to the audience. The setting of the city is crucial in animated films. To begin with,  the concept of the city has been abstracted into structural-functional areas such as residential areas, ecological areas and so on, where function and landscape are separated from each other. Secondly, the area available for a normal life is narrow and is unified into the blueprint of a whole country. The city is abstracted into a machine, of which the citizens, in order to be citizens, must also be a part.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​Metropolis

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In Deca-dense， people are trapped by aliens in a virtual fortress castle,  which is a fighting weapon to protect the people. In Attack on Titan, the wall is the barrier that separates the naturally savage world from civilisation. The city is naturally nested within the wall in layers; the most marginal urban areas being inhabited by inferior citizens. As can be seen, the futural codes of urban construction are utilitarian, pragmatic, contractual and resource-efficient.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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But in these fiction stories, the protagonists often appear below ground, on the margins, in the midst of chaos. The audience will be led by a mysterious leader, following the camera through shadowy passages to new worlds/meeting bizarre groups of people. The underground becomes the perfect place to breed the possibility of disrupting the order of the city as if it is the bugs in the game system that brings the possibility of renewal. In Reading Group session, the Savage Messiah is a contemporary representation of the underground culture, the rebellion, and the punk spirit. The author uses drifting, a new way of exploring the city, as an entry point to show shelving and scepticism of homogenisation, objectification and commodification under neoliberalism. In fact, it is obvious that those futuristic cityscapes are a highly concentrated microcosm of the modern city. The buildings in the animated film are mostly nested structures, based on contemporary patterns of community and architecture. Densely packed neighbourhoods and high-rise buildings, man-made natural landscapes, the development and use of underground space resources, and the stable structure of spider webs of zoning are the landscape of urban systems that we take for granted.

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To be continued......

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Books and other resources

Akira Ikezoe. (2020). , from Akira Ikezoe: http://akiraikezoe.com/

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