This article was published in the 9 1 issue of Iris electronic magazine.

Yu changmin

Kawara Tsutomu is Pixar's most successful work in the past ten years, which is deeply loved by the public and film critics. People like the two protagonists in the story: Kawara Tsutomu and Eve, who express their deep and subtle feelings through pantomime; The two robots are sometimes like small animals, and sometimes they are like children laughing and cursing. Scholars admire the accurate tribute to film history, the peculiar gender expression, and the unforgettable subtle relationship between narrative and time scale.

Kawara Tsutomu (2008)

There is an interesting phenomenon in discussing American cartoons. We seldom remember who is the director of each work. For example, Kawara Tsutomu's director Stanton directed Bug Crisis and Finding Nemo before, but we usually only remember "Ah, this is Pixar's work. On the whole, the aura of Pixar Studio overshadowed the charm of individual directors.

However, as far as Stanton is concerned as a director, most of his favorite plots focus on the variation of "Growth Story". The originator of this genre is Goethe's The Learning Age of William Meister, which is one of the most important narrative templates of the novel. The protagonist of the story always has to go through a journey and some setbacks, and his hope of growth may be disillusioned or realized during the transition from teenager to youth. This is basically a journey from children to adults.

Finding Nemo can be said to be the other side of the growth story: parents must understand that their children are adults and should let go. Kawara Tsutomu focused on an old robot. We don't know how many years it took him to gain a certain degree of consciousness on earth, but the whole story focuses on emotional enlightenment-in Flaubert's words, this is an emotional education.

Therefore, the charm of Kawara Tsutomu in the story is that he is young and old: he has lived on the earth for 700 years, but he still keeps his childlike innocence. He worked hard to pile up the metal tower at the beginning of the film in the city; He is willing, as if life itself is no big deal, even if he is a person, he has no complaints-at least there is a clever cockroach with him. Perhaps it is this pure state that makes Kawara Tsutomu have an enviable personality.

Kawara Tsutomu's plot is simple. Under the double influence of excessive consumption and environmental pollution, the enterprises that dominate the earth have come up with a solution: let all human beings on the earth retreat to spaceships, release thousands of garbage compression robots, and centrally remove toxic garbage on the earth, waiting for people to come back and "re-colonize" the earth.

This plan seems to be ideal, but I didn't expect that in a highly toxic environment, the recovery mechanism of the earth has been hopelessly destroyed, and human beings have been exiled in space forever. 700 years later, the robot that worked hard on the earth was broken, leaving only Kawara Tsutomu who was still working hard. In this long time, he found that there is treasure in these wastes-perhaps this is the reason why he can get rid of the rules and develop his self-awareness.

In the process, he collected all kinds of "antiques" from the polluted remains of the earth. Mixers, light bulbs, lighters and bubble paper have all become his collections (including many of Pixar's works).

What men once cherished is worthless to Kawara Tsutomu: he doesn't want a diamond ring, he just wants a gift box with spring fluff on the outside. To some extent, Kawara Tsutomu was a "wanderer" in 2700 AD.

Benjamin, a German philosopher, emphasized this point in his discussion of surrealism-people strolled in the arcade market in Paris and browsed the shabby goods left over from the19th century, trying to get rid of the consumption-oriented life and Marx's "exchange value" and create personal "use value" for these relics to imagine another future possibility. For Kawara Tsutomu, the value of these little things points to a world that does not belong to him.

On the other hand, there are many works about artificial intelligence in recent years. The most important ones are She, Lucy, Mechanical Ji, westworld, and the live-action version of Ghost. Our panic about artificial intelligence actually doesn't come from people knowing what they can do, but we don't know whether they abide by the laws set by human beings for machines-whether they have done anything that breaks through the framework of program code.

