17XX on the ship, the city in 1930, the train in 1931, and the city
director in 1932 put the suspenseful parts of the next three stories at the beginning (gang vendetta, train Disasters, immortal humans) attract the audience, and then peel off layer by layer. As the complex relationship between the characters and the mystery are solved, the darkest part of the story is displayed in the middle and back (monsters on the train, murderers, kidnapping of girls, accidental shootings at gang celebrations, especially the gloom on the ship in 17XX The story took a whole episode to unravel the mystery). Finally, there is a turnaround from the dark part, all the way to the reunion part (friends reunion, bad guys die, everyone’s wishes are fulfilled, gang celebrations) narratives, making the audience feel like a roller coaster in the process of unbelievable emotions. The dark cave suddenly came to the highest point of the mountain.
The main point of this narrative method is that the narrator must be familiar with the whole story, usually writing the outline first, or even the complete story. Then the narrator manipulates the straight timeline, turning the story itself into a lot of thread puzzles. While attracting the viewer's emotions, it also has a direct effect on the viewer's emotions (for example, in this animation, when the audience will be nervous, sad, and happy, they are firmly in the hands of the narrator).
I don’t know if there is any precedent for this technique in animation. It is already a mature writing method in novels. I know "Wuthering Heights" (a two-line narrative, putting the darkest part at the beginning, putting hope at the beginning). At the end), Duras's "Lover" and Wang Xiaobo's "Golden Age" (the two novels are single-line plots of disrupted narratives). The use of this technique in "Memento" and "The Prestige" (both dual lines) in the movie has also been fully developed. Friends who are interested may wish to come and have a look.
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Oh, by the way, I almost forgot, there is also "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" in the animation, which is a one-line scrambled narrative.
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