Author: MacroKuo
In the 2006 animation "The Melancholy of Haruhi Ryogu", haruhi's iconic self-introduction of Ryogu Haruhi brings the protagonist Ah Xuan and the audience into the lively and wonderful world of sos groups, while also pushing Japanese animation into a new era.
The latest issue, "The Intuition of Haruhi in Lianggong", was announced. Image: Kimirano.
In November 2020, after a 9-and-a-half-year absence, the news that the latest work of the light novel Ryogu Haruhi series, "The Intuition of Ryogu Haruhi", will be released, and the entire Japanese anime circle immediately returned to the carnival state when the theatrical version of "The Disappearance of Ryogu Haruhi" was released 10 years ago: not only did the official collect the response comments of 100 celebrities from all walks of life, but even because of the 9 years and the same period as Prime Minister Abe, the Internet began to circulate the "author is actually Abe" meme. This kind of festive atmosphere that makes people can't help but be amused, so that the cultural symbol "Lianggong Haruhi", which has been born for 17 years, once again proves its vivid vitality.
In fact, the presence of this eccentric girl can never be underestimated: Yasutaka Tsutsui, one of the three families of Japanese science fiction, praised the "Ryogu Kasuga" series as "SF Literature" in 2019, and admitted that he was inspired by it to write light novels. In the 2020 new crown epidemic, the male lead voice actor Tomokazu Sugita danced a video on Youtube calling for everyone to stay at home, which exceeded 2.5 million views in just one day. Within the industry, many revolutionary innovations in the animation "The Melancholy of Haruhi in Ryogu" have also taken root in Contemporary Japanese animation, blossoming into beautiful flowers and bearing the fruitful fruits of Japanese animation today.
Most of the first of the 100 celebrities to be announced were voice actors and production members of the anime. Image: Dengekionline.
Yasutaka Tsutsui wrote an inscription for the original work called excellent humor SF. Image: Kadobun.
The consternation of the spring day in lianggong
The 8th "Sneaker" Awards in 2003, "This light novel is really powerful! "The first in popularity in 2005, 05-08 for 4 consecutive years, the number of first editions of a single light novel was 510,000 copies, the highest record in history, and the third in history with a total circulation of 20 million copies... Such amazing results of the original work made the animation of "The Melancholy of Haruhi in Ryogu" get widespread attention before it was broadcast.
In this atmosphere, the producer Kyoto Animation also chose a very unusual narrative method in order to match the story of Haruhi Ryogu, who has "no interest in ordinary humans": in the first season of 2006, the order of the story was deliberately disturbed. In the name of replay, the second season of 2009 sorted out the order of the first season into a normal order, but without warning suddenly added a new chapter, catching fans off guard. In the new chapter, the "Endless August" chapter is repeated eight times in almost the same narrative... These operations by the producers are all aimed at surprising fans without destroying the atmosphere of the original work.
This series of breakthroughs and innovations in animation content and narrative traditions is exactly in line with that era. With the appearance of Youtube in 2005 and niconico animation in 2006, the more intuitive online video culture began to become the mainstream of secondary consumption. As a result, instead of the traditional consumption mode of communicating with friends after watching animation, writing posts on forums, or creating fandom, "singing", "dancing", "MAD video" and other consumption models that can share the fun and love of the work began to appear. In this trend, in the "Melancholy of Haruhi in Ryogu" ED, the protagonists' personal style of singing and dancing, "Sunny Day Good Mood", soon became a hit: for a time, videos imitating the dance of "Sunny Day Good Mood" appeared on these platforms, and people also began to perform this dance in the form of flash mobs in Akihabara and Comic Show, at various schools, and even on the street. To a certain extent, it is the popularity of "Sunny Day Good Mood" that has helped establish the status of the "Maimi" animation consumption culture today. This kind of culture was followed by the popularity of the WORLD ORDER mechanical dance video led by Sudo Genki in 2009, and it developed until the AKB48 "Fortune Cookie of Love" dance in 13 years and the Japanese national dance boom of Hoshino Gen's "Love" dance in 16 years, which became a social phenomenon. In the new crown epidemic, Sugita Tomokazu's "Sunny Day Good Mood" and Hoshino Gen's "Dancing at Home" have become topics at the same time, and they have also verified this source from one side.
