When the tripartite animation production Memories was released in 1995, it shattered the Japanese audiences due to its unexpected ideological and aesthetical revelations, and despite a rather moderate box-office success. The short animation movie Magnetic Rose is the first part of this production. Besides Magnetic Rose (Kanojo no Omoide, literal translation: “Her Memories”) which describes the adventures of an international spacecraft team in their response to a SOS message coming from a small asteroid, the other two short animation movies tackle current, highly sensitive issues of the contemporary world: the second short animation movie Stink Bomb (Saishû-heiki, literal translation: “The Most Stinking Weapon”) is the sarcastic story about the catastrophic effects of a biological weapon over which the control was lost and which killed through its very bad stench the whole population of Japan. The third short movie Cannon Fodder (Taihô no Machi, literal translation: “The City of the Cannon”) is an allegory about a small, completely isolated town whose citizens are exclusively living their daily lives while maintaining a huge cannon in order to be prepared to protect themselves for the case in which a powerful, but invisible enemy attacks them – an enemy who never shows up. All three short movies are based on manga works drawn by the producer Ôtomo Katsuhiro (born 1954), whose debut anime movie Akira in the year 1988 had accomplished the breakthrough of Japanese animation in the West due to an impressive success at the Western box-office, and despite, again, a fairly moderate success at the Japanese box-office.
The forthcoming analysis centers on the disturbingly captivating music of Kanno Yôko (born 1963) supporting the dramatic substance designed by director Morimoto Kôji (born 1959) in the first short animation movie Magnetic Rose included in Memories and its visual display of an alternate universe in the well-known progressive animation style of the animation studio called Studio 4°C (founded 1986). Kanno Yôko re-creates with warm sensibility and profound comprehension the spectacular, haunting music of the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) translated into her own compositional language. The soundtrack consists mainly of melodic structures which are strongly reminiscent of Giacomo Puccini’s opera world, with complex orchestration constructions which reflect and highlight the plot development. They bring closer to the surface the deep, complicated inner worlds of the characters. Contrasting to that, the music in the second short animation movie Stink Bomb, directed by Okamura Tensai (born 1961) and released by Madhouse Studio, is composed by Miyake Jun (born 1958) and uses mainly jazz and funk elements, hence further emphasizing the chaotic and sarcastic character of the movie. An even more extreme contrast is the music composed by Nagashima Hiroyuki (born 1966) in the last short anime movie Cannon Fodder, directed by Ôtomo Katsuhiro and released by Studio 4°C, altogether a colorful mixture of Brass-Band and symphonic fragments as well as avantgarde compositional techniques.
Simultaneously with the critical analysis of Kanno Yôko’s creative compositional strategies while taking over and employing Giacomo Puccini’s stylistical characteristics, this essay tackles the problematic of the concept of “sincerity” in Kanno Yôko’s music, as repeatedly mentioned by fans and specialists of Japanese animation. This so-called “sincerity” is generally regarded as Kanno’s secret tool in attaining popularity and financial success while staying true to her compositional standards and ideals. A further point is the disclosure of possible interpretations transcending orientalist temptations for the employment of the aria “Un bel di, vedremo” (“One beautiful day, I shall see”, from Madame Butterfly (1904), in Maria Callas’ version from 1955) as a leitmotiv-like segment in Magnetic Rose.
As previously mentioned, the musical background in Magnetic Rose relies heavily on Giacomo Puccini’s compositional style, providing such features as generous melodic arches, quiet rhythmic structures, colorful instrumental distributions, as well as a balanced portioning of dynamic, emotionally intense passages and lyrical melodic sections. Still, Kanno Yôko does not aim at providing an epigonic score. Based on those elements which could be described as typical for Puccini’s music, Kanno displays a musical landscape which goes way beyond a purely stylistic imitation. From such a perspective, the previously mentioned features regarded as typical for Puccini are enhanced by various compositional strategies and firmly embedded within a more universal context, built-up of three compositional strategies in Magnetic Rose, as to be outlined below.
Firstly, it is a highly eclectic style, in which the characteristics of Puccini’s music are combined with other musical styles in a rainbow-like spectrum: from heavy-metal to ethno-pop, from Western classics to Eastern modalisms, from jazz and blues to folk music. As expressed during an interview with Kanno Yôko conducted by myself in 2006, rather than being a conscious choice towards eclecticism, it is a compositional attitude which reflects every composer’s emotional dilemma in late-modern Japan, relying, on the one hand, on one’s own cultural heritage, and striving, on the other hand, for international recognition due to economic factors.
Secondly, Kanno adopts a syncretic approach with emphasis on the alternation between the visual and the auditive levels. In the animation industry, the auditive musical background is added and edited in the final stages of the post-production, which creates dubbing artists and sound engineers oftentimes massive problems in matching the two levels (as opposed to Western animation, particularly the one in the Walt Disney tradition, which tackles the sound and music simultaneously with the visual design, or even prioritizes it in the production process). As stated in the previously mentioned interview in 2006, Kanno Yôko repeatedly referred to the fact that she always does her best to adapt her compositional vision to the graphic-design vision of the main director, without ever losing sight of the function of music as a counterpart to the images. “Syncretism” means in this case a generous communication between different expression levels within the art-work, and less a conscious juxtaposition of delineation techniques within the artistic discourse.
