Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Neo Tokyo
1989 · Rintaro · Neo Tokyo on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how the camera style changes with each segment. (camera)
Rintaro shoots his frame story flat and frontal like a stage, Kawajiri twists his race into wide angle distortion and hard shadow, and Otomo holds a static, classical perspective.
Payoff: Three directors share one anthology but never share one way of looking at anything.
Notice how harshly light splits faces into shadow. (light)
In the racing segment, Kawajiri lights faces so hard that each one resolves into one lit plane and one black one, with almost no gray between them.
Payoff: The lighting turns every face into a mask before you know anything about the person wearing it.
Listen for how differently each segment fills the silence. (sound)
A synthesizer rock score by Mickie Yoshino runs under all three tales, but each segment adds its own layer, engine roar and sudden quiet, or the clank of machinery.
Payoff: The music unifies the anthology while the sound design keeps insisting the three worlds are not the same one.
Notice how unlike each other the three worlds look. (setting)
One segment builds a circus tent full of grotesques, one an arena of scaffolding and floodlight, and one a muddy jungle construction site strung with cable.
Payoff: Each world is imagined by a different hand, and the anthology never pretends otherwise.
Watch how differently each segment animates a face. (performance)
One director gives a salaryman visible sweat and fatigue, another keeps a racer's face nearly frozen through every scene, and a third lets a child react mostly in silence.
Payoff: Animated acting has just as many styles as live performance does, only drawn instead of filmed.
Once you have seen it
Notice the last shot placing Sachi's own screen in the void. (structure)
The frame story ends by pulling back to show that Sachi's whole adventure, screen and all, has itself been playing on a screen drifting in space.
Payoff: Spectatorship turns out to be the anthology's real subject, the watching was the trap all along.
Notice how little Zack Hugh's face changes before he loses. (performance)
Kawajiri animates the champion as an unchanging mask through the whole race, right up to the moment a phantom competitor finally destroys him.
Payoff: The mask makes his fall land as a mechanism failing, not a person feeling anything.
Notice Tsutomu never learns the contract was reinstated. (structure)
Tsutomu destroys the rebellious machine and traces the power line back, but the film cuts away before he discovers the deposed government has already been restored.
Payoff: The joke lands on him, not with him, since his one victory is silently made pointless.
Carry this in: Watch each segment's world as its own film, then watch how the frame story ties three strangers' visions together.