Porco Rosso 2: What's a Pig?

What then do we make of the fact that the protagonist in Porco Rosso is an anthropomorphic pig? We might say that, well, it’s symbolic, it’s a metaphor.

Of what?

Let’s review the opening scene, which I discussed in my opening post. Even before we see the protagonist’s head, before we know he’s a pig, Miyazaki leads us to believe that his protagonist is lazy – sleeping on the beach in mid-day – and slovenly – cigarette butts, etc, lying around. In short, that he’s piggish, as that notion is understood. When we see that, yes, he IS a pig, well . . . just what are we being told? We’ve already seen that he’s piggish. We don’t need to see a pig’s head in order to know that. We know it from his attitude and actions. But perhaps the appearance provides an account of that behavior: he’s piggish because he’s a pig. It betrays the protagonist's essence.

Later on in the film he’s chatting with Curtis in the bar of the Hotel Adriano. Here’s a bit of that conversation:

Porco Rosso: That's the plane that beat an Italian boat at the Schneider cup, two years running.

Curtis: It's not only fast, it's good in aerial combat. I hear that a pig named Porco Rosso has quite a reputation around here.

Porco Rosso: If you make a deal with the air pirates, watch your tail, young'un. They're a bunch of penniless cheapskates. They stink 'cause they don't bathe.

Curtis: Yea... that's for sure.*

Now we have Pigman criticizing others for a failure to bathe. Given the conventional implications of piggishness, that would seem to be a bit hypocritical, no? Yet, while the pirates overhear the remark and bridle at it, there’s no suggestion that Pigman stinks. He appears to be well-groomed, and even a bit of a dandy, with a white scarf around over his flight suit. Maybe he isn’t such a pig after all.

The fact is, as Tim Perper pointed out to me in private discussion some years ago, Pagot does not, in fact, act like a pig in this film. Yes, as Patrick Drazen has explored in “Sex and the Single Pig: Desire and Flight in Porco Rosso” (Mechademia 2, pp. 189-199, 2007), Pagot has a reputation as a rake, and there’s no reason to believe that he doesn’t deserve that reputation. But we don’t see him womanizing in this film. In particular, he refuses to respond to Fio’s overtures, however tentative they might have been. The Pagot we see in this film is a brave, resourceful, and courteous man. Not a pig at all.

Peer Review

Porco Rosso 1 Meta: conventions, worlds, roles

I’ve got two comments that are ‘meta’ to yesterday’s post on Porco Rosso.

Funny Animals, NOT

Somewhere near the middle of that post I observed that, while talking animals are a convention often used in cartoons, the fact that Marco Pagot appears to be a talking pig cannot be attributed to that particular convention. Miyazaki is doing something else in Porco Rosso and is not calling on that convention. He’s just calling on the normal license of story tellers to include fantasy elements in their stories.

That seemed obvious to me when I drafted it and it remains obvious in retrospect. I note here that that observation didn’t occur to me until I drafted it yesterday, and that despite the fact that I’ve been thinking about this film off and on over several years and had written perhaps 20 or 30 pages of notes and correspondence prior to writing that post.

Why’d it take me so much time and effort to arrive at something so obvious? Perhaps it’s because I simply don’t think of Miyazaki in the context of thinking about “Three Little Pigs” or Porky the Pig. They’re different worlds. As such it simply didn’t occur to me to deny the convention of one world (funny animal cartoons) in the course of thinking about a film in a different world (Miyazaki features). Whatever the reason, I do think it useful to have made the connection and thus to have pointed out that different conventions apply to Porco Rosso.

Imaginative Worlds

My other comment is a bit obscure. It has to do with thinking about fictive worlds, which is common enough. That is to say, it’s common to think about the characteristics of the world invoked in this or that narrative. In doing so we separate the world from the particular narrative and ask: What kinds of things exist in this world? What kinds of actions and events can take place? I’ve done a post doing just that kind of thing for the worlds in most of Miyazaki’s feature-length anime.

I think that can be misleading. In the case of Porco Rosso it led me to ask whether or not it would be possible to have other pigmen in this world, or perhaps donkeymen or foxwomen. Yes, the story we’ve got has only one such creature; but could the imaginative world in fact admit of others? To be sure, I didn’t mention such questions in that post, but I asked them of myself as I was thinking about this film. And I had the sense that somehow they’re beside the point.

