Hiroshima: Stepping through Different Thresholds

As I read both McCloud's and Sousanis's comic essays, I came to understand that each author was deeply interested in how we signify pictures with meaning, even when those pictures (or even the meanings themselves,) are abstract, or even complicated. McCloud was concerned with the importance of how we convey stories themselves pictures, and the implications, affordances, and constraints each style of animation or cartooning can bring. Sousanis pursues a related topic, but at the comic essays core it resonates towards a different purpose. Sousanis wished to recognize the "Fifth Dimension," a plane of imagination that allows us to create concepts, imagine worlds, and even invent differing realities through stories, pictures, and other kinds of media. When watching the video videos from the case study, two different Japanese animated depictions of the Hiroshima bombing in 1945, I got to analyze them through these two theorist's vantage points. Sousanis might say that through these two films, we are stepping through two different thresholds that afford us two different vantage points when attempting to immerse ourselves in the experience, (or the story,) of Hiroshima. I believe that McCloud would argue essentially the same, but that perhaps he would specifically attribute the differing of vantage points to feelings as a result of the animation style.

Two different styles forwardly presented themselves in their respective films. In the anime segment, we see hyper-realistic settings with characters with exaggerated, yet simplified facial features that are hallmarks of the genre, including that of the eyes and the mouth. McCloud tells us that these simply drawn characters in their detailed backgrounds create a identification that has made some anime and cartoons wildly successful. "This combination allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world" (McCloud 43). McCloud may argue that this could make the anime version of the event easier to identify with by certain viewers.

By contrast, in the segment from "Hiroshima Remembered", the characters and the setting seem harmonious in style. The faces of the people are more accurate to the facial structure of an average Japanese person. The shaping of the eyes seemed to jump out at me particularly, but I also observed the artistic license the animators took when creating the people themselves, placing them in harmony with serene settings in the first few minutes of the film, that at times looked more like traditional Japanese art than an animation.

 The increased realism in the faces of these characters is also something McCloud might address - perhaps he might mention that the stark realism of their faces and of their fates makes the film more deeply resonating to another set of audiences. The differing of these styles might be considered examples of what Sousanis would refer to as to two different kinds of doors. "Stories, too, are kind of a doorway, openings, vehicles to transport us. As the stories within stories of Scheherazade show, stories sustain us and offer spaces of freedom. They let us reach across time and space to share in another's viewpoint, touch another's thoughts, and make them part of our own stories" (Sousanis 95). Sousanis might argue that these two different styles allow us to view and hence experience the event in two different ways. 

When the characters begin to perish at the time the bomb is detonated, we begin to see how drastically the two films differ. In both of the separate films, brutal scenes of bodies melting, burning, and decaying as a result of the bomb are depicted. However, the styles in which these deaths are portrayed are different in style. In the anime version of the event, the aspect of action takes precedent, as the characters are shown flying about as a result of the explosion, the large exaggerated eyes of the characters begin to grotesquely melt out of their eye sockets, and a shocked young boy looks in terror into the face of the approaching explosion.

Alternatively, the film from "Hiroshima Remembered" depicts things slightly differently. Yes, the characters physically melt, the eyes come from the skulls. But the skulls are drawn with more detail. And as the scene progresses, the realism begins to fade into abstract. Around 6:13, we can tell that the images have drastically changed from meticulously detailed art into vague drawings of suffering humans.

 McCloud might tell us that these two videos in themselves bring together harmonies of perceived and received informations, and that because of this they become deeply powerful: "'Good' comics as those in which the combination of these very different forms of expression is thought to be harmonious" (McCloud 47). Again, from these two depictions, we receive two different ideas and different feelings of and about the event. Sousanis might tell us that these two videos are both inherently invaluable to history, telling us this: "If we have a superpower, it is the capacity to hold a multiplicity of worlds inside us, all of us do. Frames of reference to see the same world differently, to make the familiar strange. In passing through these thresholds, we emerge with the possibility to become something different" (Sousanis 96).