Over a second lunch of leftover chili I watched one of the newly-dropped Hidamari Sketch whatchamacallits. 365 4.1, specifically (yes, the cat story). One of the things about Hidamari that I’m fascinated by is Shinbo’s use of symbols — the girls’ personal icons particularly. I thought I would write a short post about symbolism in that context. Let’s get to it then.
We’ll start with Saussure, fast-forwarded a whole bunch. Ferdinand de Saussure was a French linguist who illustrated how words aren’t related to the things they describe — they are collections of sounds, and have no meaning outside what we give them. Okay, good. Symbols work essentially the same way. That is, they are signifiers (they signify something, you see) relating back to the signified (the thing being described or pointed to). Art works by blurring the connections; we all have an agreed-upon standard for “horse,” even if we all think of different specific horses. An abstract painting could be of a horse, though — that could be the title, “Horse,” and it could be jagged lines with brown blotches. Art makes the audience work to get at the signified, whatever it is.
Let’s bring this back around to Hidamari Sketch. Each girl has an icon that, in some way, is emblematic. They’re up on the picture: Yuno has her hair tie, simplified to an X; Miyako has a cat’s pawprint; Hiro has a simplified drawing of her hairdo; and Sae has a line drawing of her glasses. They’re often used in scenes, either over the top of silhouettes or in place of the character altogether. I found this morning they’re even on each character’s image CD (along with their room numbers, another persisting signifier set in the series).
In some cases these symbols act as the characters. Lines of dialogue are often delivered over a static image of, for example, Sae’s glasses. The pawprint and the X can hike up and down, following a downward incline, over footstep sound-effects, and we know Miyako and Yuno are walking down the stairs. This is not a shorthand. Indeed, it takes longer for the audience’s mind to slot the symbols into places normally occupied by the characters themselves, just as it takes longer for us to recognize a drawing of a tree than it does to simply see a tree outside. There is an act of interpretation involved in both cases. The depiction, the symbol, is at least one step removed, possibly more.
[Aside: I just came up with something for my long-brewing post on why I can watch slice-of-life anime, but I can't take the genre anywhere else -- the symbolic nature of animation. Sorry, back on topic now.]
The Hidamari girls’ symbols do not actually depict the girls, though; they depict things thematically related to them. The two furthest removed are Yuno’s and Miyako’s: an X, out of context, is a bad mark or a letter, possibly a mark on a treasure map. It is several shades away from what it is representing directly: Yuno’s hair tie. Miyako’s paw print doesn’t directly illustrate a cat, it illustrates a cat’s past presence. It’s a footprint, and an artistically-stylized one at that. Then we get to the level of cat a few shades away. All that goes on, and then the symbol is related to the character.
The symbols relate to the characters in differing ways. The easiest (for me, at least) are Hiro’s and Sae’s. Both are more closely related — both are stylized versions of a physical feature of the character, to begin with. They are still carefully-chosen, though. In fact, they serve to illustrate the wild differences in the characters. Sae’s glasses represent a level of control and restraint: not only are they glasses, typically symbolic of those traits to begin with, they’re also slim, rectangular glasses, with edges and angles further representing rigidity and restraint. Sae certainly functions, or attempts to function, in this way. She keeps her cards close to her chest, to use an idiom. She’s embarrassed by emotional outbursts, gets awkward whenever she has to describe her feelings, and hides her affection for her sister under sarcasm. Hiro’s symbol is her wild hair, bound at the top and messy underneath — an apt symbol for the conscious and unconscious mind, perhaps, but also for a person whose whims and interests have led her to great skill in cooking, something she’s supposed to be good at (controlled top, see where I’m going yet?), but whose whims and interests also forbid that which she is good at, and the disconnection serves to swing her madly between poles, making her a perpetual motion machine of dieting, binging, and general movement and activity. She can’t seem to have guests without making food. This certainly contrasts with Sae, and perhaps allows us to see how they function as a unit: a spinning top needs a firm axis around which to turn.
Being the primary characters, Yuno and Miyako deserve more abstract symbols. It makes us work at them more. Yuno’s X is an actual, accepted symbol outside the context of the show. It is a symbol (generally) of cipher: X is the typical algebraic symbol for an unknown quantity. Yuno is this in two ways: she is the main character, and thus a kind of tablet over which the audience writes their own experience; she is also learning who she is, on a kind of voyage of discovery, and thus does not have a fixed identity yet. She’s also the most typical person in the group of girls, with no special skill or strange personality quirks. She is Everyman. Miyako is pretty weird, though. Cats are typically assumed to be independent, and Miyako is usually defined in this way, by the show and the other characters (referring back to the episode I first mentioned, it finally focuses on how cats are, indeed independent, and that Miyako understands this). She’s often portrayed sleeping on the roof, covered in stray cats. That and her greedy hunger are more readily-identifiable earmarks of cat-hood, but they serve to buttress the main point of her independence and oddity.
