The Hypernatural and Supernatural in Madlax -- continued

Fictional meaning information of the opening
Madlax starts with an opening part consisting of especially impressive theme song prior to the avant, contrary to the customary procedure of most anime shows. The opening music and its background video have attained a deliberately suggestive presentation of the latent subject of this challenging anime, which is one of the most successful among many anime works directed by Koichi Mashimo who deploys impressive video expressions by skillfully utilizing the music elements. It is the directing method preferred by Mashimo to present a variety of latent conceptual axes to build a background setting, by utilizing only physical image and sound effects, avoiding the use of narration that gives explicit conceptual information to the audience. The title shown at the opening is “Madlax”, in English notation. What appear to be a number of bullets are shooting across the opening screen, but the trajectories of them are hued each in different colors. A round ball hits against the forehead of a girl who turns around, and burst like a water droplet, the girl bends backward. But the girl dodges smoothly wiggling among the trajectories of a number of bullets, as if swimming in water.

The face of this girl is overlapped with the profile of a blonde boy, and another girl with a gun in her hand is fending off the bullets likewise poised in the air. The face of this girl also is overlapped with the front face of another young girl. The identity of these four main characters and the psychic relationships between them are supposed to construct the central axes of Madlax, which determine the subject of the story and the metaphysical meaning mechanism hidden in the anime world.

note:
Concerning the psychic relationships of the characters, an extremely sophisticated directing technique is executed so that it is not possible to confirm the overall picture of the perspective until the last episode of Madlax. The use of the term “psyche” in this paper is intended to reflect the meta-description strategy adopted in the anime, where elaborate under plots are stacked so as to construct a “meta-meaning” that is not perceivable until after performing repeated viewing.



But this core information will not be provided with the audience in organized definite form, contrary to the usual fictional convention. Not only their identities but also the name of each character will not be disclosed to the audience but piecemeal through a stack of accidental episodes. However, all of the important information is already provided metaphorically illustrated in this opening scene, through a symbolic image expression.

In fact, the directing strategy is reflected in the appearance of several other characters that have slipped casually into the background in silhouettes. Since the brain does not recognize anything other than conceptually recognized thing as existing object, mere visual units that are devoid of information such as name and genus quality are not easily to be perceived as a specific figure, even if they are explicitly shown in visual shape. Though exactly the same opening scene is shown at the beginning of the show every time of the broadcast, the conceptual information to be gained by each of the viewers from there, is not necessarily always the same. In accordance with the content of understanding obtained by the individual viewer out of the accumulation of details that the anime work gradually discloses through the progress of the story, complex multi-layered semantic construction expands irradiating myriads of possible specific perspectives, reflecting the individual deviation of each viewer’s mental formation that does not depend on a single temporal transitive factor. Exactly the same way, cornerstone information that may contract the cosmological constant of the fictional world of Madlax, are to be constructed as something amorphous gained subordinately through the interactive experience of the individual viewer who practices the act of observing the work.

The speculative perspectives themselves, which establish the fictional world of Madlax, are multi-layered and ambiguous, and vary in accordance with the preferences and interests of the viewer. Any objectively defined meaning will not be provided to the audience corresponding to the common physical description, in the guaranteed form that science premises as provisional, from the creator of the fictional world. The propensity can be pointed out in the manner of disclosure process of the names, not only of four of the main characters who appear in the opening but also of some other people who are associated closely with their existence. There is a fairly large temporal distance between the first appearance of the characters and the critical scene where their names and specialties are obtained together with the roles to be enacted in the story that reflect the work’s creative strategy. The same assertion can be applied to the other various details that are supposed to build the background setting of the fictional world. Viewers who are not endowed with the opportunity to acquire definitive information to recognize the outline of the fictional meaning, are obliged to arbitrarily accumulate fragmentary pieces of knowledge gathered from accidental scenes and conversations that are exchanged between the characters and from the extended background information, through the limited view points as mere bystanders, to recognize the roles that the characters play in the work, just as provisional meaning formed as subjective impression individually. It is because anime Madlax contains multiple genre concept axes that may establish it as a fictional work. In the case of a game, it has come to be an acknowledged fact, that the storyline varies in accordance with the combination of choices the game player makes, and the obtained fictional meaning also transforms branching in multiple endings. (note)

note:
I have pointed out the peculiarity of the fictional world deployed in games that have the function to irradiate the archetypal characteristics, in my study of the identity of fictional existences, “Summoning Magic and Individuality: Existence, phenomenon and Personality in Fate/stay night”, included in Existence, Phenomenon and Personality: Individuality in Anime, Game and Figurines, (Bokka-sha, 2014). In this study, I have considered the archetypal characteristics of the game world and argued the innovative accomplishment of its fictionality that assume the role of “player” to propel the story in interactive participation, breaking through the restrictions of passive observers as readers of literary works and viewers of visual works.


However, Koichi Mashimo adopted a unique directing strategy in Madlax, pioneering an ingenious technique that allows for many-worlds like ambiguity that reflects the fictional nature of games on the platform of anime.