The dance uploaded by the voice actor of the main character during the new crown to call on everyone to stay at home. Image: AKIHABARA JAPAN.
Whether it is the narrative or the fans' enthusiasm, "The Melancholy of Haruhi Ryogu" has left a deep imprint on the Japanese animation industry at that time. From the outside, however, what really deserves "consternation" may be the simple fact that animation with chaotic narratives can be so popular.
The boredom of spring in Lianggong
From the perspective of traditional video storytelling, it is expensive for people who have not seen the original to understand the episodes that disrupt the sequence of the story. However, a fact that cannot be ignored is that with the popularity of online video media that is not limited by the viewing time, the simple conflict and charm of the characters as a focus began to replace the linear logic of traditional narrative. Therefore, the reason why this unfriendly narrative form can still be accepted by so many audiences is in its character settings.
The main character of the work, a member of the SOS group. Image: renote.
The protagonist of the story, "Ah Xuan", not only does not have a real name, but even the nickname is "virtual". He often talks to himself and complains about other characters in the play, which can be said that taking him as a subjective perspective is very suitable for the audience's substitution. The work also inherits the characteristics of the two female characters of Asuka and Ling Boli in Evangelion, and sets up an extroverted and lively proud and beautiful girl (Haruhi Ryogu) and a beautiful girl without melancholy (Nagato Yuki). Although the proud and beautiful girl has both styles, her words and deeds are always unexpected and self-centered, which can be said to be a typical "residual thought" character in light novels.
The mouthless beautiful girl first appeared as a glasses lady, but she stopped wearing them after Ah Xuan said" "I don't cute glasses", and the special arrogant attributes brought by this detail also brought about a contrast. In addition, the work also features a brash bride who is always bullied (Asahina Shijo), introducing comedic elements of natural attributes. This rash lady is a submissive childlike giant tits Lori, even if asked to dress up as a high-exposed maid, bunny girl, nurse is only shyly obedient, completely typical cute characters.
At the same time, she also has a future image - a shrewd and capable royal sister appears from time to time, which also plays an indirect role in arrogance. It can be said that the two-sided personality of these characters also perfectly corresponds to the duality of their respective identities - as sos members, they are also aliens and future people.
Even the supporting characters are full of the types of characters that are often set in Japanese anime: the soft and handsome transfer student who carefully judges the situation, the blunt miss who uses dialects, the student president with excellent grades and helpfulness... It is Ryogu Haruhi who can't stand the "boredom" of ordinary high school life, longs for this kind of world, and unconsciously uses his "god" ability to rewrite environmental information, so that there will be such characters - the work justifies these common settings.
In fact, Lianggong also frequently makes self-performative speeches such as "it is 'cute' ah 'cute', that is, a so-called cute attribute", which coincides with the audience psychology of the character attributes of Meng, knocks down the "fourth wall" between the work and reality, and finally implants these character attributes into the audience's heart with this meta-fiction technique. This resonant relationship between the audience and the Haruhi Ryogu in the audiovisual scene provides a solid foundation for the work, and ultimately makes it possible for a unique performance that disrupts the order without undermining the integrity of the work.
At the same time, the work also fictionalizes an avant-garde worldview of the project "animation, publications, and peripherals are also created by characters or groups in fictional stories such as "Super Supervisor/Leader Haruhi Ryomiya, SOS Troupe" into multimedia products such as STAFF tables, publications, and peripherals. Thus, the anti-experimental story setting of "Ryogu Haruhi's Unconscious (Wish)" instead justifies these experimental elements that break with tradition — because these are all intentions of Ryogu.
