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.

I’m afraid here’s where I crap out for a day.  First, I got these out of order — this one should be ten, and the one from yesterday should be nine.  Second, I have to go to bed so I can drive nine hours tomorrow.  This one ends up being pretty content-light anyway.

So.  It’s one more run-through for “old new things.”  This time, it was seeing more Hidamari Sketch.  Oh, I’m sorry, Hidamari Sketch x365.  Hidamari, like Toradora! after it, marks a kind of reprieve from things; it’s twenty-some minutes of gentle happiness and amusement, like what I hear people feel when they hug puppies.  I would feel it when I hug my bunny, but my bunny hates being held and kicks, scratches, bites, whatever it takes to free itself, like some sort of tuxedoed Scottish warrior.

So, yeah.  Go Hidamari!

You could mix into this one my pleasure at finding the manga at a bookstore.  I didn’t know (at that time) it was out in America yet.

After Aria showed me the light, I figured I’d give slice of life one more chance, and Hidamari Sketch, which I had attempted previously, seemed a good enough place to start. I still don’t think I get it entirely — I feel like I’ve gone snorkeling in a body of water that warrants a submarine — but at least I enjoy it enough now to keep at it. And anyway, there’s plenty to love about Hidamari Sketch. The artistic direction, the quirky characters, the humor — oh, the humor.

Moment #10 earns its lofty position by being the single funniest anime moment of the year for me. I don’t know if it’s all that funny in its own right, but it caught me off guard and left me in tears. You might say it’s masterful timing on the part of the writers.

In a nutshell, Yuno and Miyako are looking for a subject for their drawing class, and they come upon a bust of the (in)famous Marcus Junius Brutus. Brutus showing up in anime at all made this scene immediately funny to me. But what truly made the scene was Miyako’s doing exactly what I would do in this situation:

I lol’d. I rofl’d. I daresay I even lmao’d.

And after watching that scene another half dozen times, I finally moved on to Miyako’s ordeal in carrying the weighty Brutus.

This is one of those scenes that resonates with me at just the right pitch, that seems written specifically for me. It’s Pontifus-service. Of course I’m interested in Brutus; Julius Caesar aside (actually, Julius Caesar considered, I guess), he hangs out in the mouth of Satan in the Inferno, and I’m positively bookish, so I like that stuff. And of course I want to see characters in anime, which I love, exploit classic literature, which I also love, for the sake of humor. It’s like they knew, and scenes that call into question the psychic abilities of their writers are some of my favorites.