Kawara Tsutomu didn't have this kind of anxiety, and regarded the birth of artificial intelligence or consciousness as unusual: in the long repetitive behavior, there will always be some small mistakes, which can't be included in the calculation and eventually become the basis of consciousness, and Kawara Tsutomu and Eve finally don't want to surpass human existence (the ending animation produced by the director Ratatouille proved this), so that the development based on body nerve activity is only a small piece of the evolutionary history of consciousness. (Off-topic: She, Lucy, the ghost in the shell can be said to be Johnson's four-part "Turning to nothingness". )

This series of panic is actually closely related to the development of contemporary theory. The French philosopher Foucault once said, "The so-called person is actually just a face painted on the beach by the sea. Foucault's remarks emphasize how people as the main body are framed by different discussion networks, and few of them take the initiative to do something-it is difficult for people to explore how waves and ocean currents interact with tidal changes in a flash.

German philosopher Kitler took this fable a step further: the face is painted on the beach, and the main components of sand grains are oxygen and silicon, which are the raw materials of semiconductors. Therefore, even though Foucault didn't realize it himself, he had already predicted that human beings were just a chapter in the history of calculator development. The methodology popularized and displayed by Kitler has a great influence in the field of contemporary humanities-we call it "media archaeology". Isn't Kawara Tsutomu just looking for other uses in the ruins of the media, hoping to lead people to another future?

Back to the story itself, there was no dialogue for the first twenty minutes of the movie. The lyrics of the song "Put on your Sunday clothes" at the beginning of the movie bring out such a scene: "This is a beautiful town ... there are shiny little lights everywhere. Close your eyes and see the flashing light … we won't come back until we kiss that girl. 」

There are galaxies, planets, nebulae, galaxies and the sun in the image. Then the camera turned and the earth looked gray. The camera cruises above the ground through crowded satellites to check the surface of the earth that has experienced some kind of disaster. The volume at the beginning of the song becomes smaller, and the audience can also hear that the sound quality is not very good, as if entering the narrative from non-diegetic, and the camera will lead us to the source of the sound.

Suddenly, the song faded away, and we looked down from the high altitude, just like an abandoned maze, and a small khaki figure ran out from below. With the appearance and disappearance of robots, the same song sounds and then dissipates, echoing in the empty space, letting us know that the sound comes from inside the image.

Up to now, the audience hasn't seen the five senses of the protagonist, just watching how he stuffed a pile of waste into his body and pressed it into a small square, while the cockroach seemed to hear music and ran out of the empty jar. It was not until Kawara Tsutomu found an iron dome that we could see its face.

Turn off the radio (now the audience can be sure that the poor sound quality comes from the tape), and the robot reaches out to pick up the cockroach. The cockroach crawled over its body and got into its pores, which made Kawara Tsutomu itch to death-the robot's body got some physical contact here. This bridge lets the audience know that through the medium of animation, machines can also be flesh and blood. Then, the title popped up from the tower.

The first five minutes or so of the film established the audience's comparison of different scales. Any normal scale here is inflated to unimaginable heights. From the space full of garbage, the surface of survivors, countless metal squares, ubiquitous consumer garbage to corporate advertisements everywhere, the lonely figure of Kawara Tsutomu and Little Cockroach is even more pitiful.

When Kawara Tsutomu rode on the track and passed other robots of the same type that had been completely damaged, the audience also knew that he was the last survivor of the whole group. However, survivors also have an advantage: when parts can no longer be used, Kawara Tsutomu can always find substitutes. Of course, this clue didn't make the audience understand its importance until the end (when Kawara Tsutomu put the lighter in his small collection cabinet, the lens also brought the replacement part of the eye).

American philosopher Stanley Cavell's masterpiece The World Seen excludes cartoons, because he thinks cartoon characters lack flesh and blood and they can't feel pain. Of course, it's true: when Kawara Tsutomu hurried out of the container and accidentally ran over a cockroach, we were really worried.

However, its crushed body instantly regained its elasticity and was alive and kicking-such a bridge is hard to imagine in a live-action movie, which seems to be the patent of cartoons. But Kawara Tsutomu does not have such flexibility. It only has parts, and the parts will wear out one day.

