Video Research
Why does anime inspire me so much?
intricate storytelling - which often blends between reality and dream worlds, which are really interesting to me and relatable to my work / personal life. They often touch upon the different lives we (normal, modern people) - online and offline, real and dreaming, onscreen and off screen.
What shots are associated with anime?
Long, still shots, as well as “pillow shots” which are random cutaways to objects in a scene such as a water bottle or a piece of litter. This gives the impression of the shot ‘breathing’ which feels so charismatic and charming about anime.
In anime we are also able to like in live action to jump cut and match cut between scenes. For example in Paprika we see a lot of ‘matching screen’ transitions. This is when you would cut from one scene of blood dripping onto the floor, to another scene which is occurring in an entirely different time/place however the scene matches and so they cut together seamlessly. Here is the example from the film.
Woman in alley way stumbles to find a wall she can lean against, wide shot, long shot
Blood drips from her onto the pipe she rests on, and we see this blood trickle down in a close up of the bottom of the pipe
Close up & matching scene cut to the blood dripping onto the floor, however this blood is not dripping from the pipe and the woman in the alleyway, but from a separate occasion which is clarified in the next shot
Where we see a character holding a knife covered in blood.
The way that these scenes connect is really smooth and clever, and if you blink you would miss out on the next scene, or the information that we have now transitioned to another scene. Paprika was developed by Satoshi Kon, and he also directed Perfect blue (1997). His shots have been copied and used in big movie names such as Requiem for a Dream (2000), Inception (2010), examples below.
This same technique is used in other cinema, for example it is used for visual comedy in the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World in the scene below. This movie is directed by Edgar Wright.
Kon has used this technique in multiple ways, exact graphic matches as shown before, as well as the two time periods which mirror each other. However he would take this idea and put it on steroids, and create really dense / intricate dream sequences (like in the intro to paprika) which are all connected by match cuts or graphic matches. You will recognise this in his work when you watch any of his works. He liked to link and stack transitions back to back, so the viewer would never be very comfortable with a scene before it would dramatically change to another one, and like I said earlier if you blink you might miss valuable information.
He does other stuff like jumping through scenes, for example doing a murder scene : he would show us the build up, skip the murder, and then show us the gore-ish aftermath.
This use of intricate editing, has a immense effect on the viewer, our relationship between space and time is so warped we don’t even know what we are watching. I like his movies because you have to watch them a few times, or think really carefully about what you are seeing to gain information from the shot. His films also read super fast, and watching them over makes me uniquely experience his film differently every time. His style of film and sound tries to interpret his idea that people all interpret the world differently. Our experience of fantasy, space, time, reality, is different person to person, but also collective. The way he moves from scene to scene is something I don’t see often in live-action movies. There is a relatable and nostalgic feeling to the imagery and I always have goosebumps from the editing, story telling, and artistry.
