Promising Places: Theology, Virtue & Anime
Photo by Anthony Aird on Unsplash
A few years ago, I stumbled upon the anime movie Children Who Chase Lost Voices, directed by Makoto Shinkai. The movie was a technicolour document about the transformative capacity of the encounter. The movie’s initial encounter with its protagonists led to the opening up of new worlds previously unseen.
This movie piqued my interest, and led to searching out more of Shinkai’s films, many of them much shorter. The turning point came when I watched his masterpieces The Place Promised in Our Early Days and 5cm Per Second. I became fascinated by Shinkai’s move towards contemplation and introspection, which is refreshing given anime’s tendency towards the explosive and the frenetic. In most of Shinkai’s movies, the protagonist are not as much engaging in actions (although they are) as delving in thought through their actions. It was, to put it mildly, a showcase of contemplation in action.
After watching his (then) latest movie, Your Name, a thought dawned on me that something other than contemplation was taking place in his films. I could not put my finger on it until I started giving a class in theological anthropology and got stuck into the theological virtues as laid out my Josef Pieper’s Faith, Hope, Love.
Key to Pieper’s thought about the theological virtues was his concept of the status viatoris, the status of the person on the way. Virtue is a recognition that we are yet to be complete, and this incompleteness puts us on a journey not only “through life”, but to a place that is promised.
The source of this promised place, Pieper tells us is a person that whom we encounter. Prompted by Shinkai, I expanded on this to theme to argue that this encounter opens up the person before us, but also puts a place in our horizon, a place that leaves us restless until we reach it.
It is precisely this restlessness that characterises many, if not all, of the protagonists in Shinkai’s movies, and it was a motif that refused to go away. The nexus between virtue, places and encounter demanded a teasing out.
My fascination with his movies led to me turning his corpus of films into a research project. The first manifestation of this was a talk at a small private library in Melbourne. Due to another big event occurring at the same time nearby, only 4 people showed up for my talk, though you still can hear the podcast.
The smallness of the crowd prompted me to find a more permanent format and a wider audience with which to leave this topic before moving onto the research projects I was meant to be doing. So naturally, what better way to spread one’s reach than to put it into a peer-reviewed publication in a journal?
I am pleased to say that I have successfully justified all that movie viewing! What began as a fascination with a director’s work has now made it into scholarly publication, thanks to the kind invitation of David Wilmington of the Petra Academy. The article is the first to roll off a special edition of the journal Religions, which is open access so the full article is available for download.
While readers might be interested in the anthropological focus of this post, they might also be interested in the eschatological focus of the previous post on electronic dance music.
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