- The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
- A Dream within a Dream, Edgar Allen Poe
You know, Goethe once described Shakespeare (to Eckermann) as a wildly overgrown tree that — for two hundred years straight — had stifled the growth of all English literature; thirty years later, Börne called Goethe: 'A monstrous cancer spreading through the body of German literature.'
- The Letter Killers Club, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
He is the Magician of Germany. They know all his dreams there. “Schoolboys learn his love affairs as well as Jove” (so claimed Mann). We talk of Goethe, the scientist, occultist, poet and writer extraordinaire. Every language has its saint: Shakespeare for English, Pushkin for Russian, Dante for Italian… most are poets who have played with the language to the extent that they have revived it and enriched it with new flavor. These are the men who impress upon the vocabulary new words, new ways of thinking and new ways of speech.
The German culture itself is one entrenched in high magic. They have the tales of Grimm, the beliefs of Walpurgisnacht and the legends of the Black Forest. Who else but Germany’s highest poet would pay greatest homage to this tradition of magic in his major work Faust? Neither Macbeth nor A Midsummer’s Night Dream can compare with the host of spirits, devils, witches and other phenomena that enter into the story, that hang from the cloisters and chant and sing; it is the most magical of all plays… and so we cross our hearts endlessly and pray to the Literary Saints that Akiyuki Shinbo and company will be interested enough to actually adapt the whole two parts of Faust into animation.
If the swift moment I entreat:
Tarry a while! You are so fair!
Then forge the shackles to my feet,
Then I will gladly perish there!
So makes Faust the deal with Mephistopheles: that if he ever has a moment where he wishes to linger for a second more he has found his fulfillment and his soul will be dragged into the inferno. It takes him several decades before this moment is actually reached; if I were in his shoes I would have fallen in an instance. “More Magic! More Lights! More Spectacle!” I would have cried to Mephistopheles to convince Shaft to throw in just a few more frames into the whole 3rd movie merely for the sake of being able to gaze more at that ephemeral symphony. The general consensus of Hollywood movies is that Greater Budget = More Shareholders = More Executive Interference = Shittier Art (e.g. Blockbuster Movies. David Foster Wallace did a comparison to the downfall of the great neo-noir cyberpunk work Terminator 1 to the special effects bombardment that was T2); sometimes Capitalism works in our favor and pushes the artist to the peak.
The narrative itself has already been talked endlessly and quite frankly some people have brought up more interesting views than anything I could muster, on how the Last movie realigns the whole metaphysics of the work from a Christian view to a more Buddhist/Taoist perspective. How the Monism of the world is transformed into a Dualism and, each side being equally ambiguous, turns into a sort of Yin and Yang order rather than a straightforward good versus evil. In other words it is NOT the Paradise Lost of Anime which is whole and whole clearly a Christian viewpoint. But all these things can be Google searched and anyway it isn’t the point.
It is impossible, in fact, to really touch upon the whole work simply because it is a ‘Saint’s’ Work, the type of work whose formal properties, though a combination of old styles, the end effect is so Sui Generis that it brings new light to the possibilities of the medium. Who knew that Russian and Czechslovakian stop-motion techniques would blend so well with Japanese Traditional Style Drawn animation? Likewise, with the End of Evangelion, who knew that Artaud’s philosophy of the Theater of Cruelty could manifest itself in the realm of animation? These are works that, once it appears, have such a considerable impact on the image-consciousness of the people that their whole entire visual framework is transformed; they can see new ways of drawing and doing things, new ways of saying, new ways of art. Sadly Studio Shaft is no Poet Saint with the written word but the narrative suits the art well enough to not be jarring on the screen.
If I were to comment on my definitive favorite moment then it would be the Bus Scene. A mostly silent moment entrenched in the pureness of the art. If I were to narrow it more and comment on my definitive favorite frame in the work it would be that moment when the phantom bus stops in the middle of a vast redness of Expressionist sky, with faint turbines in the distance and a host of birds crisscrossing the view. Such pure art symphonies are as transient as they came; the image lingers for a brief moment then vanishes. We wish for greatness and ambition. We want our 10+ hour long fully adapted animated Der Ring Des Nibelungen with original Orchestra and completely original avant-garde beautiful aesthetically magnificent art. This is the type of work that makes us so excited for the medium that we would not want less.
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Since this film has now become exclusively my most favorite animated work of art I feel that my old review of it doesn't cover enough ground to encapsulate all I feel about the work. If I had the time I would even be willing to do a thorough frame by frame analysis of the entire work, which shots work, which shots are particularly weak, how certain scenes cohesively tie together and relate to other scenes. Since I can't do that I'll only be going through a few pointers that I need to talk about.