During the production of Kawara Tsutomu, director Stanton once asked the whole animation team to watch a Chaplin or Keaton work every day and learn how to express deep feelings with facial and body movements. To some extent, after the film history entered the period of talking movies, although there were more possibilities for expression, it also compressed the space for other modes of communication. The most important close-ups and body movements in early movies had to be attached to the dialogue. Vincent Amiel, a French scholar, once said, "The film prematurely takes the body as a narrative carrier and gives up its own thickness. 」

Speaking of the body, we may think about how the various parts of Kawara Tsutomu are interwoven into various expressions. It has binoculars as eyes, and the telescopic lens can make his eyes shake up and down, left and right, back and forth. The track jammed by four axes allows the small robot to move up and down and adjust its height. Two hands are like clips, so you can catch it. It also has a tape recorder on it, so that it can play "Hello, Julie! Hello, Dolly! ) song recording. These separated parts formed many different expressions, which also made Kawara Tsutomu more vivid than Eve.

Kawara Tsutomu found the video of Hello Julie directed by Jim Carrey on 1969! Starring barbra streisand, he won the Oscar for best artistic direction, score and mixing. This is another reason why "Kawara Tsutomu" is loved by film critics-Pixar's team skillfully integrates these references to film history into the plot and reconstructs the elements of silent films, musical films and classic science fiction works.

In order to create a photographic effect of some sci-fi works in the 1960s and 1970s, the team invited Dickins and Mullen (visual effect design of Star Wars, Terminator and Jurassic Park) to create a 70cm wide screen effect: distortion, reflection and focal length change brought by the lens (this effect is particularly prominent in a supermarket scene).

Paleontologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan once discussed the essential characteristics of human nature in Gestures and Words-walking upright, walking on two feet, having a thumb for people to grasp and so on. Therefore, Kawara Tsutomu's "humanity" comes from his appearance.

These parts, like the muscles on our face or hands, can be operated in different ways and express complex emotions. In the history of film theory, people often focus on faces and hands. It is precisely because these expressions and gestures are always slightly different. Facial theorists include Bela Balazs and Jacques Haumonte, while gesture theorists include Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben and recent tactile theorists such as Marx.

Besides Kawara Tsutomu's appearance, her voice is another indicator. Based on R2D2 in Star Wars, the production team tried how to convey delicate emotions in high and low voices. Bert, the sound designer of this film, once said: Kawara Tsutomu's voice "sounds like a baby ... this tone is like a common language. The robot in each film has its own special voice, which allows the audience to gain this information repeatedly and build a sense of identity even without dialogue.

Like a glimmer of life on the earth in the city of death, spaceships from far away use lasers to locate their landing positions. Seeing little red dot, Kawara Tsutomu seemed to rush forward like a cat. And little red dot also likes to play tricks on it, running from here to there. Once again, we see how the behavior of animals and babies shapes this little robot. Eve, a plant detector sent by the spaceship Axiom, came to the streets of Kawara Tsutomu without exception.

In contrast, Eve's smooth appearance reminds people of eggs, but more importantly, it is difficult for the audience and Kawara Tsutomu to guess her thoughts and feelings through her body movements. After all, she only has two hands and no other movable organs. But Eve's gliding in the sky reminds us of some kind of white seabird.

This is also the initial interaction between Kawara Tsutomu and Eve: the little robot doesn't know what this flying thing is looking for. As the film progressed, Eve's expression began to be conveyed through her changeable eyes.

When Kawara Tsutomu brought Eve back to the small container for the first time, Eve sneezed because of the dust outside-the mechanical body was conveyed by the elastic expansion of the animated image. The first intimate contact between them was also achieved by a small cockroach tickling Eve-in any case, the unclear boundary between machinery and biology is precisely because the characters in Kawara Tsutomu are elastic.

The first time we heard a meaningful conversation was about 22 minutes in the movie. Kawara Tsutomu doesn't have a complete language, so he has to prove that he is a recycling robot. Eve laughs because Kawara Tsutomu always sends her name "Eva". Language and gestures are contrasted here again.