This creative technique of connecting the protagonist's "boring" emotions with the audience's emotions, so as to obtain a sense of substitution and centripetal force, is also similar to the 10-year "My Sister Who Is So Cute!" ", 11 years of "My Friends Are Few", 13 years of "My Youth Love Story" is indeed problematic. " and other subsequent works have been continued. It can be said that it is the success of "The Melancholy of Haruhi in Ryogu" that makes these animations further try to connect the protagonist's emotions with the "boring" emotions of the animation audience through the "post-setting" technique symbolized by their respective titles, and resonate.
The indignation of Haruhi Ryogu
In addition to the clever post-setting technique of attracting the audience's psychology, the treatment of the performance scene in "The Melancholy of Haruhi in Lianggong" also brings vitality to the characters from the image performance.
At the Gakuen Festival, Haruhi Ryogu and Yuki Nagato performed a song called "God Knows..." for the band members. In the performance clips of the song, the granularity of the characters' expressions and actions is much higher than that of other parts of the animation, which perfectly reflects the "indignation" of Haruhi Ryogu in the song, and also pushes the audience's emotions to a climax. As one of the few classic scenes in the history of Japanese animation, this clip on Youtube has been played more than 100 million times, and there are even hundreds of messages from fans around the world every day.
The video has been played 104 million times and has 220,000 comments by its deadline. Image: Youtube.
The reason why this video can bring chemistry to the audience's senses lies in the painting skills. Different from the hand-drawn storyboard of other shots, in order to achieve this clip, the producer actually filmed the live-action band playing and Ryogu Haruhi voice actress Aya Hirano singing, and then through rotoscope( technique, the expressions and muscle movements of the characters in the video were reflected in the actions of the animated characters. As a result, details such as the musician's performance of each note of the instrument and the voice actor's vocalization of each word are integrated into the animated characters, making them come alive. The length of the shot, which usually requires 8 animators, is actually depicted by more than 20 people participating in the performance. This is probably the first time that Japanese late-night animation has adopted such a laborious and time-consuming approach.
Shunji Iwai produced the anime "The Killing of Flowers and Alice" entirely through rotoscoping techniques. Image: cinra.
Perhaps because of the success of this "God Knows...", after 2010, Japanese animation began to actively use rotoscoping techniques to depict the delicate expressions of characters. For example, in the 12-year-old Evangelion Theater Edition: Q, the piano performance is depicted using rotoscoping techniques, showing Nagisa Kaoru's delicate emotions towards Makoto Tsurugi. And "Evil Hua" in 13 years, "Flowers and Alice Killings" in 15 years, and "Music" in 20 years boldly adopted the rotoscoping technique of the whole article. Among them, "Music" took 8 years to complete the production.
A scene from a copy of a live-action image in "Listening sideways". Image: Listening in the Ear.
Similar to rotoscoping, there is a longer tradition of music scenes in Japanese animation, that is, the method of copying and depicting with live-action images. For example, the "Can Ever Remember Love" clip sung by Lin Mingmei in "Timeless Fortress" in 1984 and the "Concrete Road" clip of "Side Ear Listening" in 1995 are good examples. After Kyoto Animation's success in God Knows..., it continued to revive this technique in works such as "Light Girl" in 2009, "Blowing Bar On the Bass Horn" in 15 years, and "Yuri on Ice" in 16 years, and was also used by other companies in works such as "Apollo on Sakamichi" in 2012. It can be said that "The Melancholy of Haruhi Ryogu" not only established Kyoto Animation's status today through these expressions, but also established a milestone in the successful use of the "rotoscoping" technique in late-night animation.
The sigh of spring in Lianggong
If the innovation in character attribute setting and expression techniques has laid the foundation for the popularity and status of "The Melancholy of Haruhi in Ryogu", the handling of the plot performance of "Endless August" is one of the few controversial places in this work.
In the second season of the anime in 2009, there is a plot in which Haruhi Ryogu always feels that there are still shortcomings in the summer vacation SOS group activities. As a result, this mood made her superpower unconsciously play, allowing more than 15,000 performances in the last two weeks of August. The anime, on the other hand, uses eight episodes to play the event over and over again with almost identical plots, compositions, and lines.