Thirdly, there is the quest for a leitmotiv-like structure in the shape of the aria “Un bel di, vedremo” from Madame Butterfly, in Maria Callas’ version from 1955. The role played by the aria “Un bel di, vedremo” in Madame Butterfly as an opera can be seen from two main points of view: the plot is placed in Nagasaki, in the past one of the most progressive cities in Japan and the only gate open to the rest of the world during Japan’s long “politics of seclusion” or sakoku (Edo period, 1603-1868). The development and the denouement of the plot in Puccini’s opera could be considered, on the other hand, as one of the most important stages in the orientalisation process of Japan by the West. From the perspective of the current analytical discourse, the employment of Maria Callas’ version suggests an almost symbolic significance, as it brings to the forefront the ethos of an entire generation of artists and “contents creators” long before the emergence and spread of digitalization made the inter-connectivity a daily issue, as Kanno Yôko put it in the interview in 2006. Just as the main character Eva Friedal, or her memory, lingers on the abandoned space-station in the midst of holograms and electronic waste (after having disappeared in the aftermath of murdering her fiancé Carlo Rambaldi), Maria Callas’ voice with the aria “Un bel di, vedremo” counterpoints the intermittent contacts between the space-station which is sending the SOS signals and the spacecraft pursuing the SOS signals. It is like the song of an invisible mermaid carrying Eva’s voice in the dramatic, hopeful tones of Puccini’s music, driving the two spacecraft specialists Heintz and Miguel increasingly more deeply into their own illusionary worlds, arisen from past traumas and their encounters with fascinating and hurtful entities. The tension between Maria Callas’ vigorous voice, completely absorbed in her devotion, and Cho-cho-san’s fragile stature seems to reflect once again the stress-ratio between what was commonly referred to in the past as the “West” and the “East” – a stress-ratio which is, by all means, challenged and eventually reversed by its employment as musical background to animated images as the visual main representation medium.
In other words, as it became clear during the interview with the composer and later on in another interview with the director Ôtomo Katsuhiro in the same year, likewise conducted by myself: “Un bel di, vedremo” is an aria of hope. The little Japanese girl is waiting full of longing, love and unconditional commitment for the great, almighty Western man. This power relationship as displayed in Madame Butterfly significantly shaped the public perception of the relationship between Japan and the West during the last 100 years. It is, historically speaking, the hopeful view of the Japanese intellectuals from the early Meiji period (1868-1912) while striving to absorb the technological and industrial achievements of the Western modernity, of which they believed they could deliver practical, possibly immediate, solutions to the political and socioeconomic state of bankruptcy, in which Japan found itself at the end of the of Edo period by mid-19th century.
Roughly 100 years later – in 1995 –, the aria “Un bel di, vedremo” in the animation work Magnetic Rose turns into a song of passionate revenge. By employing this very song, her greatest success during her lifetime, the main protagonist Eva Friedel, once a very famous opera singer who had murdered her fiancé in a burst of jealousy, seduces and kills the spacecraft specialists by attracting them into an illusionary world crafted out of their own past traumas and repressed desires. One could go as far as to say that it expresses bluntly Japan’s current efforts, increased after the triple disaster of 11. March 2011, to re-define and (re-)configure the concept of “superpower”, above all as a cultural movement on an international level. It is a thoroughly Japanese version of cultural imperialism, in which Japan – respectively, the Japanese government – has been striving to generate and implement worldwide Japanese cultural assets via the so-called Cool Japan movement. The selection of these cultural artefacts refers so far mainly to cultural elements which have emerged during Japan’s modernity under Western influence: e.g., anime (cartoons) and manga (comics), live-action movies and J-Pop (Japanese popular music), cute fashion and minimalist architecture as well as Westernized Japanese cuisine such as potato-salad sushi and Hello Kitty pizza. The reason for selecting such cultural products relies on their subliminal resonance with the perception of Western consumers, while being simultaneously unknown and exotic, and hence encourage curiosity and consumption. As both the composer Kanno Yôko and the director Ôtomo Katsuhiro repeatedly mentioned, Magnetic Rose and the entire trilogy was mainly aimed at Western audiences.
In her pragmatic pursuit for an authentic compositional development, Kanno Yôko keeps an ironic approach towards cultural artefacts by disclosing in full honesty the ideological clichés and aesthetic stereotypes dominating the artistic discourses. At the same time, she playfully tackles the problematics of self and other as mutual reflections leading eventually to mutual transcendences. This compositional endeavor includes, more subtly, a creative repetition of musical structures under the sign of cultural differences: that is, the transformative quotation within the compositional process, in which irony is the foundation and sincerity is the super-structure – in Marxist parlance. This leads, eventually, to the economic success of cultural products. The employment of ideologic clichés and aesthetic stereotypes becomes an essential means within the marketing process implying a creative game with familiar structures and the concurrent employment of alienating patterns in unexpected contexts and combinations.
Altogether, Magnetic Rose received very good specialists’ reviews and was classified by the Japanese animation journal Animage as No 68 in the scale of Best 100 anime works of all times. A realistically displayed love story about loss, pain and emotional horror, devastating and lyrical at the same time, Magnetic Rose appears both on the visual and auditive levels as a turning point in the history of Japanese animation. Its release was prepared by previous anime works directed by Ôtomo Katsuhiro such as Akira (1988) and Rôjin Z (Old Man Z, 1992), and opens the pathway to more symphonically structured anime works such as Steamboy (2004). In terms of the animation soundtrack, Magnetic Rose acts as an important station, facilitating the transition from several less important animation works to which Kanno Yôko had composed the musical background towards the memorable Cowboy Bebop (1998) – its soundtrack is regarded as the best animation soundtrack of all times, both by fans and by specialists. As such, the animation soundtrack of Magnetic Rose overcomes and transcends the orientalist challenges in Giacomo Puccini’s music by ironically reversing the alienating sounds and displaying a world full of sincere artistic visions in which self and other do not compete with each other, but melt into each other tenderly.