The appearance of the two sets a series of contrasts: male and female, clumsy and flexible, prey and hunter, outdated and avant-garde. -but these binary pairs will change constantly in the film. The narrative of Bildungsroman is to make the characters walk from one end of the spectrum to the other and make them realize that they have different potentials. Eve gradually becomes gentle in the film and can understand Kawara Tsutomu's romance. Kawara Tsutomu, on the other hand, changed from an ordinary recycling robot to a hero, left the earth with adventure and went to another "town" mentioned in the lyrics.

When Eve saw the plants in Kawara Tsutomu's hands and switched to automatic mode, waiting for the shuttle to transport the plants back, the Bridge of the Earth ended. As mentioned earlier, Eve looks like a white seabird, and this metaphor has gained Christian meaning in the whole movie.

In the Bible, when God caused a flood to punish mankind, Noah built an ark to preserve all the creatures in the world. When the flood receded, a white dove sent an olive branch, symbolizing the reconciliation between God and mankind. Similarly, Eve seems to have returned to the exiled human beings with a green olive branch, but other machines are still trying to make trouble. Of course, Kawara Tsutomu and Eve are also like Adam and Eve in the Bible.

To axiom (its ancient Greek root is? ξ? Ω μ α, which means worth it, goes without saying), the audience once again found that only robots that are divorced from daily settings can gain autonomous consciousness, such as the little robot Mo, who deviated from the established route and replaced the role played by the little cockroach in the film because he wanted to eliminate pollutants in the world. When there is a problem with repetitive behavior, consciousness comes into being. This is the case in Kawara Tsutomu, and Mechanical Discipline and westworld are no exception.

On this space shuttle, the film proves that there is a reason for the great waste on the earth: the consumer society. People live their own lives according to the instructions given by enterprises, and stick themselves on the screen for meaningless conversations. Fashion changes only come from the instructions of the computer: red is red and blue is blue.

This whole scene can be said to be the ultimate nightmare of Frankfurt School: the image of industrialization finally makes people become a part of the machine. Marx said: "The machines in the world live fearfully, while we are worryingly lazy. When people's biological clock is also manipulated by enterprises, our body bones will degenerate endlessly. As a machine, the human body is closely related to the environment.

When Kawara Tsutomu was released in 2008, people were still worried that the screen time would be too long, because calculators and screens would make us ignore interpersonal communication or colorful things around us. At present, the screen has become an inseparable part of our lives, and our video works naturally regard this as the normal state, trying to make people understand what consequences many images will bring to our lives, rather than giving people an illusion that they can get rid of the image culture.

The British TV series Black Mirror is a good example: the ubiquitous video interface not only projects flowing light and shadow, but also captures information, trying to discover people's preferences by treating people as data piles: we have long lived in the world of 1984.

When Kawara Tsutomu and Eve found that the grass had disappeared during transportation, they were sent to the out-of-control robot repair shop by Otto, the master calculator on the plane. Here, Kawara Tsutomu plays the role of Spartacus, rescuing these faulty robots from their cages, while Eve is angry at these unruly behaviors.

In this bridge, these robots are so cute and not hostile, as if their intention is only to disturb the order on the ship and make people unaccustomed to this rigid law. This is also very different from other recent science fiction works: these robots have no resentment against humans. They don't want revenge to replace human beings.

When Kawara Tsutomu was sent into space by Otto to blow himself up, Eve went to rescue him. Surprisingly, it seems that Kawara Tsutomu was not hurt by the explosion at all, and successfully saved the crumbling plants. Kawara Tsutomu picked up the fire extinguisher in the capsule and played a duet with Eve's jet engine. When Kawara Tsutomu collected garbage, we saw fire extinguishers as props. Here, the director slightly changed the function in our impression, so that the two can communicate through the ice crystals ejected from the cylinder.

Clumsy Kawara Tsutomu has gained unparalleled athletic ability here, and Eve is also happy to pick up the little robot and circle it, so there is a spark of current between them. Kawara Tsutomu has no lips, so she can't kiss her lover, but this electric shock image represents the deep connection between them. As the lyrics say, "We won't come back until we kiss that girl. Kissing a girl means it's time for two robots to bring people back to earth.