The reason why I say "almost" is because the same picture and sound are not used every time in the animation, but different production crews have made 8 versions at the same time without affecting each other, and there will be some subtle differences between each version. In other words, this method shows the "8 different performance effects" that can occur when the same production company produces the same animation chapter. This is unprecedented in the history of Japanese animation, and no one has dared to imitate it again.
"Endless August" occupies more than half of the 14-episode new plot of the second season, completely breaking the original story that fans expected the work to reproduce, and making their expectations disappointed. What's more serious, however, is that fans, who have no idea when the plot reversal will end, have watched almost the same story for 2 months, but have also suffered from mental suffering in this eternal hell. This plot is so controversial that even many people "sigh" and say: "Without "Endless August", the influence and achievements of "The Melancholy of Haruhi in Ryogu" in the Japanese animation industry would be even greater. ”
Evangelion was filmed for nearly 1 minute. Image: Evangelion.
However, unlike the well-known event in the history of Japanese animation in "Evangelion", which used more than 50 seconds of silent static screens because of labor problems, this repeated performance was actually deliberately set up by the producers. However, the performance brought about by the "accident" of the former animation production happened to be at the same time as the 1995 earthquake and the Sarin gas incident, which was interpreted by critics as a criticism of social events, and finally brought popularity to "New World Evangelion", while the intentional "Endless August" caused controversy because of its overly advanced concept.
The melancholy of spring in Lianggong
In fact, when we put "Endless August" in the entire story of "The Melancholy of Spring in Lianggong", we can find that the effect of this repeated plot gives the audience a sense of substitution. And this performance itself has left an important symbolic meaning and influence on the entire Japanese animation environment.
Haruhi Ryogu generates "melancholy" from the mood of "always feeling what the shortcomings of summer vacation" and creates this world of constant repetition. Nagato Yuki, who is the body of alien intelligence integration, is the only one who retains all the recurring memories. In this sense, through repeated performances such as "Endless August", the audience's point of view is unified with Nagato's point of view.
It was the 15,000 repetitive two-week memories that overloaded Nagato with the bust that caused her to make a bug and become a foreshadowing for the subsequent "disappearing" plot. The work first resonates with the audience with her load through Nagato's point of view--by watching the "hell" of the repetitive plot, and experiencing the weight of Nagato's accumulated memories. And this strong load and pressure is also the result of the "melancholy" emotions of "dissatisfaction" of Haruhi Ryogu acting on the world. It can be said that the expression method of "melancholy" described here with "repeated" is similar to the logic of using attribute characters to substitute for the audience's emotions.
Obviously, Ryogu Haruhi's displeasure of melancholy actually stems from her pursuit of "non-everyday" aliens, future people, super-powered people, etc., and the "everyday" of this summer vacation that "seems to have happened nothing". For the audience, this set of opposites can be replaced by the opposition between the "non-everyday" and the real "everyday" in the animation. As a result, the emotions of the audience who were forced to stay in the "daily" due to the "repeated performance" of the animation that could not continue to watch the "non-daily" of the animation resonated with the melancholy of Haruhi Ryogu, further shortening the distance between the audience and the world of the work, and finally appeared in a controversial way. In other words, the controversy of "Endless August" just shows the success of this plot.
The opposition between "everyday" and "non-everyday" here is also a symbol of the Japanese animation environment. On the one hand, the age of the characters in longevity works such as "Detective Conan", "Robot Cat", and "Cherry Pills" does not increase with the broadcast, as if there are subtle changes in the daily recurrence of "Endless August", and each episode starts from the same setting to tell the audience a similar story, rarely continuing or growing.
On the other hand, works such as Evangelion, Space Battleship Yamato, and Dragon Ball depict aliens, future people, and super-powered people make the audience buried in a non-daily life that is completely contextualized. Therefore, the opposition between "everyday" and "non-everyday" behind the melancholy of Haruhi Ryogu is also raising the question of how Japanese animation can find a balance between daily and non-daily, empower daily life with non-daily, and finally get out of the daily cycle and achieve growth.
