WARNING: Long Post About Stuff, Not Spoilers Though
Marco 2 (Redux) +
A discussion of visual world building.
There's one thing I totally failed to notice or care about the first time I watched this episode,
the sense of space and location. Which is just an overly-long way of saying: they make Marco's home town feel like a real, defined location.
The way this is achieved is quite simple, really, but it's not something you see done very often in tv anime productions.
The director shows us how Marco gets home. Not in the normal manner, where we see a character at the school gates, then they walk over a bridge or something as they chat and then they're home. No, we see
the whole route. Perhaps I should demonstrate a visual idea, y'know, visually! See below (
click to make it larger!)
It's strange how, when I was watching it I totally failed to notice this, but as soon as you look at the picture it becomes so obvious. The whole thing is is kind of odd because it's so
unnecessary. It's very important that you cram as much as you can into the time you have allotted, especially with anime episodes being around twenty minutes long. Usually you'd want to focus on say, the characters, or the plot, or some action. Not just...streets, for like a minute. That's "boring". However, in reality this lengthy sequence (and many others that I haven't got to hand) serve two very important reasons.
1) We see what kind of world Marco goes to school in compared to the world he lives in. Note the people, their clothes, their attitudes, the condition of the buildings, etc.
2) We start to feel like we're part of Genoa (the city where Marco lives). There's a tangible sense of the geography of the location. Places are connected as if they
really existed. You feel as if you might know your way around a few of these streets now. This is of course useful in pulling you, the viewer, into the world of the story. That's why they resist breaking from this powerful, but simple set of shots. Even in the very last shot, taken from inside the door to Marco's building, you can see the water pump from the previous shot. You know
exactly where you are in this fictional world. It's very neat.
A lot of shows don't bother with this. It's animated, so we can just have one scene here at at a school, another scene here at a shop, another scene here at a house. Nothing is done to link them or make it feel like part of a cohesive world. It's just a load of sets.
I was too poor as a student to afford them and couldn't bring myself to pirate the show, I was loving it too much.