On the other hand, dancing in musicals always conflicts with the laws represented by movies. I mean, usually when people suddenly dance, the world in the film stops working, and the rhythm of the body challenges the society and culture to discipline people's normal work and rest.

In the most famous musical "Singing in the Rain", when Jin Kaili splashed water on the sidewalk to celebrate his future success, the roadside police gave him a stern look and asked him to stop quickly. This scene in Kawara Tsutomu is no exception. Only when they are out of the control of Otto and axiom can they dance and talk to each other.

In this passage, Pixar emphasized the most important feature of musical films from different angles: how the body on the image is transformed into abstract patterns in movement and rhythm. Of course, "Kawara Tsutomu" is not as extreme as "Dumbo", which turns the elastic body of the animated character into a colorful nightmare. However, the two robots interweave streamline patterns on the image by spraying airflow, which makes the audience experience visual pleasure. This abstract consideration is why there are always dancers accompanying the leading role in musical films, which makes the patterns on the stage show various changes.

In Robot, Asimov put forward three principles of robot operation:

Robots shouldn't hurt people, or stand by and watch people get hurt.

Second, unless the first law is violated, robots must obey human orders.

Robots must protect themselves without violating the first and second laws.

I, Robot (2004)

These laws seem simple and direct, but there is a lot of room for explanation. At first, Asimov discussed many of these contradictions in his essay. When describing the conflict between human beings and robots in later generations, it always depends on these three conditions. It is precisely because of the different interpretations of the first law that Otto, an axiomatic computer, wants to destroy plants and keep people in outer space forever. For it, sending people to earth will hurt them.

Otto's design is of course a tribute to Hal, the calculator in 200 1: A Space Odyssey. But there is a world of difference between the two: Hal banished mankind because he wanted to get rid of himself. Otto just wants to follow the interpretation of certain rules.

Another obvious praise for the bridge comes from the passage that the captain regained control. Zarathustra of Strauss said that when he struggled to stand up and move his atrophied feet forward. This soundtrack appeared at the beginning of 200 1, symbolizing that mankind has taken a big step towards the space century. Here, this meaning is ironic: in order to leave space, human beings have to take their own small steps.

The battle between the captain and Otto made Axiom stagger (which is also the predecessor of the contemporary vision-free image), and Kawara Tsutomu was seriously injured in the process. At this time, Eve didn't want to send the plants back to the ship in order to complete the task. It wants to return to earth to find parts. Kawara Tsutomu's replaceable parts have gained new meanings here. At first, the parts on the earth enabled it to work endlessly. Now, the audience is worried about where Kawara Tsutomu's soul is hidden in these components. Will one piece be missing, and Kawara Tsutomu will no longer be Kawara Tsutomu?

Of course, Kawara Tsutomu finally gave us a happy ending. The electric shock induction between the two robots became the key to Kawara Tsutomu's awakening. The two can work together to fight for the future of the people. In my description, I avoid using gender to describe the appearance of Kawara Tsutomu and Eve, because science fiction, as an important literary type, can be said to deconstruct gender stereotypes through different world settings.

Ursula Le Quinn's The Left Hand of Darkness is one example, and Asimov's The Gods themselves is another. These works all conceive a possible utopia for us through different gender imaginations. From the robot's point of view, Kawara Tsutomu also has such expectations.

But Pixar finally knew clearly that he was also the product of Hollywood media companies. In the movie, we saw many advertisements and the logo of the interstellar company Buy and Large. Even the children on board learned ABC from Axiom A, Buy and Large, instilling in them that the company is the best friend. If you don't save it to the end of the film, you will know that Pixar also put a Buy and Large trademark at the end of the film, which promoted the pattern from text to text-like level.

Subtext usually includes film title, staff list, trademark and other elements that do not belong to the story world but determine the direction and type of the story. This trademark can be said to be a mockery of Pixar's utopian imagination.