This anomalous person, this Marco Pagot slash Porco Rosso, exists not simply as a character in some imaginative world floating around in the imaginative ether, waiting for us to tell tales about it. That person exists specifically as a creature of the tale Miyazaki has crafted about him. As I emphasized in yesterday’s post, that person is THE PROTAGONIST in this story and his anomalous nature is as much a function of that role as it is of the imaginative world. Though the two things can be teased apart analytically – the world, the role – one cannot understand the creature (Marco Pagot slash Porco Rosso) except in the conjunction of the world AND the narrative.

Just why that is so I attribute to the mostly invisible and unknown machinery through which we tell and understand such stories.

Porco Rosso 1: Pig as Protagonist

Recently I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking about the films of Hayao Miyazaki, re-watching them too, time and again. In the large I’ve been thinking how each film involves its own assemblage of naturalistic and fantasy elements. In some films the naturalistic seems to be a pendant on the fantastic, think of Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle. In others it’s the reverse, Kiki’s Delivery Service or the film I want to examine now, Porco Rosso, that is to say, The Crimson Pig.

The film’s central conceit is that the protagonist, Marco Pagot, is a man who, at some point in his life, became a pig. That is how he appears in the film. That, and a closely associated aerial parade of dead fighter-pilots in their planes are the only fantastic elements in the film. There are no elixirs and potions, no spells, no semi-divine and / or supernatural creatures, nor giant insects, no dream worlds, no flying about on brooms, none of that. Just a man who looks like a pig, and his memory of those dead pilots, their planes streaming upward. The memory takes but a minute or two on screen, but the porcine visage, that’s constant, from beginning to end.

Given any of Miyazaki’s films one might wonder what would happen if the fantasy elements were eliminated. Do that to Spirited Away and the film all but disappears. Eliminate the fantasy from Porco Rosso and most of the film remains, so much so that one might wonder whether those those two fantasy elements serve any compelling purpose.

I assume they do, but nonetheless find myself compelled to ask: Why a pig? What does Miyazaki accomplish through that conceit that he could not otherwise accomplish? While I find the film compelling in immediate experience, I don’t know how, upon reflection, to rationalize the protagonist’s porcine head.

Isn’t it symbolic?

Isn’t everything?

This is the first of two or three posts in which I examine how Miyazaki deploys this central device. In this post I will examine something that is so obvious that it hardly seems worthy of notice, much less analytic commentary, namely the fact the pig is in the protagonist role.

The Protagonist is a Pig

The pig in this film, Marco Pagot, is the protagonist. He’s not a secondary or tertiary character. The other characters exist to fill-out his story, not he to fill theirs.

By way of examining the obviousness of this fact, imagine the same film, but with Pagot appearing human at all times. Instead, some minor character shows up with a pig head, a donkey head, or a chicken head, choose your animal. Imagine that it’s the bank teller, or the boy who pumps the gasoline when Pagot refuels on the way back to his island. We see this minor character with an animal head. No fuss is made about it, and it’s the only animal-headed character.

How would that go over? It seems to me we’d be forced to think of it as a DUMBASS MISTAKE. What else could it possibly be? We have some being acting the role of a human. All of the creatures acting in such roles are ordinary humans, all of them except this one. If that’s not a mistake, then it requires an explanation.

What kind of explanation could possibly work? Perhaps the person really is just a person, but is wearing an deceptively convincing mask. If that’s the case, then the film has to show us that it is a mask, and must somehow account for that mask. Or perhaps the person really is a donkeyman, or maybe even an extraterrestrial donkeyman. That too must be somehow explained. However this anomalous creature is rationalized, the rationalization will threaten to enlarge the character out of minor status into major status or even . . . even the protagonist slot.

All of which is to make the obvious point: If there’s going to be one, and only one, anomalous character in the story, the implicit logic of story construction demands that that character be the protagonist. Further, the story must account for how the protagonist became anomalous.

Cartoons with talking anthropomorphic animals are ubiquitous. No one wonders why the taking creatures are animals. But those cartoons are pervaded by such animals. They are understood as conventions of the imaginative world in those cartoons. As such, they require no account. Porco Rosso is not one of those cartoons. Pagot’s porcine nature thus does not follow from that convention. It requires a different justification.

The Malibu, 24/7

Behind the Scenes: Disney, Miyazaki, Paley

I’ve been reading around in Hayao Miyazaki’s Starting Point, 1979-1996, a collection of short pieces by and interviews with Miyazaki. Among them is a speech he gave to Japan’s Association of Scenario Writers in August 1994. He observes (p. 103):

So, why don’t we script the film in advance? Well, it’s mainly because this is the way my brain has been trained to work. I’ve tried writing the story out many times before, but even if I think a story works great in text, when we render it in continuity sketches it’s usually unusable. It just doesn’t work, and usually reveals how shallow my original ideas were.

