Anime isn’t Deep. You Are
Following from: “Anime isn’t deep, it’s just entertainment”: Themes and symbolism in Darker than Black, and Anime is more than “just” entertainment.
I figure I ought to blog my replies to a blogger sometime. That’s what bloggers do, right? The great thing about Tim O’Reilly’s platformic web (TM, me) is that I can claim my own trademarks on derived buzzwords, and even spout off a thing or two about my anime knowledge! But I’m not going to do either, today.
What I’m going to do is beg the question of deepness. The answer is drugs. What were we just talking about?
From a young age, we’re all taught not only to pick out the subtle nuances of a work of fiction, but also to believe that the creators were veritable genius for sticking all those layers in there, like an ogre. (The term used is “analysis”, as if the process somehow resembles science — or its results carry authority.) Sometimes there’s a good chance that belief is right on the money, but it’s irrelevant. The real question is whether anime is capable of flipping your inner switches, which only you can answer.
This isn’t to say that authors don’t try to create depth artificially, through careful plotting. Intrigue building (what I sometimes call “the tease”) is a perfectly normal approach to creating an illusion of depth. There must be something worth seeing if the author is hiding it from us so carefully, right? But when we come to view the full picture, it telescopes into nothingness as if sunlight is toxic to it. The thing that is revealed afterward — is it meaningful?
We can certainly define depth as complexity of plot, but that’s not too useful to us. A plot is just a tool; all complexity is intentional or accidental, but never essential to the story being crafted, which is why we train ourselves to look past it. It might not be useful to define what we then see as depth, either, because we only perceive it; it doesn’t exist in any real sense.
I think that what we see as meaningful is essentially some kind of self recognition (or denial). The snobbish food critic in Ratatouille tastes a dish and sees his childhood, a connection which only he could understand, and possibly doesn’t. What, too, is meant by depth of character in fiction? Maybe we recognize some facet of that character in ourselves, or in somebody we know. Maybe a character’s actions represent something you admire or despise — indeed, we often view real people in the metaphoric sense too.
Many authors describe writing as a process of discovery. The nuggets of wisdom spread throughout a work aren’t engineered into it, but instead are emergent properties of the process. It is somehow easy to believe that this is the truth — that wisdom can’t be willed into a story, but can be found within, both by the author and reader, and in different ways.
Perhaps depth can best be expressed as a state of mental growth. In that sense it’s elusive — clearly that which is seen as deep in one instance no longer is, after repeated exposure, though different discoveries are possible. This might explain why we react so strongly to sentiment, but it never changes us. Sentiment is only capable of causing ripples in the pool. Seeing depth changes the pool.
April 1st, 2008 at 9:39 am
Back in the day when I was a student my English Lit teacher said: “You can not be wrong you must only be consistent”. The point is not that British (and American) literature is written by geniuses but that it is written in a way that allows us to analyse it without it “falling apart”. The book can not and will not change because we look at it (no mater what Mr Pratchett’s Disk World Wizards might think). What changes is the reader.
This is, I think, what you were saying. That what is shown by our analysis is not the depth of the author but the depths of the reader. Art, so long as it has internal consistency (and anime is art), is like an imperfect mirror - what we see is a reflection of part of ourselves.