An Animated Reality

In the two clips we see animated depictions of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The clips, while featuring different animation styles, shed light on a commonplace topic that a viewer who was unfamiliar with the subject could still comprehend. I will be using McCloud’s “Vocabulary of Comics” and Sousanis’s “Unflattening” to describe how the images of both cartoons work to create understanding.

McCloud coins the term “viewer-identification” and states that a central part of audience involvement is the degree to which an audience identifies with a story’s character. He theorized that we experience life in two separate realms, the realm of concept and the realm of sense. We enter the world of 1945 Japan in both clips with the aid of a “sensually-stimulating background,” filled with buildings and landscapes that tend to be slightly more realistic than the characters.

The first clip, “Animation Depicting the Hiroshima Bombing,” shows the atomic bomb attack by using anime, an art style McCloud refers to as “virtually a national style” of Japan. He states in his essay that “by de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts.” (McCloud 41) The conscious choice to use anime by the creator makes it so that we, as Americans, can relate easier to the nation and culture of Japan. It is nearly impossible for us to fully grasp the magnitude of this horrific event that happened in 1945 since many of us were not even born then and because it took place in a country foreign to many of us. However, through the use of anime, we can see the brutal aftermath of this attack. We begin to envision ourselves as one of the Japanese people on the ground witnessing the deadliness of the attack first hand.

The second clip, “Hiroshima A bomb attack,” depicts the same event as the first one but uses less photo-realism and is a more-traditional cartoon compared to the first clip. For example, the Japanese people shown in the clip are drawn with less-detail concerning facial features. Their eyes are simple pencil marks and again the background contains more realism. At the 1:48 mark in the clip, we see a man looking up at the sky at a passing airplane. The man is drawn using heavy shadowing, and facial features such as the pupil and teeth are drawn more clearly. McCloud writes that “while most characters were designed simply, to assist in reader-identification—other characters were drawn more realistically in order to objectify them, emphasizing their “otherness” from the reader.” (44) This pivot in drawing technique is intentionally done to make the reader aware of the object as “something with weight, texture, and physical complexity.” (McCloud 44)

After reading McCloud and Sousanis’ essays, I’ve concluded that both writers argue similar points in their essay. Sousanis believed that there were a boundless amount of possible perspectives and vantage points beyond where we’ve been, or even where we can go. He thought that “imagination lets us exceed our inevitably limited point of view to find perspectives not yet in existence or dimensions not yet accessible.” (88) Within all of us is “the capacity to host a multitude of worlds…frames of reference from which to see the same world differently,” according to Sousanis (96). This is similar to McCloud’s belief that “our identities belong permanently to the conceptual world,” (40) They are merely ideas that cannot be seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted and everything else—at start—belongs to the sensual world, the world outside of us.

However, I would say the two writers differ slightly in how they think pictures are understood in the mind of the viewer. McCloud writes that “when pictures are more abstracted from “reality,” they require greater levels of perception, more like words.” (49) He believed that pictures are received information and that the message is instantaneous while words must be perceived. I believe McCloud would say that the choice to use anime in the first clip allows us to see the Hiroshima events through the eyes of another perspective. 

In the excerpt from the Sousanis essay, he does not make these clear distinctions between pictures and words. Instead, more emphasis is placed on the individual’s perception and their capability to empathize through framing. Sousanis uses the example of a door simultaneously functioning as both a “barrier and a bridge while also serving as an invitation to enter.” (94) Through the use of “doors” we can “travel across space and time to share in another’s viewpoint, touch another’s thought, and make them part of our own stories.” (Sousanis 95) I think that Sousanis would have found the second clip more effective for the American viewer since it used traditional cartoon that is more common in the United States.