Satoshi Kon - Editing Space & Time - YouTube

Hi my name is Tony and this is Every Frame a Painting.

Today I’m going to talk about one of the greats of the last twenty years

the Japanese filmmaker Satoshi Kon.

Even if you don’t know his work you have certainly seen some of his images.

He is an acknowledged influence on both Darren Aronofsky and Christopher Nolan

And he has a fan base that includes just about everyone who loves animation.

In one decade, he made four feature films and one TV series

all of them amazingly consistent, all of them about

how modern people cope with living multiple lives.

Private, public. Offscreen, onscreen. Waking, dreaming.

If you’ve seen his work you’ll recognize this blurring of reality and fantasy.

Today, I’m only going to focus on one thing: his excellent editing.

So as an editor, I’m always looking for new ways to cut

especially from outside the realm of live-action.

Kon was one of the most fascinating. His most noticeable habit

was matching scene transitions.

I've mentioned before that Edgar Wright does this for visual comedy

<i>--Scott! --What?

It's part of a tradition that includes The Simpsons

and Buster Keaton.

Kon was different. His inspiration was the movie version of

Slaughterhouse-Five directed by George Roy Hill.

<i>--I can always tell, you know, when you've been time-tripping

This is more of a sci-fi tradition that includes Philip K Dick

and Terry Gilliam

But even among peers, Kon pushed this idea pretty far.

Slaughterhouse-Five has basically three types of scene transitions:

a general match cut

an exact graphic match

and intercutting two different time periods, which mirror each other.

Kon did all of these things, but he would also

rewind the film, cross the line into a new scene,

zoom out from a TV, use black frames to jump cut,

use objects to wipe frame, and I don't even know what to call this.

To show you how dense this gets, the opening four minutes of Paprika

has five dream sequences and every single one is connected by a match cut.

Number six is not connected by a match cut,

but there is a graphic match within the scene.

Just for comparison, the opening fifteen minutes of Inception

has four interconnected dreams. Number of match cuts: one.

<i>--What is the most resilient parasite?

Cuts like this aren’t uncommon, but they’re definitely not something

most filmmakers build a style out of.

Usually you see them as one-off effects. Two of the most famous examples:

Oh and this one because it's amazing

Kon’s work was about the interaction between dreams, memories,

nightmares, movies, and life.

The matching images were how he linked the different worlds.

Sometimes he would stack transitions back to back,

so you’d be getting used to one scene before you got thrown into the next.

All of this made him really surprising to watch.

You could blink and miss that you’re in a different scene.

Even when he wasn't dealing with dreams, Kon was an unusual editor.

He loved ellipses and would often just jump past part of the scene.

So you’d see a character look at a key.

You expect to see her take it, but that doesn’t happen.

The scene just moves on. Later on, in a different scene:

Or you’d see a man jumping out of a window and fade out.

We’d then cut to a scene we didn’t understand, reveal that this is a dream,

back out, and then show the conclusion of the previous scene.

Even things like murder, he would do the build-up and cut away.

But he would show us the gory result.

I particularly love the way he handled character death.

Here, an old man dies and the windmills of his hut stop.

Then it turns out he’s alive, so they start up again.

When we finish the scene, the windmill shot doesn’t repeat,

but you’ll notice they aren’t moving, implying he is dead.

Kon also had a habit of starting scenes in close-up and you’d figure out

where you were as the scene went on.

Every once in a while, he’d use an establishing shot.

And then reveal that it was actually a point-of-view. So without you noticing,

he brought you into the character’s world.

He was constantly showing one image and then revealing that it wasn’t

what you thought it was.

Your experience of space and time became subjective.

He could also edit in ways that a lot of live-action filmmakers could not.

During an interview, Kon said that he didn’t want to direct live action

because his editing was too fast.

For example:

This shot of the bag is only 6 frames. For a comparable moment in live action

that was 10 frames. Or how about this insert of a note?

10 frames. But in live-action...

49 frames. Kon felt that as an animator, he could draw less information

in the shot, so your eye could read it faster.

You can actually see someone like Wes Anderson doing this in live-action

removing visual information so his inserts “read" faster.

It’s worth noting: you can actually cut much faster than this, but the images

pretty much become subliminal. Some of these shots are 1 frame.

None of this was for cheap effect. Kon felt that we each experience

space, time, reality and fantasy at the same time as individuals

and also collectively as a society. His style was an attempt to depict this

in images and sound. In the course of ten years, he pushed animation in ways

that aren’t really possible in live action.

Not just elastic images, but elastic editing -- a unique way of moving from

image to image, scene to scene. And he was helped in this crusade by

the studio Madhouse, who did some of their finest work on his films.

If you want to see a perfect summation of his work, I present his final film:

a one-minute short about how we feel when we get up in the morning

This is Ohayou

<i>--Ohayou

Farewell, Satoshi Kon.