Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Neo Tokyo
1989 · Rintaro · Neo Tokyo on Sightlines
A girl and her cat step through the face of an old clock, and the floor goes away. That is how Rintaro's "Labyrinth Labyrinthos" begins, and the rest of Neo Tokyo hangs from that moment. Sachi doesn't quite fall. She drifts. Figures turn to silhouette against saturated fields of color, the scale lurches, and depth comes from flat cutout planes sliding past one another rather than from perspective. She hardly speaks. She looks, and things happen in front of her.
Then she sits down in a circus tent in front of a screen, and on that screen play the film's two other stories.
First, a word on the name. The Japanese title means "Labyrinth Tales." The American distributor Streamline renamed it Neo Tokyo after the city in Katsuhiro Ōtomo's Akira, although none of the three stories is set in Tokyo. The original title is the honest one. This is a film about getting lost inside images, and about who does the watching.
Gilles Deleuze divided cinema into two broad regimes. In the first, which he called the movement-image, a character takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the editing is built to carry that chain from seeing to doing. In the second, the time-image, the chain breaks. Characters end up in situations they can't act on, and they become what Deleuze called seers: people who watch and endure instead of intervening. Sachi is drawn as a seer. Atsuko Fukushima animates her with a light, almost silent-film physicality, a child who reacts rather than speaks. Rintaro links his images by dissolve and association instead of continuity, and Deleuze has a name for that too, the dream-image, where one picture slides into the next by resemblance rather than cause, the way things change shape in sleep. The labyrinth itself is what Deleuze calls an any-space-whatever: a space with no fixed ground, which has stopped being a stage for action. Nothing there needs doing.
Why does this lens help? Because it changes how the anthology looks. Without it, Neo Tokyo is three shorts in one box. With it, the film puts a seer in front of two stories about action and lets her watch what happens to action at the end of the 1980s. So the question to bring to each story is what has become of the hero.
In Yoshiaki Kawajiri's "The Running Man", action is still running flat out. Zack Hugh has won the Death Circus for a decade. Low angles. Driver's-eye view. Whip pans across the arena. The lens warps barrel-wide, except there is no lens: Kawajiri draws the distortion by hand, re-creating the low-mounted wide-angle chase coverage George Miller filmed optically in Mad Max 2. From Death Race 2000 he takes the televised bloodsport and pares it down to a single expository device, the retrospective voiceover of Bob Stone. Speed is built from smeared drawings, streaked backgrounds and held cels.
And yet the action-image buckles under its own pressure. The light is so hard that faces split into a lit plane and a black one. Deleuze traces this to German expressionism, where the gradient of light and shadow gives things a strange, inorganic life of their own. Hugh's face barely moves across his years of winning. It is a mask, which is the point. The psychic force that destroys his rivals is pure drawn light, airbrushed glows and backlit effects cels, a power-quality in Deleuze's sense: an intensity shown for its own sake, not as a tool in a plot. As the shots shorten and hallucinated imagery stacks up, the race breaks down into graphic pulse. Engine roar gives way to sudden near-silence whenever the telekinetic arrives. Kawajiri's Madhouse colleagues had already rendered psychic force as buckling architecture and burning air in Harmagedon. Here that force is squeezed into a single wordless contest. It still looks like an action movie. It plays more like a fever.
Then Ōtomo takes the opposite route and slows everything down.
"Construction Cancellation Order" puts us at Facility 444, a jungle building site in the fictional Aloana Republic. Rain, mud, cabling, prefabricated housing. A salaryman, Tsutomu Tsujioka, has been sent to shut the robots down. Ōtomo frames it in strict single-point perspective, with wide, mostly static setups and flat, unglamorous light. The camera holds; the machines move. Every frame is crowded with information, a closed system you could study like a technical drawing. This is the clearest action setup in the film: a man, a situation, a job to do.
Watch his body, though. Takashi Nakamura, who went on to direct the animation on Akira, gives Tsujioka sweat, fatigue and the small deflating gestures of a middle manager losing an argument to a machine. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, called this the gest: a posture that shows a social relation. Before Tsujioka has finished a sentence, his shoulders have told you about the company that sent him. Ōtomo uses long takes with comic timing, letting a beat sit so the exasperation can land, while the site's constant clanking plays the antagonist. This is the crisis of the action-image in miniature. The man perceives clearly and knows his task, but what he can do is no longer enough for what he faces.
So one story pushes action until it turns into pure intensity, and the other deflates it into a tired, very human gesture. Between them sits a child who only watches.
Rintaro built that frame out of an old lineage. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari gave him the fairground barker's tent as a portal and depth staged with painted flats whose vanishing points can't exist. From Mushi Production, where he came up, and from Belladonna of Sadness, he took the economy of panning across held illustrations as a shot in itself. His own Galaxy Express 999 supplied the receding corridors and slow, ceremonial processions, here moved onto a clockwork carnival.
What the film did for animation as an art has to do with that range. The OVA market of the mid-eighties paid for work too short and too strange for television or theaters, and it let three directors with strong signatures set three grammars side by side in fifty minutes. All of it was photographed on 35mm cel under a rostrum camera, near the limit of what the photochemical process could do, and it has a physical grain that later, cleaner digital pipelines don't reproduce.
So when you watch it, keep half an eye on Sachi. Each time the film comes back to her, you are sitting where she sits, in front of a screen, watching heroes who can't quite act. Then ask what kind of watcher you are.
Concepts in play
- the seer (voyant) — Sachi, animated by Atsuko Fukushima with a near-silent physicality, a child who reacts rather than speaks, sits in the circus tent watching the other two segments on a screen
- dream-image (onirosign) — Rintaro's frame story proceeds by dissolve and association rather than continuity; Sachi passes through a clock face into a space of shifting scale
- any-space-whatever — The labyrinth beyond the clock: a space with no fixed ground, flattened cutout planes and lateral drift instead of perspective, a carnival no longer serving as a setting for action
- expressionism — Kawajiri's chiaroscuro so hard that faces resolve into a lit plane and a black one; lineage to Caligari's painted flats in the frame story
- power-quality (qualité-puissance) — The psychic energy in 'The Running Man' rendered as pure drawn light (airbrushed glows, backlit effects cels, high-contrast masks), marked on the soundtrack by abrupt near-silence
- the frame as closed set — Ōtomo's rigorous single-point perspective and wide static setups at Facility 444, crowded with cabling, mud and mechanical business: 'the camera holds; the machines move'
- the gest — Takashi Nakamura's animation of Tsujioka's sweat, fatigue and small deflating gestures of a middle manager losing an argument to a machine, held in long takes with comic timing
- crisis of the action-image — Tsujioka has a clear task (shut down the robots) but his actions fall short against the site's clanking persistence; Kawajiri's race, meanwhile, dissolves from action into superimposed graphic pulse