When the movie begins, the sequence is of a sky battle. We are positioned within an airplane and we hear someone’s breath; immediately we share Kannami Yuichi’s subjectivity, entering the world of the film through his perspective. This makes him identifiable to the audience; we can imagine ourselves in his position. Through this initiation, we are able to track the same character throughout the movie and thus examine closer the issue of identity in individuals who live within a world that sets itself apart from the external world as well as separates the Kildren from the general population.
Eventually, Yuichi emerges as a Lacanian subject, in search of and/or in the process of forming an identity while struggling with the limitations of this cultural language. The subject according to Jacques Lacan, is explained by Karen Coats as one “beholden to the forces of its environment and in many ways limited by the possibilities of its time and culture, though it has some power to change and expand those possibilities” (3). Rather than Sigmund Freud’s notion of the ego, which puts emphasis on “choice and individual autonomy and its universal and ahistorical nature” (3), Lacan’s psychoanalytical subject exists more in conversation: “It is therefore within the language and images of a specific culture that the subject must both find and create himself” (4). In The Sky Crawlers, Yuichi struggles with locating himself through the language of the movie. The question of representation is raised by Coats:
Although we are born with what is called proprioceptive self—a self that is perceptually aware of its place in space and can judge, to a very minimal extent, the physical properties of the things around it—we have no cognitive centering principle to organize that perception. It is not until we begin to use the processes of representation, both visual and verbal, that we are able to make those sensory perceptions have meaning and consistency. (2)
Visual processes of representation are especially important in this anime. Oshii plays with the aesthetics of the genre, contributing to Yuichi’s processes of identity formation. As a filmmaker, he pays attention to details and employs the visual language of anime to highlight ideas within the movie. A moment of revelation inspired by such details is when Yuichi meets a newly-arrived pilot named Aihara. Yuichi watches him fold his newspaper and is reminded by another pilot who dies earlier in the movie who used to fold his newspaper the exact same way.
This sparks an epiphany for Yuichi, who, throughout the narrative, asks many questions about the pilot who flew his plane before him. Aihara’s way of folding his newspaper is a physical marker, but it is only when Yuichi makes the connection between this mannerism of this new pilot’s and the same mannerism exhibited by another absent pilot that he uses the same language to arrive at the possibility that he is the same as Jinroh. In this sense, he finds and creates himself through a visual language, recalling fragments of memories of past lives, consolidating them and forming a more unified sense of self than he had before.
Returning to the Lacanian limitations of time and culture, the world of The Sky Crawlers is constructed as an isolated setting with very restricted contact with the rest of the world. In one sequence, Yuichi guides a group of tourists around the base, showing them around the hangar, letting them take pictures of the planes. The tourists interview him on videotape, asking him how he feels when he is flying, when he is fighting in the sky. He answers, “I feel like a winner.” The tourists excitedly compare the war to a game and thank Yuichi for fighting for them. Yuichi answers, “It’s my job,” and smiles awkwardly at the camera.
This is the culture that contains these characters; this culture’s language labels them as players in a perpetual game. More specifically, this is the culture that created Kildren so that there would be pilots who would fight a war, and who could keep fighting for as long as it is necessary. The Sky Crawlers suggests that there may not be a time when war would not be necessary. These carefully-constructed conditions are the language in which the Kildren exist, which allow them to fulfill their purpose and encourage them to do not much else.
In another sequence, Suito Kusanagi looks directly at the audience, addressing them, saying, “To humans, the sense of reality [war] imparts has always been essential.” This brings into light questions of mortality. War inspires fear of death. However, the general population does not directly involve itself in war; rather, people sponsor wars through corporations. All this contradicts what Kusanagi cites as the reason for having war and maintaining the notion of war in the public consciousness in the first place: to perpetuate war as a constant looming threat yet not to experience it directly is counterproductive. This culture, with its possibilities and limitations, is problematic in its attempt to define war simultaneously realistically and idealistically. Kusanagi’s speech represents the realistic side, the one that necessitates war as the opposition of peace. Her perspective is especially pertinent because she has experienced the reality of war firsthand. On the other hand, the existence of the Kildren, as a notion itself, presents a more idealistic perspective, one that is afforded by the population who watch the war on the television instead of being directly involved in it. This idealism promotes the very appealing idea that no senseless human deaths would actually occur as a result of this necessary war. Only Kildren fight the war, so no one from the general population will be hurt by the war. Moreover, the condition that the Kildren find themselves in diminishes the irrevocability of death because they are allowed to live again. The limitation that keeps Kildren from maturation into adulthood is in turn the ability that allows them to be reincarnated; this paradoxical language mirrors the Kildren’s—especially Kusanage’s—contradictory thoughts on war.
