| Satoshi Kon,a Japanese animation director,is a “non-mainstream” animation director with a surrealistic spirit and good at creating dreams and expressing the complicated psychologies of his characters.As an animation director,he had five animation works,including four animated films and one TV animated series.In his works,one can both sense the undertone of the psychoanalytic theory and feel how Satoshi Kon was deeply influenced by the “stream-of-consciousness” films.Satoshi Kon often focused on the abstract spiritual world to depict the unfathomable human consciousness;he used his distinctive and changing personalized mirror language and created strong dramatic tension and terrific suspense in his stories.Taking the five animation works made under the supervision of the late Satoshi Kon as its research objects,this study mainly adopts the psychoanalytic theory to interpret the elements of dreams and fantasy in Satoshi Kon’s works,including the character personality,the audio-visual language,the narration methods and so on.Satoshi Kon was originally engaged in comic creation and used to publish a few comic books.Later,he studied animation from the Japanese animation master Katsuhiro Otomo.As one belonging to the new generation of animation directors in Japan,Satoshi Kon inherited the creating thinking in animation creation from his predecessors,but his works are also featured by a strongly personal style and have thus served as a link between the past and the future in the Japanese animation industry.The fact that he had read an extremely large number of animation works and excelled in learning the audio-visual skills in film manufacturing contributes largely to the cinematic sense in his works.By combing the dream films in cinema history and summarizing the styles and features of dream films in different times and of different schools,we could find that there is a natural similarity between films and dreams.Then,through examiningthe characteristics of Satoshi Kon’s dream films,it could be seen that the animation works of Satoshi Kon are dreamlike in terms of content and structure.He was good at using his own dream experience to construct his films,and tried to tell the stories via adopting a series of lens language like dreams,daydreams,fantasies supplemented with related dream theories and the dream mechanism.In this way,he metaphorically expressed the deep-seated social,philosophical meanings as well as other meanings.Satoshi Kon’s animation works had not only been influenced by his predecessors,but have also played an advanced guiding role and have exerted huge influences on many Hollywood directors.Dreams and fantasies account for a large proportion in Satoshi Kon’s animation works,and the depiction of dreams and fantasies could forcefully demonstrate the psychological crises and inner struggles of the characters under pressure or stuck in personality contradictions.Adopting the related theories of psychoanalysis,this thesis examines the personality of several characters in Satoshi Kon’s works and analyzes the underlying reasons of their personality contradictions.Through analyzing the dream cases,the thesis makes a study of the relations between the characters’ dreams and their subconsciousness.In Satoshi Kon’s animation works,both time and space are free and unrestrained,the real and the illusory are intermingled together,and the characters often freely shuttle in reality,dream and fantasy.This endows his film narration with a strong “stream-of-consciousness” feature.By analyzing the narrative strategies,artistic expression techniques,the thesis is hoped to interpret the narrative features,artistic styles,as well as the distinctive artistic expressiveness in Satoshi Kon’s works.The strongly personalized dream elements permeating in each aspect of Satoshi Kon’s works,together with the interwoven,interacted consciousness and subconsciousness as well as the intermingled,integrated reality and dream,have brought about an adventurous and miraculous audio-visual experience,endless aftertaste and a large meditating space to the audiences.The study of Sathoshi Kon and his animation works will be of tremendous significance to expand the innovative thinking in our country’s animation and film creation,to advance the artistic expression techniques and to better depict the inner world of characters in the animation works and films. |
