IT’S ALL ON THE DETAILS: Eizouken crafting an incredible chase scene.

If there is one thing anyone can recognize about a Hayao Miyazaki work is that he is incredible at mapping a setting. While I had an understanding of this looking at a number of his concept art books I have to give credit to Digibro for making an outstanding video on How Miyazaki Maps a Setting. Hayao Miyazaki always makes sure that each and every environment where the characters are located has a clear sense of scale, direction, design and functionality. For example in Mononoke Home (Princess Mononoke), by having our main character Ashitaka travel through the scene from the outside where they host the walls to when we go inside and we see the shops, spend time in the men’s quarters where they eat and later we see him in the women’s area where they work the bellows. Miyazaki has a knack for keeping the character walking in the same direction as a means to guide the audience through a location as we see in Spirited away with Chihiro and Haku running through the pig stys and whine cellars up to the entrance of the building. Eizouken shows in its first episode how much Masaaki Yuasa appreciates the elements that makes Miyazaki so well loved among Ghibli fans and fans of film in general.

In the very first segment of the episode we see Asakusa scouring the the apartment house where she moved into looking for things to draw. With her exciting imagination and the innovation of the staff at Science Saru we see a very clear map of the entire location of the complex making it feel lived in. One thing that they establish early on is how our main character often references real life in order to evolve their own imagination. This is a concept that I greatly appreciate and will be coming back to often for I feel that one of the major weaknesses of anime and a lot of other media is when it tries way to hard to merely reference it’s native medium and doesn't hope to branch out adding levels of complexity. While this first segment of the story truly cements in the viewer how much Yuasa appreciates these principles it isn’t until 2 moments later on in the episode that we see it actually be applied.

In the scene where Mizusaki is being chased we see something that Miyazaki in alot of his earlier works is an absolute master of and that is the chase scene. One thing I remember growing up watching the likes of the Castle of Cagliostro, Laputa a Castle in the Sky and Sherlock Hound is that in all of Miyazaki’s chase scenes he utilizes the mechanisms of the setting to sell the believability of the absurdity. Situations will be surprising and often hilarious but we buy it because the elements in the setting are so well crafted. In this scene Yuasa displays it when Kanamori and Asakusa basically steal Mizusaki away from her father’s cronies and run away. First of all the position they all have is absolutely hilarious with one holding her legs and the other her arms as they hastily run into turning door that shuts close on the cronies chasing them. This is a simple gag but is still funny on levels I’m not sure I can explain now but bear with me. Then they run out and up a small flight of stairs and this is when the genius happens. As one of the cronies tries the pursue them up the stairs one of them pulls down one of the stage command ropes (if I forgot to mention the room were this is taking place is a stage). When Asakusa pulls it down a trap door opens and then the cronies evades it. She pulls another rope and the stage curtain comes down and right before he gets all the way up the stairs and she pulls that final rope the whole thing turns into a slide and he barrels down into the trap door. The thing that truly makes this incredible to me is how in the very beginning of the scene before anything I mentioned Kanamori and Asakusa entered the area through a lower level of the stage and you can see that there’s an even lower level below them. And so our minds already register the layout and set up in the room! Also the small action of having Asakusa pull the second rope and it fails lends itself a level of believability and realism because there was no way she was going to know every single element of the stage. Just small details like that in conjunction of the later scene where the three enter the coin laundry and you randomly see an air conditioner on top of the entrance really garners this world a sense of being lived in because it displays the overall sort of weird nature of humans and how we tend to do weird things. YUASA IS EASILY ONE OF THE BEST DIRECTORS EPISODE I CANNOT WAIT TO WRITE MORE ON IT!