The Aesthetics of Japanese Cinema

During this semester, we had watched three Japanese films made by different prominent directors, Yojimbo (1961) that directed by Akira Kurosawa, Spirited Away (2001), an Anime film written by Hayao Miyazaki, and Hana-bi (1997), a painstaking artwork of Takeshi Kitano, where three of them, could all be said as a renowned filmmaker in the Japanese film industry. Kurosawa was expert in telling stories by camera movement (Every Frame a Painting, 2015), Miyazaki has created detailed settings of his imaginative world, and Kitano who is well integrated arts in his films. Especially in the contemporary Cinema of Japan, Miyazaki got a global reputation through making animation films, as well as Kitano, a post-modernist that shown the reality of the world by making films (Taylor-Jones, 2013).

The aesthetics in Japanese Cinema could even be told by their movie titles, that some of them contain hidden meanings. For Spirited Away, the title in Japanese was “Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi)”(The Spiriting Away of Sen and Chihiro), where the spirited away of ‘Chihiro’ means the protagonist’s name was being taken by Yubaba (the bathhouse witch) in order to get a job in the bathhouse; for the spirited away of ‘Sen’, some believes that it is a representation of Chihiro had already forgotten her adventure once passed through the tunnel; and the word ‘Kamikakushi‘, means ‘hid by spirits/gods’ in Japanese. As well as, the title of Kitano’s Hana-bi was also a double entendre, that Hana, ‘flower’ could be a metaphor for life, and Bi, ‘fire’ for Death in Japan (Taylor-Jones, 2013).

In Spirited Away, the elaborate movie settings had shown how aesthetic the director Miyazaki was, that buildings in the film could evoke Japanese audience’s sense of nostalgia. For instance, the bathhouse was a common community space for older Japanese that could remind them their childhood, that they were used to build their friendship there while washing in public area, at the same time, its design also contains Chinese and Western architecture elements that make it looks novelty (Osmond, 2008). Likewise, the appearance of the empty town had used the modern Tokyo as a reference, that could let Japanese viewers having the sense of familiarity, but also feels strange at the same time, since it had been defamiliarized by decorating with figurative signs and characters like stars, that giving both moods of nostalgia and mystical to spectators.

The fantasy, but empty town,  Cr. Spirited Away

On the other hand, in Hana-bi, the unique artistic sense of the director Kitano could be seen in two ways: how he presented violence scenes, and how he applied paintings in the film. Different from Hollywood, Kitano tended to demonstrate killing and bloody scenes in a direct and brutal style. There was a scene that is shown how a chopstick had been stabbed in one’s eye, and several killing scenes had been displayed straightforwardly, which intended to make audiences feel how pain those characters was, together with fulfilling their desire of being visually stimulated, being entertained in this slow-paced and sentimental film. About the paintings in film, Kitano had employed it to present character’s emotion, mindset, and to represent splatter-gore scenes, that had left space for audiences to figure out and interpret the meaning behind them (Redmond, 2012). Where according to my understanding, the painting below could mean human creatures and flowers shared the similarity that, most flowers contain meanings that created by us human, while sometimes we would use those meanings to describe one’s personality.

A kimono-wearing woman with the head of Lilly, cr. Hana-bi

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References

Every Frame a Painting. (2015, March 19).  Akira Kurosawa – Composing Movement (video essay). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doaQC-S8de8

Kitano, T. (Director, Screenwriter and Editor). (1997). Hana-bi [Film]. Japan: Nippon Herald Films.

Miyazaki, H. (Director & Screenwriter). (2001). Spirited Away [Film]. Japan: Toho.

Osmond, A. (2008). Spirited away (BFI film classics). London, England: British Film Institute.

Redmond, S. (2012). The cinema of Takeshi Kitano: Flowering blood (pp. 39-42). Columbia University Press.

Taylor-Jones, K. E. (2013). Rising sun, Divided Land: Japanese and South Korean Filmmakers (pp. 174-214). Columbia University Press.

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