AKIRA: How To Animate Light

[0:02]Unlike in live action cinematography, lighting in animation is something that's built totally from scratch. In other words, while in live action light is controlled, sometimes to brilliant effect. In animation, light is created. Of course, these days a lot of animated light is computer generated, meaning that virtual lights can be placed in 3D environments and actually play off solid surfaces like they would in real life. Like the control of actual lights, this too can be used to beautiful effect, but today I want to talk about lighting as it was done in traditional hand drawn cell animation, particularly in the groundbreaking anime film by Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira. Now Akira is well known for its painstaking animation, every frame of the film was composed with the closest attention to detail and color. And that gives it an unmatched richness and soul. For this reason, Akira is also a film that's been painstakingly picked over and analyzed by others. But one thing I haven't heard much about is the way that lighting is used by the filmmakers, because I see the film's many lights, their different qualities and textures, as a powerful motif and symbol and a vital element of its genius. The celluloids and backgrounds must still be photographed by the master camera in technicolor. Here the operator puts a Donald Duck celluloid on top of a background as the overhead camera exposes one frame of film. Like I said, Akira was a film made in the cell animation style developed in the first half of the 20th century, which involves drawing and painting onto transparent slides and layering them over a background. Frames composed like this were photographed and strung together to create the animation. This 2D traditional style coupled with the tropes of anime means that the light in Akira is quite specific and pronounced. The lines between shadow and light are distinct and evocative in the same way that film noir lighting is. And like in film noir, light in Akira is intimately connected to the city at night. This, for example, is the very first shot after the opening credits, a flickering neon sign for the neighborhood bar where Canada is waiting for his friends. Nothing could more concisely communicate the rundown, dystopic feeling of the future Tokyo Otomo is going to present us with in the very next shot and throughout the film. Indeed, this is a city as sordid, romantic and multifarious as the lights that slash across its million surfaces to make a delicate hole. A city where the disenfranchised young mark their presence and their personalities with the streaks of light that their motorcycles leave behind. A city where authority is as much a blinding spotlight as it is a gun or a badge. Otomo has said that he wanted Tokyo itself to be a major character in Akira, and one of the ways he flushes this out is with light, particularly neon. Neon has a special significance for both Tokyo and the Cyberpunk genre. It is the bitter but beautiful light that signifies both the colorful radiance and the gaudy consumerism of modernity, the dark dystopic side of which remains Cyberpunk's basic focus. Tokyo, for its part, has been a cultural hub for neon signage ever since 1957 when the Totsuko company unveiled its giant 30 ft neon billboard in the Ginza district, revealing its new name, Sony. Since then, the signs have proliferated, becoming a signature, even a tourist attraction of Tokyo's nightscape. And novels like William Gibson's Neuromancer, films like Blade Runner, took the vivid and suggestive qualities of Tokyo's neon as their palette for a bleak, tech saturated future. Akira continues this tradition, but here the neon quality infuses all the light sources of the film, both inside and out. There's the neon on the buildings, but there's also the neon bright screens that shine in the characters' faces and the neon control panels of bright primary colors. The spotlights that rove in the sky are like giant neon tubes being waved back and forth. Machine gunfire is a barrage of neon streaks. Even the sunlight shining in through the windows has a bluish neon quality to it. In Neo Tokyo and its inhabitants aren't so much lit as caught, caught in this huge incandescent web that serves only the mandates of money, capital. In that web, government is as impotent as a biker gang made up of disaffected children. It's funny that industry, business is notably absent from the film's plot, because its DNA seems to be in the corners of everything. I mean, blink and you might miss a news reader at the beginning of the movie shining from another flickering light source, reporting riots of unemployed workers after tax reforms. And maybe this is why Tetsuo, at once the protagonist and the antagonist of the film, a boy who gains extraordinary psychic power, so often produces a disruption in the light around him. Whether it's in his own mind or in the form of an explosion or in the aura around him, even in the vibrant dancing wavelength that his brain patterns create. Indeed, psychic power, most fully realized in Tetsuo and his counterpoint Akira, represent the only kind of power that can have an effect on the state of things in Neo Tokyo. This is perhaps the reason that the protesters turn to Akira for their salvation, because even when the authorities turn their biggest spotlight on him, a mega satellite laser that takes the name of our sun, he comes out the victor. In the end, the salvation represented in Tetsuo comes at the cost of ruin, a catastrophe which consumes Neo Tokyo in the form of a giant ball of light. One single uniform white light that erases the countless artificial lights of the city. Otomo seems to suggest that there's some freedom in this, some rebirth as true sunlight wipes across the city in patches. When you have to draw light 24 times in every second of a two-hour movie, it must be the case that you gain a new appreciation for how it can tell a story of its own. And that's what Otomo and his crew have done in Akira. Light is layered into the story like it's layered into the animation cells, pointing toward meaning behind the film at the corners of it and illuminating from different angles the characters and their place in this neon world. In other words, Akira is a great example of how you animate light.