Framed to Perfection VIII

AKIRA (1988)

Director: Katsuhiro Ôtomo

Cinematographer: Katsuji Misawa

I guess it’s pretty easy to lineup a nice shot in animation. Or is it?! I suppose with live action, if you’re not happy with what you see, you can just pick your camera up and move it slightly to the left or to the right. But, with animation, you have to draw the whole damn picture over from the start.

While some pictures can tell a thousand words, this eerie moment, in the soon-to-be-remade masterpiece, beautifully says nothing at all.

But there’s so much going on.

If you asked an uninitiated soul to describe the shot to you, all they could say is: “Uhhh, I dunno, it’s some creepy-looking kid at night looking at the camera with a streetlight in the background”, which would be fair. However, in the reality of the film, it’s a moment of stillness amidst utter chaos.

The full description would be: It’s a shot of a prematurely-aging boy, who has found himself a scientific test subject for the government. The boy is on the run from his violently-determined captors, who are attempting to harness super-human abilities amongst a group of small children held in a fortress-like daycare centre. The boy has just witnessed his rebel father being gunned down by the police, in the most shocking of many shocking moments in the film. While fleeing to safety, the boy encounters a teenage biker gang, one of whom accidentally nearly runs him down, but the subject’s burgeoning psychic powers blows up the bike and injures the young gang member, thereby unlocking the teenager’s own psychic powers. The injured teenager’s friend, our eventual-hero Kaneda, notices the odd-looking boy and the two become locked in eye-contact. As the disquieting moment continues, searchlights from police or military helicopters, that are there to recapture the boy, begin to drop in the background.

Now that’s a whole-fucking-lot of background information to practically nothing at all. I can’t quite work out whether that’s better or worse though: an image that says nothing at all, but has a lot going on around it; or an image that says so much, without saying anything at all. I suppose they both have their merits, artistically speaking.

This marks my gentle return to posting after a difficult alcoholic relapse last week, so I thought I’d make it somewhat easy for myself. If you can count this as “easy”. While I’m over the hangover and DTs, I’m still rather traumatised by events, so still need some time to heal emotionally. Still, it’s nice to get back to doing stuff, rather than just wallowing in self-destruction and pity.

I have some ideas for differently themed posts to come, so keep an eye out for those. One music writeup and, erm, well I guess that’s it.

For now!

Do stay in touch, darlings.

Toodles!