Hunting the Elusive

For those who have not paid attention to my repeated harping about this, Sora no Kioku is a background art book by Makoto Shinkai. It covers "Byousoku 5cm", "Kumo no Mukou, Yakusoku no Basho", "Hoshi no Koe" and the 15 second spot he did for a newspaper. This book arrived rather later than I expected, but it's all good. As I have mentioned repeatedly, even though I got multiple copies of this book, I will not be debinding and scanning as a release for a few reasons. However, here is a review of the book along with evaluative pictures.

The book costs around 2667 yen and is soft-cover. It comes packaged in shrink wrap and in a paper sleeve which carries a blurb and preview of the contents, as well as the barcode and all that stuff needed on a Japanese book.

But that's not the real cover of course. Inside is the real cover, and the jacket carries the price of the book but not the barcode and all the extraneous stuff.

Under the jacket, it's plain blue.

Contents, as I have pointed out before. Notably absent are a few of things, the minori stuff, Kanojo to Kanojo no Neko, Egao, AniKuri short, etc.

The first and longest section is obviously Byousoku 5cm, since it is divided into multiple sections and sub-sections. For each of the three chapters of the film, there is one section, which is then subdivided into themes. Oukashou, for example, has "Spring ~ Hometown ~" which is basically the childhood town at the beginning of the film, then school, home, railway stations, re-encounter (Akari's place) and the place where they said goodbye (railway station).

It basically reads like a list of settings for the film, which is a logical way to organise things.

Remember that this is a background artbook, so the characters are absent most of the time. This is in direct contrast with most normal artbooks we see, which prioritise character drawings. But then again, Makoto Shinkai isn't famed for drawing characters -- his forte lies in the backgrounds and scenes.

It's a bit eerie, perhaps, like a photoshoot for furniture and furnishings, where there is a hint of a sign of life, but no one around. Chairs sit empty, cities uninhabited. We step back from the drama and the life which populate Shinkai's films, and delve into the world he has created. Film, the moving medium, also means we don't often have the opportunity to dwell on a single frame or shot -- we are forced to move on quickly in our illusion of movement. This book addresses that problem.

One of the things I noticed just looking through the book is that the colours for the shadow parts of the drawings are rather darker than I remember the film being.

Second part is of course Cosmonaut.

Cosmonaut has the most science-fiction-y parts of the film in terms of scenery. And it's epic.

And Byousoku 5cm is the last part for this film's chapter. It's the contemporary city of Tokyo. The last segment here is "Sakura ~And then the new season~", which of course deals with the whole moving on theme.

By the way, I just realised it when I was looking at the book, but Makoto Shinkai basically duplicated his mouse in the table details (first picture in this section): it's the Logitech MX Revolution which you can see in the 3rd-last scan...a mouse which completely coincidentally, I bought during the weekend (before the book arrived). It's either coincidence, or I have been subconsciously programmed by the film.

Kumo no Mukou, Yakusoku no Basho is the film with a lot of natural settings. But at this point of browsing through the book, you come to realise how well titled it is. Sora no Kioku (Reminescences of the Sky, as I term it) or as the official English title puts it, "The sky of the longing for memories", is about looking back over the skies that Makoto Shinkai has drawn throughout his three major films.

I mean, just thinking in terms of the two films covered so far, everything else he draws, trains, cities, buildings...they're all framed by the sky. Obviously when he is doing indoor scenes without windows, the sky is not there, but it is constantly being referenced, almost as a subconscious contrast. The sky is almost always present through the windows, on the streets, between buildings. Sometimes the "camera angle" goes impossibly high, follows the birds, pans vertically to contextualise the city/nature on the ground with the sky.

In Kumo no Mukou, Yakusoku no Basho, the plot is a journey "beyond the clouds", but the sky remains as the ultimate bounds within which the films take place.

And what wonderful skies they are! They exist in the equilibrium betwixt the realistic and the idealistic, their varying pallets of light and colours vibrant and emotive. These skies are the signature of Makoto Shinkai, and many have taken to mimicking them, but never with the same success that the master has.

Hoshi no Koe, arguably Makoto Shinkai's first major film, went beyond the sky. But really, what existed in space was never really a point of visual interest. The eye was always drawn to the planets, the hues of the alien sky, away from the darkness of space.

Throughout the book, one can almost see a progression of the complexity and sheer epic nature of the skies that Makoto Shinkai rendered. The airscapes of Hoshi no Koe still hold a wonderful aesthetic draw, by Byousoku 5cm's are sublime.

I am a bit puzzled why the short animation for the newspaper made it into the book -- it only got two pages of content besides the cover page. In my opinion, the ef latter tale promotional video was much more revolutionary than this one.

The second-last section of the book shows a few techniques of how he composed the frames (layers, reconstruction from photos, etc). The last section is a series of interviews which tell the Japanese-fluent about Makoto Shinkai's world.

Conclusion:

"Sora no Kioku" is a great way of gaining a new retrospective on Makoto Shinkai's works to date. It is no less than a gallery on the artform of backgrounds, lighting, and colours that he is so famed for. Even when we strip out the drama, the obvious emotions of the plots and characters, the background still remains hauntingly emotive. Melancholic, reflective, this book lives up to its name in a surprisingly deep manner. A pretty picture book for the initiated, and something so much more for fans of the director.

On the decision not to release:

There are a few reasons for not scanning this book for release.

Firstly, this book can be bought and exported from Amazon Japan, meaning there is absolutely no reason for people who want the book not to buy it (unless you don't have CC, in which case, you have to nag and wait for local retailers). The point is, it is easily obtainable.

Secondly, although I realise the whole "obtainable" point isn't exactly relevant (I release some stuff which can be bought normally, for example), I admit here that I have a bias against pirating Makoto Shinkai's stuff. We all know he deserves our money. Obvious problems with policy inconsistencies and all that arise, but this is a blog, not a republic.

(This ties in to a little issue some people had with the [pireze x moeside] subs of Byousoku 5cm. The 700MB video encode the subs were packaged with was inept in quality. If I wanted to, I could have encoded a 1.4GB h.264 one, but I didn't. The point though, ties back to my reluctance to pirate this director's stuff -- the release was always ONLY the subtitles; the accompanying video was a vehicle.)

Thirdly, there is no point in scanning the stuff in. Many people don't realise this fully, but scanning in something from print is an ultimately lossy process. In terms of data integrity, it's as clumsy as dubbing audio tapes. Obviously, part of the process is analogue -- the printing. Why would we scan this book and then run the scans through another lossy process of descreening, when the high quality digital source is right there? I have the Blu-rays, others have the DVDs. Blu-ray wins of course, in terms of getting HQ stuff out of the film, and what I can derive from the Blu-ray would be superior to anything I could produce by scanning the book. I know, the book doesn't have characters "obscuring" the background, but that's a really small point to justify the effort and pain.

So with all that out of the way, this is again, just a review post, consisting of a few pages of the book to give an overall idea of what it "feels" like. During review, I did scans at 300dpi, and they were processed once through GREYCstoration. Another round might have done some good, but I'll leave it for you guys to decide if you want to do so. The JPGs in this post are moderately compressed and 50% of the original size. PNGs can be source here at 260MB.