The disappearance of the spring day in The Cool Palace
For this balance of "everyday" and "non-everyday" in the anime, "The Melancholy of Haruhi Ryogu" gives her answer through the climax of the story, the plot of the theatrical version of "The Disappearance of Haruhi Ryogu".
Cover of "The Disappearance of Haruhi in Ryogu". Image: The Disappearance of Haruhi Ryogu DVD
The story ends the dissatisfaction of Haruhi in Lianggong as Ah Xuan and others end, and finally breaks away from the cycle of August. However, the memory of Endless August brought bugs to Nagato's load, which eventually caused her to change the world of the work - all the members of the SOS troupe became ordinary people, Ryomiya Haruhi also lost the ability to transform the world, and only Ah Xuan left the memory of the change before the change - the unusual "Ryogu Haruhi" "disappeared" in this way.
For the audience who watch the work through the perspective of Ah Xuan, it is like returning to daily life from the "non-everyday" world of animation, but only they retain the memory of animation in daily life. How will the audience act? Nature is back to the world of animation again, and this is also the choice of Ah Xuan. In the end, Ah Hui corrects the bug with the help of the future Asahina Shikuya and returns to the original world.
At this time, the appearance of the story of "Ryogu Haruhi", which depicts the "world view reform", as the ultimate "world system", is revealed. "World Series", a type of story that has sprung up in the Japanese animation industry since the advent of Evangelion, depicts the direct connection between small relational problems between individuals (everyday) and abstract big problems (non-everyday) such as the crisis or demise of the world. "The Final Weapon" depicting the world war and "The Sound of stars" in the endless interstellar space belong to this category of stories.
Unlike these works, which simply depict the demise or crisis of the world, "Disappearing" does not directly describe the "crisis" of these worlds, but changes the world by introducing "non-everyday" factors (Haruhi Ryogu and Yuki Nagato) into the everyday world that "can change the world". The "crisis" here is not the non-everyday situation depicted in such works that is opposed to the everyday, but the choice and change in the state of daily and non-daily coincidence.
It can be said that after "The Disappearance of Haruhi Ryogu", there are more and more similar stories in the genre of world animation that change the world by connecting "everyday" and "non-everyday". Such stories often change the world through "time travel", "religious or spiritual world", "virtual reality" and other means to achieve the unity of "everyday" and "non-everyday" in the protagonist's world. In recent years, the more influential "Magical Girl Little Circle" and "Your Name." "Weather Child", "Monster Child", "Destiny Stone Gate", "HELLO WORLD" and so on belong to this category. The "non-everyday" and "everyday" deviations in the animation world have also been balanced in the emergence of these works that depict the unity of the opposites of "everyday" and "non-everyday".
The latest work of this genre, HELLO WORLD. Photo: HELLO WORLD
In November 2020, when the latest issue "Ryogu Haruhi Intuitive" pre-sold, Oshii Mori's classic animated film "Fukusei Boy Beautiful Dreamers" directed by Oshii Mori in 1984 will also return to the screen as a live-action movie. Also through the repeated plot to describe the choice between "everyday" and "non-everyday", the return of this work to the same period as "Ryogu Kasuga" is probably not a coincidence. And this image, inherited and created by "Endless August" and "The Disappearance of Haruhi in Lianggong", will continue to develop in subsequent works.
The live-action version of Oshii's "Fukusei Boy Beautiful Dreamers" is about to be released. Image: The official website of the work.
The intuition of the spring day in Lianggong
The substitution technique of post-set character perspectives, the sense of presence brought about by the use of live-action image rotoscoping, the discussion and choice of the relationship between "everyday" and "non-everyday"... The name "Haruhi Ryogu" may gradually be forgotten with the emergence of subsequent works, but the "not ordinary" gene planted by this girl to the industry will indelibly promote the continued development of Japanese animation. Whether "The Intuition of Haruhi in Ryogu" will inherit the impact of animation and bring changes to this era, we do not know.