Channels, Fall 2016

Page 146 Parson • Drawing Is Where the Joy Is purpose of the recitation were to elaborate on Sachiko’s character, he would have no reason to include the entirety of the poem. However, Sachiko experiences the poem in full while standing in a uniform group of children in a bare school yard. Even the intrusion of her giant doppelgänger and the interjection of the narrator do not entirely overpower the voice of the vice-principle. In this way, Ishii forces his viewers to encounter the poem as poetry and judge it as a piece of art. The fact that the poem is poorly composed, completely derivative, and tastelessly didactic seems to conflict with its prominent position in the scene, but the tension between its value as good poetry and its implied value to the film leads directly to the point Ishii is making. By treating it as though it has inherent value, Ishii forces the viewer to recognize that the performance, however deficient as art, is valuable as a personal attempt to interpret and organize the vice-principal’s relationship to the world around him. Ishii treats the viewing of Yoshiko’s demo reel with similar respect. The director arranges to minimize the distraction by demanding that the studio be “pitch black” before beginning the video projection. Somebody’s desire for sounds and effects results in Yoshiko’s permission to improvise the sound track, making the babble of engaged and excited voices in the darkened room both an authorized element of the artwork itself and a method of completing the experience and guiding the viewer through the animé demo as a piece of art in its own right. The film’s single-minded attention to art whenever it appears holds true at significant turning points, such as the recording of the Birthday Song (an artistic fiasco to which both the characters and the viewer are subjected at length), the viewing of Yoshiko’s demo, and the opening of Akira’s parting gift of animated flip-books, but also at less significant moments that the Western viewer would perhaps struggle to classify as artistic. When two strangers dressed as a giant cyborg and a gaudily-dressed superhero sidekick interrupt Hajime and Nobuo on their evening commute, Nobuo urges Hajime to politely disregard their presence, but Ishii forces the viewer to stop and focus on the strangers and their peculiar hobby. At the request of a photographer who apparently boarded the train independently, the cosplayers turn on the theme song of the “Meteor Power Force” and begin to pose for pictures. The interaction between the two cosplayers and the photographer (himself an artist) and the use of music to complete the scene legitimizes a chance encounter on a commuter train and transforms it into an ephemeral moment of performance art. Similarly, when Ayano happens upon a street performer practicing next to the lake, Ayano’s focused observation and the contrast between the dancer’s orange body suit and the drab wilderness landscape turn the moment into an acknowledged piece of art. Following this logic, one could discover instances of art or at least scenes that seem filmed as deliberate artistic moments all the way down to the level of casual Go games, meditation sessions, and practice on the horizontal bar. In fact, the structure of Japanese aesthetics and cultural conception of the beautiful makes it difficult to find a clear distinction between the creation and experience of art and situations in which recognition and respect for the beautiful simply combine to create an aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experiences are significant to each character’s private method of coping with the monstrous, but it is still necessary to establish a distinction between art and aesthetics in order to explain the full