animation is different from movies, you only need to place the camera in front of the subject to instantly image. Every stroke in the animation works requires the creator to create it from scratch. Therefore, the time cost of general animation creation is much higher than that of movies. The consumption of time cost is often recovered through secondary profit from peripheral products produced by character modeling. Therefore, under the trend that character modeling is valued, Xin Haicheng, as a creator who specializes in landscapes, can be regarded as one of the few and unusual. However, Xin Haicheng did the opposite, and conquered many audiences with a very realistic, meticulous and aesthetic style. The rain of cherry blossoms scattered in "Five Centimeters Per Second", the quietly snow-covered city. In "The Garden of Words", the freshness of rain hitting the leaves on the pool surface, the white clouds floating after the rain and sunny days, etc. are the best wallpapers.
But on the other hand, Xin Haicheng’s characters are often pointed out that people feel lack of movement and vitality, sometimes even just a few strokes are like symbols. Indeed, looking at all the past works of Xinhaicheng, there are almost no descriptions of the faces of the characters. This may be to avoid what I am not good at, but for animation, how to express the character's face is actually not an easy task. Like Dreyer's "The Dilemma of Joan of Arc", only the close-up of Joan of Arc is used to show all movies, which is impossible in animation. Because no matter how dexterous the hand is, it cannot outline the rich changes in human facial expressions. Instead, Xin Haicheng placed the characters in a large number of mid- to long-range landscape shots. However, Xin Haicheng's landscape is not only the environmental background of the characters, or the symbols that reflect the change of seasons and the passage of time. But it is also connected to the inner world of the characters, which produces emotions, which directly affect the narrative level. For example, in the first part of "Five Centimeters Per Second", when the train is closed and separated, the hero and the heroine fly away from the branches with birds—empty chairs in the snow—flashing traffic lights and other empty shots to express the melancholy of parting. sense.
But if it is said that Xin Haicheng completely relies on changes in the scenery to express the emotions of the characters, and it is by no means true that he ignores the expressions of the characters. Precisely in "Your Name", the perfect fusion between characters and scenery is achieved in a deconstructive way. Mitsuba is witnessing the fall of the comet. The camera first rotates from the back to the front at a low angle of 180 degrees, then switches to Mitsuba's body, gradually approaching the face, and finally becoming a close-up of the pupil. Through Sanye's pupils, we saw the landscape reflected in it, that is, two shining comets cut through the night sky, falling and separating one after another. Until the pupil and the scenery in the pupil gradually covered the whole picture. From the beginning to the end, Mitsuba's expression and body did not change in any way, but the movement of the camera and the passing of the scenery in the pupils used a static braking method to express the shock of Mitsuba witnessing the end of the world. At the same time, the binary opposition between the characters and the landscape in the previous works has been completely eliminated. Under the close-up of the pupils, we can no longer tell whether it is a face or a landscape. While the landscape has become the face, the face has also become a part of the landscape. What we see is a whole as a landscape and a character. This is difficult to achieve in ordinary movies. It is unique to animation, and it is also a way of expression that has not been seen in the previous works of Xin Haicheng.
The film can be completed in just two years, largely due to the strong production team behind the post-Xin Haicheng. Including Masaji Ando who has participated in the production of Hayao Miyazaki and Imatoshi. Tanaka, who is good at character design, and the designers of Toho Studio, etc. It is under such a combined force that the narrative structure and the landscape treatment of characters have achieved innovations that have never been seen in previous works. After Miyazaki Ghibli, we seem to see the arrival of another "new" dream world.