The Kildren’s condition of living life in cycles ultimately calls into question the issue of individuality. Is every incarnation a separate being or the same? As the narrative of the movie progresses, Yuichi asks more questions about the pilot who used to fly his plane. Other than providing his name, Kurita Jinroh, the other characters never give Yuichi any clear, unambiguous answers to his questions. Yuichi’s curiosity about his predecessor seems obsessive after a while; he is compelled to know about what came before him, almost as if he does not know how to exist without this knowledge. This obsession fits into a Lacanian paradigm:
The passion of the signifier [i.e., the drive to be in language] then becomes a new dimension of the human condition, in that it is not only man who speaks, but in man and through man that it [language] speaks, that his nature is woven by effects in which we can find the structure of language, whose material he becomes, and that consequently there resounds in him, beyond anything ever conceived of by the psychology of ideas, the relation of speech. (Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 78)
Yuichi, in the beginning of the movie, arrives at the military base with no memories; soon after, he starts asking questions. He could have asked any type of question, but his inclination toward seeking answers about his plane’s past signifies the existence of valuable information there that needs to be uncovered. Certain rules prevent the other characters—Kusanagi, Tokino, Sasakura—from telling him the truth, suggesting that he needs to discover it for himself. Tokino and Sasakura, more specifically, both look regretful that they have to keep information from Yuichi, suggesting a closer relationship than is initially apparent.
Implicit rules seem to form the structure of this cultural language that these characters live within. They are alienated characters, among themselves and from the larger general population, leading to a more meaningful search for identity. Their relationships with each other seem lacking, so Yuichi attempts to compensate by asking questions and gathering information, trying to figure out his position within the culture, among the people he seems to have just met but who show subtle hints of knowing him, or at least a part of him. His attempt at positionality is his struggle with the language that contains him as well as with the expression of that same language.
Speaking of language, the movie as an anime exists within a language specific to its genre. Stylistic and creative choices on the part of the director Mamoru Oshii demonstrate his understanding and subsequent manipulation of the parameters of this language in order to most effectively convey ideas and tell stories. The world of The Sky Crawlers is not presented as a distant future but a reachable one, perhaps even one set in an an alternate present, setting this movie apart from other science fiction works where apocalyptic events separate our present from a possible future represented in the work (Hollinger 461). More and more, according to Hollinger, science fiction is about “how we find ourselves permeated by futurity as a kind of defining feature of the perpetual transition that is now“ (461). Thus, the existence of the Kildren is plausible in terms of our present, only Oshii localizes this world as an isolated space, apart from civilians. Interestingly, Sky Crawlers shows a mirror version of the present by not making a spectacle out of advanced technologies. The biotechnology that the Kildren embody is not aestheticized in any extraordinary manner; they look just like mortal humans. Also, the isolated geographic setting is showcased during flight sequences, when the movie pans out to show ground level from a high angle up in the clouds. Sky Crawlers shows the world below as a world
of nature, full of greenery as opposed to cityscapes. This is a departure from the more conventional image of possible worlds in science fiction as full of machines made of metal. Oshii uses images that are familiar and pre-existing as opposed to imagined futuristic vistas. As such, Sky Crawlers negotiates the space between possible future and present.
Similarly, Oshii’s Sky Crawlers blurs the borders of film genre. Susan J. Napier cites Roland Barthes’ essay on bunraku (75), where Barthes discusses the “basic antimony” between animate and inanimate, which can be easily circumvented when it comes to anime films, it seems. It works thus in Sky Crawlers, released in 2008, which benefits from advances in digital animation and employs these to create ambiguous aesthetics. This ambiguity blends animation and live-action visuals (or a very convincing imitation thereof), playing with the spaces between conventional realism and surrealism.
This negotiation of boundaries and overlapping spaces in terms of form mirrors those of content. In Sky Crawlers the plot is surreal but plausible. The existence of a class of humans who do not grow up but who fly planes and fight wars seems a far away concept, but all the same it is imaginable. Napier also cites Chikamatsu Monzaemon: “art is something that lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal” (75). If the movie were easily classifiable as one or the other, without argument, it would be less than a work of art. This is the same idea that Theodor Adorno discusses in his book Aesthetic Theory.
As a work of art that exists in conversation that negotiates the spaces of real and unreal, of alternate present and possible future, The Sky Crawlers opens itself up to interpretation, providing us with a structure that amounts to a specific cultural language. The structure consists of rules and limitations while granting freedom to adjust certain parameters. Ultimately, Yuichi shows understanding of this language as he exists within it while at the same time daring to fathom the world outside of it. In a sequence where he asks Kusanagi about the Teacher, he thinks outside of the language he is contained by; to conceptualize an outside, he must have first understood what is inside.
In another sequence toward the end of the movie, he says, “Even if it’s the same old road, the scenery isn’t the same.” This statement resonates with wisdom. Yuichi has learned through his processes of finding and creating self that though his memories are erased every time the cycle restarts, even though his existence is restrained by so many limitations, he learns to make sense of the cultural language within which he exists. Asking questions about what lays beyond the cycle and talking plainly about living within the cycle signify a profound understanding of his own existence.
Additionally, he asks, “Can’t things just be that way,” suggesting a sentiment of acceptance. Through understanding what the cycle is, how it operates, and how one exists within it, Yuichi asserts his own individuality. By understanding the limitations of his existence, he can play with the possibilities that he is left with. Rather than trying to conquer the limitations of the cultural language that traps him, he accepts it for what it is.
WORKS CITED
Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory.
Coats, Karen. Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2004.
Hollinger, Veronica. “Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition”.
Lacan, Jacques. Feminine Sexuality.
Napier, Susan J. “The Problem of Existence in Japanese Animation”. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 149, No. 1 (Mar. 2005), pp. 72-79.
The Sky Crawlers. Dir. Mamoru Oshii. Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2008. DVD.
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