It's not serious homework (skillful narrative) (pig nose), just talk about the interesting things after reading it.
Disclaimer: I have never read a novel or listened to drama. It is purely an animation adaptation.
When I made up this film, my knowledge of Narita inevitably came from DRRR (I only watched anime), and my knowledge of the genre of group portraits also remained at an interesting technique. Baccano is a bit different. It is estimated that this is Narita's harder work, with more thoughtfulness in the unity of content and form.
What is the theme of this story? Love? desire? A story with no ending and no protagonist? These answers are all good, but I think if you want to fully appreciate this work, you have to distinguish several levels for these themes. Taking the structural dimension of the text as the measurement standard, it can be divided as follows:
1. Intra-text: the so-called "story told".
2. Extra-text: the so-called "storytelling", the meaning of reflecting on the nature of the story being told, that is, the level of "meta-narrative".
3. Meta-text: the meaning of further reflection on the "telling of the story".
The first two levels directly involve Baccano's text, and the third level is purely a reflection of some concepts, but still serves to explain the meaning of the whole work.
1. It is
not very difficult to straighten out the whole story from beginning to end. After straightening out, you can clearly see the development of the plot, but even if you don’t do this, it is not difficult to find that runs through the plot and promotes the plot. The important theme behind it. In my opinion, this theme is [love for life and humans], summarizing [love, desire, happiness] these things. (This is also an obvious theme in DRRR.) The specific objects of these emotions or ideas are different in different roles, but they constitute their most basic motivation.
In Ladd and Graham, it is shown as a pleasure achieved through destruction: Graham just likes to destroy physical things. In addition to killing people, Ladd has a bigger agenda, which is similar to Nolan’s Joker’s anti-stability (anti-stability, (Refer to what Joker said to Dent in the hospital), hoping to destroy any form of fixation or plan. It shows a unique sense of justice in Vino, which is seen in his obsession with the status of flight attendant-he never kills people indiscriminately, and there are reasons for saving people. The object of Szilard's desire is first knowledge, and then it evolves into pure possessiveness, because it stands to reason that a person who is immortal, rich and powerful has no desires. Ellma "Smile Poisoner" is strange, but from his optimism about everything and his wishes to the devil (guarding Maiza until Maiza can laugh), his motivation can also be attributed to his kindness to others (smile/ Happy spread). The idiots are the most similar to Ellma, but they are more purely enjoyable than Ellma.
The last two characters put forward the most important concepts: the demon and the vice president.
The motivation of the devil is pleasure on the surface, but the core is still the so-called [interest in humans]. This is very interesting: demons are everywhere, at least often among humans, but they are not humans, they are just a playful observer, and they have no morals at all (good and evil only make sense to humans). In other words, it is something sandwiched between humans and gods, which touches on another theme that Tian’s favorites are: isolation, loneliness, morbid psychology, and "Playing God". Press no table.
What the vice-president said to Carol in the first and last episodes is the words of a narrator, whether it is said in the story or in terms of separation. His happiness (note that the word "楽しい" is almost the most frequently put on the lips of all the characters in the whole work) lies in the description of the behavior itself and the "possibility" of the description. From here we can touch the level of meta-narrative.
2.
There are two themes at the meta-narrative level, and other comments have all raised: stories that are not over, and stories that do not have a protagonist. Both concepts are commonplace, first is the openness of the text, and then the irreducibility of the narrative (irreducibility). The interesting part is that this is not only an extra-text meaning, but also rooted in the setting of the work from the beginning. The two corresponding settings are a) immortality and b) group performance.
a) The so-called unfinished story refers to this group of immortal people (the undead) who will live forever and their lives (hence stories) will go on forever. The implication here is the openness and infinity of the narrative.
b) A story without a protagonist. To be precise, it does not mean that the narrative of this work adopts a narrative and multi-line method (discussed later), but the whole story—that is, what happened in the story (maybe There are other things, but they are not included. The last mouse is an example) itself is diverse, everyone has encountered different things, and these things are related to each other and affect each other. The implication here is the multiple nature of the narrative that cannot be reduced to each other (for example, simplified into "a" story). It is a kind of decentranlization, which means that the story does not have a single center, but is multi-centered and multi-angled-this Pushing the viewpoint to the extreme is a dialectical dissolution without a center. The animation industry seems to have relatively few examples, but from "Rashomon" to Pulp Fiction, Memento and Cloud Atlas all tell such stories.
Of course, in addition to the [narrated story], the methods of narrating the story, such as circular narrative, interstitial narrative, multi-line narrative, etc., also imply these two themes. In this respect, a) can be open text The vertical expression of sex, that is, time, b) can be the horizontal expression of the same concept, that is, space. On the purely narrative level, the expression technique here touches on one point: since a) is the ablation of linear time, b) is the ablation of a certain center in space, how can there be a specific narrative? To put it in a simple way: even the immortal mouse has its own story, how can we finish telling these stories? (The sixteenth episode of the vice president is really the finishing touch to the rat metaphor)
3.
I very carelessly put forward the term meta-text, which does not mean [the text of the discussion text] that is normally understood, but refers to some meaning brought by [narration of this story] itself, which is a meta-narrative. Reflection. The final question that can be asked about narrative techniques is: how is narrative possible? And Baccano's work not only implied this question, but also because of its own setting and the narrative framework provided in the first and sixteenth episodes, it clearly asked this question. Recall: the theme expressed at the meta-narrative level (second level) is the openness and decentralization of narrative, so when we reflect on [the narrative of "meta-narrative"], we should immediately see the problem-the meta-text Existence is actually self-contradictory and self-defeating.
This situation is not only like the so-called dialectical ablation, but more directly, it means "with the boundlessness of the boundlessness", in which the infinite is stated in the finite. The problem is that if you want to truly state [nothing] (no center, no time limit), the statement itself becomes impossible (it is the reason of "very Taoist", although the points are also different). However, the metatext exists as a fact (ie there is this work called Baccano, and as a novel/animation it has both a beginning and an end), this incomplete and contradictory state becomes the fixed state of the work itself.
This fixed state is not the result of an abstract conceptual game, but, as the vice president said, it is actually a metaphor for the state of life, and the irreducibility and openness of life as a text. The vice president feels happy because of this, and I think Narita is the same.
(I have one more thought about the "fixed state": Wegenstein later believed that human language cannot be explained in a completely coherent theorized way. Williams also views morality and ethics in the same way. This anti-system view ( Excluding the two philosophers’ own response to this position) will probably be recognized by Ladd and Joker, right?)
Finally, explain why this work has the so-called "unification of content and form" (the wine in the bottle is the wine in the bottle, you have been deceived w). To put it simply, I think (3) can be regarded as an artistic expression of (1). In other words, the contradiction of meta-text is the reason why novel authors love life and stories. If it is not interpreted in this way, (1) it is inevitable that it will become a completely replaceable "wine in a bottle" (as mentioned at the end of the film review "Not Another Connotation Film"), but the reason why Narita wants to be in the "metatext" The bottle of "love, desire, happiness" is not without reason. Not only because of the "author's love", but also because of the central position occupied by the theme of Playing God: the author of the text is God and also a demon.
----By the way
, the jazz soundtrack is really amazing. Firo is so cute. complete.
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