This article was published in the 91st issue of Iris Electronic Magazine.

Yu Changmin

Kawara Tsutomu is the most successful work of Pixar 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 profound and subtle feelings through pantomime; Sometimes the two robots are like small animals, and sometimes they are like children laughing and cursing. Scholars admire the accurate tribute to the film history, the peculiar gender performance, and the unforgettable delicate relationship between narrative and time scale.

Kawara Tsutomu (28)

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

However, as far as Stanton is concerned, most of his favorite plots focus on the variation of "Growing Story". The ancestor 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, with some setbacks, and his hope for growth may be disillusioned or realized when he transitions from teenager to youth. It's basically a journey from a child to an adult.

Finding Nemo can be said to be the other side of the growth story: parents must understand that their children have grown up and should let go. Kawara Tsutomu focuses on an old robot. We don't know how many years he spent on the earth before he gained a certain degree of consciousness, 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 lies in that he is young and old: he has lived on the earth for 7 years, but he still keeps the childlike heart. He worked hard and piled up the metal towers at the beginning of the film in the city; He is willing, as if life itself is no big deal, even if he is alone, he has no complaints-at least there is a clever cockroach to accompany him. Perhaps it is this pure state that makes Kawara Tsutomu have an enviable personality.

The plot of Kawara Tsutomu is very 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 waste compression robots, and centrally remove toxic garbage on the earth, waiting for people to come back and "re-colonize" the earth.

this plan seems ideal, but I didn't expect that the recovery mechanism of the earth has been destroyed beyond saving in an environment with high toxicity, so human beings are exiled in space forever. After 7 years, the robot that once worked hard on the earth was broken, leaving only one Kawara Tsutomu who still worked hard. In this long time, he found that there are treasures in these wastes-perhaps this is why he was able to get rid of the rules and develop his self-awareness.

In this 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 remains of Pixar's works).

What man once treasured is of no value to Kawara Tsutomu: he doesn't want a diamond ring, but only a gift box with spring fluff. To some extent, Kawara Tsutomu was a "wanderer" in 27 AD.

The German philosopher Benjamin's discussion of surrealism focuses on this point-people stroll around the arcade market in Paris, browse the shabby goods left over from the 19th century, and try to get rid of the consumption-oriented life and the "exchange value" in Marx's mouth, so as to create personal "use value" for these relics and 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 in the shell. Our panic about artificial intelligence actually doesn't come from people knowing what they can do, but we don't know whether they obey the laws set by human beings for machinery-whether they have done anything to break through the framework of program code.

Kawara Tsutomu doesn't have this kind of anxiety, and sees the birth of artificial intelligence or consciousness as unusual: in the long repetitive behavior, there are always some small mistakes, and these mistakes that can't be included in the calculation eventually become the basis of consciousness, while Kawara Tsutomu and Eve didn't want to be beyond human beings in the end (the ending animation produced by the director of Ratatouille proves this), so that the development based on physical nerve activity is only a small segment of the evolution history of consciousness. (Off-topic: Her, Lucy, Under the Skin to ghost in the shell can be said to be Johansson's four-part "Into nothingness". )

This series of panic is actually closely related to the development of contemporary theory. The French philosopher Foucault once said, "The so-called man 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 rarely have their own initiative to do something-people are hard to explore how waves and ocean currents work with the changes of tides in ephemerality.

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

Back to the story itself, there was no dialogue in 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 the scene: "This is a beautiful town … full of shining little lights. Close your eyes and see the flashing light … we won't come back until we kiss the girl.

Milky Way, planets, nebulae, Milky Way and the sun appear in the image. Then the camera turned and the earth looked dusty. The camera cruised above the ground level through the crowded satellite to examine the surface of the earth that had experienced some kind of catastrophe. The volume of the song at the beginning becomes smaller, and the audience can also recognize that the sound quality is not very good, as if it enters the narrative from non-diegetic, and the camera will lead us to the source of the sound.

Suddenly, the song faded. From the perspective of high altitude, we looked down like a maze of waste, and a small khaki figure ran out from below. With the appearance and disappearance of robots, the same songs sounded and then dissipated, echoing in the empty space, letting us know that the sound came from inside the image.