The show as a whole needs these consistent, almost-habitual signifiers to underline one of its main points: the effects of people on our lives. In memory a person is often reduced down to a bare few lines, an image or two, and Hidamari does this quite carefully and deliberately. The time of the show is rigidly (painfully) fixed: once school is over for these girls, they will go somewhere else. They are linked by living in the same tiny apartment building, rather than being students together, but the apartments are meant for students of the school. They will leave. Half the group will graduate a year before the other, and they will be separated. All that will remain are the images they each leaves behind for the others, footprints rather than selves. It seems appropriate, then, that they are all artists, creating images of events to be remembered later. The show charts a course of four people interweaving their lives for a short time and creating hundreds of memories that will be all that remains — so they get a head start on the process by turning themselves to symbols before their time, turning to symbols for us as well as one another.
And to add on to that comment about Miyako, I’d say that she’s the character in the series least restrained by societal norms and conventions. Throughout the series, her outbursts and her mischief demonstrate this along with her unbounded creativity which she conveys through her quick, oftentimes abstract sketches that only she can see. It’s this independent mindset that makes her the most feral of the lot, thereby emphasizing the appropriateness of the paw mark further, but it’s also the reason why I’m convinced that she’s the genius of the four when it comes to art.
Yes, to all of the above. I meant to talk more about her art, thanks for bringing that up. I would go so far as to say that (illustrations for Sae’s books notwithstanding) Miyako is the one who might end up as a career artist. I don’t think that’s even what the others want out of life.
After Miyako gives Yuno the nick-name Yunocchi, you occasionally see Yuno represented as: (small-tsu)-X. The small-tsu is a typographic convention in Japanese for representing a doubled consonant. X is, among other things, the Greek letter chi, turning the in-show convention into a multilingual pun.
I was always interested in those few moments when Yuno’s X turns into an O, though I can’t remember the circumstances exactly. O is the “correct” to X’s “incorrect,” or the omicron to X’s chi, to throw out a few probably-irrelevant interpretations. One way of looking at it, I suppose, is that the O has more in common with the symbols of the other girls, particularly Miyako and Hiro’s, both of which include circles. Maybe it’s evidence that people are prone to revise the symbols they choose to represent themselves based on the symbols they choose to represent others, whether consciously or subconsciously (I’m thinking subconsciously, as Yuno never seems to be aware of it when her hairband turns into an O). In any case, the characters become so tied to their symbols that the change of a symbol, however momentary, immediately evokes in me a sense of deep change in the character herself.
Before x365 had begun, I tried myself to do a character study of the main characters by using a single shot (or two) which I felt exemplified each character the best. I like how you distill that even further by showing how even symbols can be enough, if used in the right context, to describe the characters.
Though looking at it, our descriptions of Hiro are pretty different. :P
My thoughts coincide with yours regarding Sae and Yuno, but as for the other two…
The cat paw interpretation actually makes a whole lot of sense. Up until now I was thinking more of a general “animal-paw” idea behind Miyako’s symbol – indicating possibly her perpetual hunger and also tendency to appear as a rather impulsive character, a “creature of instinct”, if you will.
The octopus-hair interpretation is pretty interesting. My initial gut reaction to it was that I thought the frazzly tentacles indicated more of a “touchy-feely” personality, maybe with a bit of sensuality, noted with regards to Hiro’s warmth as well as love of food.
@thebign @vendredi: Other interpretations are certainly viable. What I included, concerning the characters specifically, represents either what I *consider* to be pretty simple and obvious and my personal interpretations. Hiro is certainly touchy-feely, for example, as evidenced by her hair (not the symbol of same) wagging onto screen at times like tentacles.
The main thrust of the essay comes right at the end, I’m afraid — at least I didn’t include it in a footnote like Freud. All the other stuff just makes up (hopefully interesting) *stuff* with which to back that up. :)
In a sense, this is the kind of posts that makes me jealous of English majors — I wish I the analysis skills or the insight for this kind of work. I will be looking forward to your other analysis!
[...] SHAFT certainly has a penchant for picking up on animal motifs or using other symbolic stand-ins for characters; a long time back Cuchlann over at SuperFanicom put up a post on signifiers in Hidamari Sketch: http://superfani.com/?p=3446 [...]
[...] The Architecture of Signifiers [...]