In the end I can say though that the plot, narrative story elements, and characters are not priority to the work itself. What is important is the shadow behind the story and the artistic and expressionistic composition of the whole cinematic experience. Madoka 3 is firmly and truly the work of dreams. It is condensed, purified dream material and is a testament to the ability of animation to depict our dreams. It works better than the vast amount of 'oneirists' out there from David Lynch to Nicholas Winding Refn to Linklater's Waking Life. Mere coming into contact with the work has opened up my visual library to the extent that I now extensively 'free-dream' with such vivacity and color that dreaming itself has become intertwined with, and has become an extension of, my waking reality. What Madoka 3 really shows is that every imaginative tangent is possible. The movie shifts from beauteous normal city-scapes to gothic cathedrals and architecture to scrapbooks strings of stop-motion puppetry and carnival to magic dusty fairy-tale roads. The story of Madoka 3 is the story of an imagination rather than an actual story in itself.
What then does this imagination consist of? At its core it is influenced by the fairy-tale princess idealist world of magical girls mixed with the true gothic dark reality of medieval witchcraft as devilish in the Faustian sense. The key antimonies are derived from there, ballet and patchwork dolls, candy and pentagrams; a girlish tea party is disrupted by a descent into a gigantic graveyard and cathedral ruin. Besides this the imagination of Madoka 3 is also fighting against the Japanese over-urban reality. Much of Shinbo's other work has an over-proliferation of modern urban symbols - lamp-posts, classrooms, cars, construction, wires, mixed with ultra-minimalist clean white functionalist buildings. The key scene of the whole movie, the bus scene, is an argument between a city and a desert. The outskirts of Mitakihara city has a bus-station, a strange metallic construction, modern air-turbines, and a long empty road with floating wispy street-lights amidst a startling emptiness. There's a sense of urban decay and alienation behind many of his works (Though not over-extended to the sense of Anno's great spaces) . When the whole movie goes straight into hell the entire city is engulfed in a strange carnival of fire and disfigurement. It seems as though the movie is fighting a grand urban horror-vacui by jumping back into a world of over-ornamentation and romantic fairy-tale ideal. This makes the work extremely post-modern and opens up vast dimensions to engage with it.
A timeline of the images and symbols can be created in order to understand the visual-story behind the told narrative
Ballet - Cake House - Everyday School Life - Patchwork - Cake Song - Flower Garden - Degraded Reality (blurry faces and otherworldly elements) - Bus Ride - Desert - Lonely Road - Industrial Bridge - Tea Party - Dark City - Gothic Cathedral (the fight scene) - Mechanized Alleyway (talking to Sayaka) - 'Tunnel of Love' Boat - Dark Flower Garden - Hellscape City - Dark Princess Chamber - Mental Degradation (Witch turning scene) - Executioner's Guillotine - Fantasy Battle - Romantic Gaudy Art Nouveau Victory - Desert and Ruins - Stairway to Heaven - Fragmentation and Emptiness - Degraded Reality - Poison River (Green and Purple) - School After Hours - Dark Garden (after credits)
The images can be arranged in 3 general spheres: Urban, Medieval Gothic, and Romantic. And even within the images certain oppositions exist though one always seems to gain prominence. The opening ballet scene for example has a prominent romantic vision while also depicting the destruction of buildings through bombs (harkening to the real urban fear of terrorism). Likewise the Dark City is actually a mix of Film Noir, Urban and Medieval Gothic when it transitions to the Cathedral fight scene. The Bus Ride sequence is a mix of Urban and Medieval Gothic. The music played is that of a broken down carnival tune while the bus itself is not a standard urban bus but an 'augmented' carnival bus. The floating lamp-posts also become will-o-wisps.
Another great moment is the Cake Song because its the moment when it becomes extremely ambiguous which ruling principle the movie sides with. The cake song has the appearance of whimsical colorful romantic magical girl action but its also contaminated with various off-putting elements. The pentagram and the dark lyrics are combined with shots of the characters in 'darkened' frames performing mysterious childish hand actions. It really pays homage to the idea of a Faustian spirit-summoning scene and gives the whole moment a 'devilish' edge. It is at that moment when you feel the characters are involved in real Witchcraft.
The visual flow of the film as a whole seem to side with a downfall of the romantic Magical Girl genre with the rise of Urbanity and Darkness. All trace of the flowery world of pink and white is brought down in place of purple and green, the colors of poison. It is this way that the movie becomes more than a trite 'Dark Retelling' but becomes a full-fledged Nightmare. It is not just that the visuals complement the plot but that the visuals create a world of their own and become 'higher' than the plot. Imagine the whole movie with all of the exposition edited out and only glimpsed at; it would still tell a story of its own through the scenes. This ability to have the narrative split itself from the movie without losing much is what makes it a brilliant movie.
The defining factor of animation is its ability to be generous to the dreamer, as I have mentioned in my 5 cm Per Second review. I firmly believe this. There is a story by Kawabata called 'Snow' about a weary businessman who sets aside New Year's Day for a special moment of dreaming. He reserves a hotel room for the whole day and keeps his location a secret from his family. There he lies down on the bed and spends the whole day dreaming of Snowy mountains and magnificent scenery. There is also a moment in the movie Waking Life when a character comes up with a theory that when we fall unconscious before we die we have around 6 minutes of pure brain activity. Within this 6 minutes it becomes possible, due to the warped time of dreams, to live another life again. If you extend that logic then it would be possible to, upon death in a dream, life another entire life in the dream of a dream, and this would occur infinitely.