Up to now, the audience hasn't seen the facial features of the protagonist, only watching how he put a pile of waste into his body and pressed it into a small square, while the little cockroach seems to hear music and run 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 welcome the cockroach. The little cockroach crawled over its body and got into the pore, which made Kawara Tsutomu itch to death-the robot's body got a certain physical touch here. This bridge lets the audience know that through the medium of animation, the machine can also have flesh and blood. Then, the title of the film emerged from the tower.

The five-minute paragraphs in front of the film establish 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 the survivors, countless metal squares, ubiquitous consumer waste to corporate advertisements everywhere, the lonely figure of Kawara Tsutomu and Little Cockroach is even more prominent and 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 in the whole group. However, survivors also have advantages: when there are parts that can't be used any more, Kawara Tsutomu can always find a replacement. 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 parts of the eyes).

The World Seen by Stanley Cavell, an American philosopher, excluded cartoons, because he thought cartoon characters lacked flesh and blood, and could not feel pain. This is true, of course: when Kawara Tsutomu hurried out of the container and accidentally ran over a cockroach, we were really worried.

But its squashed body instantly regained its elasticity and was alive and kicking-such a bridge is hard to imagine in a live-action film, which seems to be the patent of cartoons. But Kawara Tsutomu doesn't 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 work by Chaplin or Keaton every day and learn how to express deep feelings with facial and body movements. To some extent, after the film history entered the sound film period, although there was more possibility of expression, it also compressed the space for other communication methods. The most important close-ups and body movements in early movies had to be attached to dialogue. Vincent Amiel, a French scholar, once said, "The film regards the body as a narrative vector too early and gives up its own thickness.

When it comes to body, we may be able to think about how Kawara Tsutomu's parts interweave into various expressions. It has binoculars as eyes, and the telescopic lens allows his eyes to sway up and down, left and right, back and forth. Tracks stuck by four axles allow the small robot to move up and down and adjust its height. Both hands are like clips, so that it can be grasped. It also has a tape recorder on it, so that it can put "Hello, Julie! 》（Hello, Dolly! ) songs are recorded. These separated parts form many different expressions, which also makes Kawara Tsutomu more vivid than Eve.

Kawara Tsutomu found a video of Hello, Julie, directed by jim carrey in 1969! Starring barbra streisand, 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 has cleverly integrated these references of film history into the plot, and reconstructed the elements of silent films, musical films and classic sci-fi works.

In the earth scene, in order to create a photographic effect of some sci-fi works in the 196s and 197s, the team asked Dickins and Mu Lun (the visual effect design of Star Wars, Terminator and Jurassic Park), and wanted to create the effect of a 7cm wide screen: the distortion, reflection and focal length change brought by the lens (this effect is particularly prominent in a supermarket scene).

In Gesture and Speech, the paleontologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan once discussed the essential characteristics of human nature-standing 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 are just like the muscles on our faces or hands, which can be operated in different ways and express complex emotional spectrum. In the history of film theory, people often focus on faces and hands. It is precisely because these expressions and gestures always have subtle differences. Face theorists include Bela Balazs and Jacques Aumont, 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. Taking R2D2 in Star Wars as a prototype, the production team tried how to convey delicate emotions in high and low tones. Bert, the sound designer of this film, once said: Kawara Tsutomu's voice "sounds like a baby ... the tone is like a universal language. The robots in each film have their own special voices, so that the audience can build a sense of identity even without dialogue when they get this information repeatedly.

It's like a glimmer of life on the earth in the city of the dead. Spaceships from far away use lasers to locate their landing positions. Seeing little red dot, Kawara Tsutomu seems to be rushing forward like a cat. And little red dot also like to play a trick on it, run 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 spacecraft Axiom, came to the streets of Kawara Tsutomu without exception.

In comparison, Eve's smooth appearance reminds people of an egg, but more importantly, it is difficult for the audience and Kawara Tsutomu to guess her thoughts and moods through her body movements. After all, she has only 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 interaction between Kawara Tsutomu and Eve at first: 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 flesh was conveyed through the elastic expansion and contraction of the animated image. The first intimate contact between the two people was also achieved through the tickling of Eve by a small cockroach-in any case, the undefined boundary between machinery and biology is precisely because the characters in Kawara Tsutomu are elastic.

It was about twenty-two minutes in the film that we first heard a meaningful conversation. Kawara Tsutomu has no complete language, so he has to demonstrate that he is a recycling robot, and Eve smiles because Kawara Tsutomu always sends her name as "Eva". language