A bit later (p. 104): “In the old days, we always thought getting the sketches first was essential, but the problem is that drawing the continuity sketches seemed to always get behind schedule…” [ellipsis in the original text]. What emerges from this discussion is that Miyazaki and his colleagues start animation before the story has been completely worked out in continuity sketches (that is, story-boarded). “If you keep working, making adjustments here and there, in the process you really develop a much better understanding of the characters you are trying to animate.”

Though Miyazaki doesn’t discuss either the voice acting, the musical scoring, or overall sound design, I assume that that isn’t done until the film is completely animated. Given his “work it out as we go” improvisational process, Miyazaki’s not going to have a speaking script until it’s all done, nor will he know the sound effects required nor the music.

What I find so interesting is that this process is quite different from what I had understood the “classic” process to be, the process that used by Disney, to name an obvious example. In that process full animation would be the last part of the process. Before that could happen a script would be written, characters and settings would be designed, a complete storyboard would be worked out, the actors would voice their parts and the music would be composed and recorded. Then the animators go to work, synching their drawings to the sound where necessary. Of course, things might not quite work out as planned up front, so some revisions might be necessary along the way. But the basic idea is to create a detailed plan – storyboard and sound – before starting to animate. That, I assume, is what Miyazaki had in mind when he asserted that in “the old days” they did the sketches first.

I have assumed that this classical process arose, at least in part, as a way of coordinating the activities of what, in a feature film production, would be a very large team of artists, animators, writers, inkers, actors, and so forth. What Miyazaki found, however, is that it didn’t work for him.

Is this merely a difference between his personal style and Disney’s, for example? We know that Disney stopped drawing in the mid-1920s and thereafter functioned strictly as a director, albeit as a director who demanded control over every detail and often micromanaged his projects into chaos. Miyazaki, however, has always done a great deal of drawing in his projects, often doing most of the story-boarding himself. But it’s not entirely obvious to me how that difference would itself translate into the very different overall management styles, the classic and the Miyazaki.

Underbelly 10: In Process

BruceLabounty802 has some photos of The Underbelly Project in mid-stream. He's posted them as a set on Flickr. Here, for example, you can see Swoon at work.

Impaled leaf with saturated grass

Together

Music and Intermediaries

Red Leaves

Underbelly 9: A Documentary in the Works

As some of you know, some folks are making a documentary about public reaction to The Underbelly Project. They spent Sunday afternoon (yesterday) interviewing people at a Chelsea studio. I was among them.

I showed up at 2PM expecting to see, say, a half dozen or more people sitting around waiting to get interviewed. It wasn’t like that. I guess I over-estimated how many people would be interested – through, for what it’s worth, Google’s now giving me upward of 500K hits when I search on “the underbelly project.” It was 200K hits two weeks ago.

In any event, I was the only one there just at that moment to get interviewed. So I got miked up and started talking. While Stephanie was interviewing me, some more folks showed up.

I stuck around for about an hour afterward and listed to four or five more interviews. One woman hadn’t known anything about graffiti and street art until she’d read about Underbelly. Except for one ex-writer from Staten Island, most of people tended to treat it all as graffiti and didn’t recognize street art as a different movement. But then, the Project itself didn’t make any distinction, did it?

From what I heard in that one hour, they’ve got an interesting range of views. Everyone was positive about it.

Stay tuned.

Animal Passion? Hyacinth Hippo and Ben Ali Gator

This is a slightly revised version of a post from The Valve, Slapstick Onto-logic in Dance of the Hours.

When I watched Fantasia six or seven years ago, this episode, a setting of Dance of the Hours, was hard to take. Frankly, I felt a bit embarrassed to be watching it. It seems so silly, cute, and cloying. But Ward Kimball convinced me to give it a chance. He was one of Disney’s premier animators from the early days and he remarked, in “The Making of Fantasia” (included on the DVD): “Every once in awhile you see something that’s perfect. That was one of them.” If Ward Kimball thought it was perfect, then I figured I should give it a chance.

So I watched it, and watched it, in whole, in segments, stepping through some parts frame-by-frame, and came to appreciate it, even to like it. Really.

In its original setting, Dance of the Hours was a ballet within an opera, Amilcare Ponchielli's La Gioconda; that is to say, it was a play within a play. This music was a bit long in tooth by the late 30s and ripe for parody. Disney's basic conceit is to have ungainly animals dance the roles normally taken by graceful ballet dancers. Beyond this, as I have argued in an exchange with Michael Barrier (animation historian and Disney biographer), these animals have a hard time keeping in role.

