Hiroshima: Different Lenses

Because of their chosen style in getting their messages across, it seems clear that both Scott McCloud and Nick Sousanis understood that visual media is powerful, but when looking at the Hiroshima clips assigned to us, it may be safe to say that the two would have come to different conclusions about how the clips impact viewers.

McCloud would have focused on how we interact with the two Hiroshima clips by extending our identities into the videos, or the characters in the videos. Based on his ideas about comic styles in “The Vocabulary of Comics,” it’s likely that he would have decided the differences in the clips would begin in the style of the animation. In his work, he speaks at length about effects how well the audience makes a connection with the animation. He asserts that people seek to “mask” themselves in a character, and this is more easily done when a character is drawn in a more simple -- “iconic” or “conceptual” – way. He says further that people don’t feel the urge to identify with the inanimate objects in the background of a comic, and so artists may take care to add as many details to the scenery and to the objects in a scene as they like. The result of these ideas is that there have been numerous successful cartoons drawn with simplistically drawn characters going on adventures in striking, realistically drawn settings.

McCloud would comment as well on the fact that the clips are Japanese animations, as he dedicates a section in his writing to the way Japanese cartoonists have particularly honed this method of juxtaposing simple and complex artistry in their comics and animations. McCloud would have theorized that if the animations are meaningful to the audience, it is likely due to the way the characters are drawn against a backdrop of a very detailed explosion. He might further argue that if one clip is more meaningful than the other, then perhaps it is due to the more meaningful clip being drawn with more simplistic, iconic characters than the other, making it easier for the audience to identify with – to mask themselves within -- the characters as they die. I think that the second clip, from “Hiroshima Remembered,” was a bit more striking, and it is true that it has more simplistically drawn characters, giving it the feel that its character could be anyone you might know or see yourself, going through the mundane motions of life. McCloud also explained that in Japanese comics, something might be drawn more realistically to give it a particular weightiness. In both clips, I feel this is exhibited in the way the characters deteriorate, or melt, in the midst of the bombing. Those scenes are extremely graphic and as a result, can have a very striking effect on a viewer.

Based on Sousanis’s musings in his Unflattening, the meaning derived from both clips would have to do with the thoughts provoked by the images and where those thoughts take a viewer while and after watching. Sousanis is concerned chiefly with imagination and the things that borne out of imagination from our experiences and the others we come into contact with. Sousanis might be more focused on how viewers are getting a view –a vantage point -- of Hiroshima’s bombing that isn’t our own -- how the representations given by the videos are perspectives, no matter how realistic, are still provocative. They give us piece of the picture of the bombing and we can use our imagination to fill in the blanks of the tragedy that are left after seeing the images in the clips. Sousanis might argue that the key difference in the meanings drawn from the clips would be in the fact that the two clips are two different perspectives of two different people – or however many people went into the creation of the two clips. (However, I don’t believe that he would argue that variation in meanings-derived is a bad thing though.)

           McCloud and Sousanis obviously put a lot of stock in visual representation. McCloud in his “Vocabulary of Comics,” is really pushing for a system that encompasses and structures all visual representations. He might’ve tried very hard to classify where or his scale of iconic to realistic the two Hiroshima clips fell and judged their meaningfulness accordingly. Sousanis doesn’t seem to be pushing toward that all. He actually seems to critique that way of thinking altogether. He explains on page 110 that the danger of trying to write ideas in stone is that we start “following without reflection,” until we’re all, “rendered inanimate.”