The animated films of Kansai artistMika Seike (清家美佳, b. 1975) are a rare treat. Information abouther is even harder to come by as she has very little web presence. As far as I am aware, Face to Face(Omukaisan/お向かいさん, 2007) is the most recent animated workreleased by Seike. As in her previousfilms, she uses scanned objects and photographs of her actors (in this caseNatsuko Miyata and Yoshiro Togami) for the basic forms of her animation, whichshe manipulates, colours, and animates on her computer. As in her previous films, the people andbackgrounds in Face to Face have a grey, textured tone similar to that ofnewsprint. In contrast to the grey andblack of the human forms, elements of the natural world, such as leaves,butterflies, and flowers have been vividly coloured.
A female hand enters from screenleft and puts a green leaf down on a flat surface and it grows roots andtransforms into a small tree that leans to the left. Then a male hand enters from screen right andplaces a red leaf on the tree. This leafsprouts into a branch giving the tree a more balanced shape. The camera then cuts to a wider angle and wesee that the surface on which the tree is growing is not earthen, but a smallwooden card table. A man and woman sitat the table, hands on their laps, heads bent forward in rapt concentration asif they were playing chess with one another.
The woman raises her head, and agreen leaf pops out of her mouth, like a ticket out of a vending machine andshe places it on the tree, causing a new branch to form. The man does the same with a red leaf. And so the “game” continues, with the man andwoman staring intently at one another across the branches of the tree. Their faces have a rough quality to them asif they were made out of corrugated paper.
When the tree is full with entangledbranches of green and red, one of the green leaves suddenly pops off the treeand begins to fall. The man lookssurprised and the woman’s expression suggests that she is crestfallen by this –her eyes lower to watch it fall. Whenthe green leaf touches the table, it begins growing into a vine which rapidlywraps itself around the woman’s neck and head. Another leaf comes out of her mouth and she places it on the tree. As the green leaves grow higher, close upsshow us that the leaves are now almost blocking out eye contact between thewoman and man.
Two red leaves fall to the groundand transform into vines that wrap themselves around the neck and face of theman. Another red leaf comes out of hismouth, but instead of placing it on the tree, he plants it on the woman’s sideof the table, where it grows into a red-leafed vine that wraps around thewoman. She opens her mouth and a greenvine grows out of it, wrapping itself around the man’s face. He releases another red leaf, but instead ofplanting it, holds it up defiantly between their lines of vision and ittransforms into a red flame. He sets thevine alight, and the flame travels, as if up a dynamite cable, to the woman’smouth. Consuming the flame causes asmall stone to fall out of the woman’s mouth. She then raises her head and a stone shoots out of her mouth, hittingthe man on his forehead.
The woman looks over the man’sshoulder at a butterfly fluttering past the window, set against a red sky. Her gaze then shifts to the floor, wherethere are three stones – suggesting that this has happened before. She then removes the vines from herface. She walks to the window to peeroutside. As she does so, the redbutterfly comes to greet her on the windowsill and a rumble of thunder can beheard. Outside, there are some of flower-boxes – some full of colour, some empty – and a giant stone appears to have fallen atsome point on the ground causing fissures in the concrete. The woman’s gaze follows the butterfly as itsoars into the sky, joining other butterflies against a ruddy sky. This establishing shot reveals a landscape ofdull grey apartment buildings, each with flowerboxes giving the scene somecolour. In some of the apartment windowsother people can be seen sitting at tables performing the same ritual ofplanting leaves on tables.
As the butterflies continue theirsoaring, the sound of leaves rustling in the wind joins the low rumble of adistant thunderstorm. Eventually, thebutterflies plant themselves on the floor of a small wood of red-leafed trees,causing another red-leafed tree to sprout. This tree also produces a fruit, out of which is born another butterfly.
The butterfly flies to the woman andlands on her hand, then journeys into the sky. The camera pulls back to reveal that the urban landscape seems to bewalled. The camera pulls back further toshow that these walls are actually the walls of a box that juts out from thechest of the man. Back inside theapartment, the woman returns to the table. The sky is now green and the red butterfly has joined them. The man looks down, then removes the vinesfrom himself, stands and closes the box into his chest, as if it were a bureaudrawer. He walks to gaze out the windowon the opposite side of the room, where a green butterfly lands on the windowsill. Between the apartments out thiswindow is a much less bleaker scene: agarden full of greenery and colour. Somepurple butterflies plant themselves in the grass causing a stone to grow out ofthe earth. The green butterfly returnsto the man who looks at it intently before watching it fly away again. The camera then pulls back to reveal more ofthis garden community, and then to show that it too is inside a box, but thisone is jutting out of the woman’s chest. When she closes it into her chest, a green butterfly escapes from it andjoins the red butterfly on the tree on the table. The red butterfly then lands on the woman’sforehead, then enters the woman’s mouth.
Inside the woman, the butterfly flies downwardsand arrives in the garden where the man is gazing out the window. It plants itself in the ground in front ofthe man and sprouts into a red-leafed tree. The green butterfly then flies to the man’s forehead, then into hismouth and appears on the stormy side of the house, where it plants itself inthe empty flower-box. Unlike the redbutterfly, which sprouted a tree of its own colour, the tree that the greenbutterfly creates has both green and red leaves. The man returns to the table and the couplestare at each other over the original tree. Each pulls a leaf from their mouths and plants them on the tree, causingbutterflies to emerge – the red butterfly lands on the woman’s forehead and thegreen on the man’s forehead. As thecamera pulls silently away, we see the butterflies then enter their mouthsagain. The camera continues to pullback, out of the window. The finalimage is of the man and woman, framed in a window, staring at each other overthe green and red tree on the table.
Seike’s characters inhabit amonochrome world and the only signs of nature – the leaves and the butterflies –seem to represent communication between men and women. But, instead of being a beautiful organicprocess, the relationship between the two sexes has been reduced to a game ofstrategy. It is a bleak vision of themodern world with the vibrant butterflies being the only signs of a possibletransformation of the relationship into something more beautiful.