And that leads to the issue I want to examine: Just where is baseline reality in this segment? What’s a role and what’s reality? Just what is being staged, and by whom?

Dance of the Hours Framed

As its title suggests, Ponchielli's ballet depicts the succession of the hours of the day. Disney picks up on that and divides the ballet into five segments: 1) ostriches, early morning; 2) hippopotami, mid-day, 3) elephants, dusk, 4) alligators, night, and 5) finale, night. The climax of the sequence occurs in the second half of the fourth segment, when Ben Ali Gator woos Hyacinth Hippo - who'd been introduced in the second segment and was sleeping on a chaise longue during the third segment. (Note that these names never appear in the film itself; they are names used by the production staff.) The wooing is at once absurd and dramatically intense, set to a sustained crescendo in the strings that bespeaks consummation. This is followed by a moment in which Ben proudly presents Hyacinth in a promenade:

It was somewhere in this sequence that, on one occasion, I said to myself: “They're not acting! They're for real!” For what it's worth, that's the observation that prompted me to think seriously about Dance of the Hours. This promenade gives way to several turns, which then give way to the finale, when everyone is back on stage in furious zigzagging motion.

When Dance opens we see the doors to a large room, the doors open, and the camera zooms through (perhaps) a hallway to face a stage with lowered curtains in front. The curtains rise and we see an ostrich awakening and beginning to dance. Clearly we're looking at something happening on a stage. But, as we will see shortly, we leave the stage near the end of this first segment and go out of doors, where the action remains into the finale. Two thirds of the way through the finale it suddenly becomes obvious that we are watching something take place on stage. As the music comes to an end, the camera zooms back so that we see the entire stage, with dancers arranged in a final tableau, and keeps zooming back until we are outside the hall, looking at the doors, which then fall off their hinges.

So, this five-section drama begins on-stage and ends on-stage. In between it is out of doors, in the “real world.” Except that it is not - by which I do not mean that it is all a cartoon. That is obvious. What is not obvious is just how this cartoon works.

Look back at the previous frame grab. This action is taking place outdoors. Ben and Hyacinth are on walkway with grass in front of them and behind them. But they also appear to have a spotlight shining directly down upon them, for their shadows are directly beneath them. Nowhere in this garden do we see lights up on poles, much less strung out over open spaces. But if we imagine this promenade to be taking place on stage, then the light is readily interpretable as standard stage lighting. Thus, on the simplest interpretation of the visual cues before us, this space is ambiguous, it is both outdoors and onstage.

Let's look at that ambiguity. Even as the cartoon presents us with a line of foreground action where animal dancers have difficulty staying in role, it also presents us with a distinction between being onstage and being in reality. It then proceeds to elide that distinction.

Sex, Identity, and Social Space on the Web

A couple of days ago I posted about sexy photos publicly posted on Flickr. One thing I neglected to say is that most of these photos are posted under pseudonyms and a good many do not show a person’s face. They are thus more or less anonymous images. I have no way of knowing, of course, whether or to what extent these people share these images with people they know in real life. Sharing such images with people you know, however, IS quite different from sharing them with the anonymous public at large.

That’s what I want to explore a bit: what images we reveal on the web, under what circumstances, and to whom.

I note that this is a special case of playing different roles in different social ‘spaces.’ We do it all the time. We act one way at work, another way at the school board meeting, another way at the family reunion, and still another way in the privacy of our own homes. These various roles generally are not completely discontinuous.

The internet has given us another space in which we can create yet other roles. This general issue has, of course, been subject to considerable discussion and investigation over the last 15 to 20 years. Privacy has always been an issue and so has community. I take it as given that online communities need not be a means of escaping from life, but that they can function to extend and enhance our lives. I certainly don’t want to rehash all of these arguments here but that’s the general ball park I want to play in.

I want to look at three online spaces: 1) the Flickr space, which I previously contrasted with 2) the pornography space, and 3) a private online community. My discussion will be relatively quick and simple. I’m not going for detail or subtlety, just a quick characterization.

Flickr vs. Pornography Space

Let’s start with the first two. Flickr is a social networking space where photographs are the medium of interaction. I rather suspect it started as a place to display photographs and only later became a networking space – in fact, I suspect that it still is more of a display space than an interaction space. But it IS an interaction space, even if much of the interaction is relatively minimal – designating someone as a contact, friend, or family; picking a photo as a favorite; commenting on a photograph. There are also provisions for discussions associated with opt-in groups of photographs.

Blue Skies