Philosophy dabbler; anime ace.
How should we talk about animation? What distinguishes Japanese animation? And why do “I” like Japanese animation? These questions can be approached from many directions—culture, industry, aesthetics, production, communities, and more.
As someone who studies form and style, though, I want to approach them from a very particular angle: to show you how the study of form and style addresses such questions, and what makes it compelling. So let us begin with a shot—or, more precisely, a kind of shot, a way of composing the frame.
What is unusual about this shot? We can see that Dr. Romani is positioned in the lower-right corner, with a large expanse of empty space behind him. Compared with the space in front of his gaze, this space behind him occupies an enormous proportion of the image, yet the shot gives us no way to see what he is looking at. His gaze points forcefully offscreen. The composition itself is profoundly unbalanced.
Watch contemporary Japanese animation with this in mind, and you will surely notice how often this composition appears—
Another group of viewers—Kyoto Animation fans—may recognize it even more immediately as a composition that appears constantly in the studio’s work, used extensively by its directors, Naoko Yamada foremost among them:
We could supply more examples, but these are enough to establish that this is a very common composition in Japanese animation. It cuts across genres and studios, late-night anime and children’s shows; it does not belong to any single director. It is a widely used conventional technique. A question follows quite naturally: what is this composition called?
Here things become strange—it has no generally accepted name. More surprising still, if we look closely, this composition seems not to exist in any other cinematic tradition outside Japanese animation. We can find isolated exceptions, but, taken as a whole, in no other cinematic tradition has it become a convention or even enjoyed a passing vogue.
Why? Think about it, and this turns out to be a rather baffling problem. We are not talking about, say, a distorted perspective impossible in live action, a graphic style that would look strange in live action, or some wildly imaginative scene that is relatively easy to animate but would require expensive computer animation in a live-action film. This composition is not especially difficult to achieve in live action. A filmmaker who wants to use the edge of the frame for an expressive effect need only shift the camera slightly or crop the image afterward. Even problems with image quality at the edges can be dealt with. Yet it does not exist in live-action cinema.
Why Japanese animation?
This is the question this article investigates.
Defining Offset Framing
First, we need to give it a name. In the French film theorist Jacques Aumont’s Dictionary of Film Theory and Criticism, we find the concept of offset framing (décadrage), which the dictionary defines as framing that appears to result from a movement away from the center, shifting important narrative elements toward the edge of the frame. A more fundamental analysis of graphic perception can be found in the Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception:
This is the very first diagram in Art and Visual Perception. Through the perceptual relationship between the circle and the square, Arnheim introduces a basic schema of visual balance. In this diagram, the circle seems to be attracted to the square’s right edge. Conversely, the left edge also exerts a pull: the space between the circle and the right edge feels compressed, as though it were struggling for more breathing room. These are more or less Arnheim’s own words. Let us provisionally define offset framing through two features: (1) imbalance within the individual composition; (2) the subject’s relation to the edge of the frame.
Framing in Live-Action Film Traditions
Why has offset framing become a conventional technique in Japanese animation but not in live action? To answer this, we need to begin with the framing practices of live-action film traditions. The classical Hollywood continuity system contains a highly consistent set of schemata, which will serve as our baseline for discussing framing. Take Gone with the Wind:
First, centered composition. The visual center of gravity coincides with the center of the image. Here we have two sets of shot/reverse-shots from Gone with the Wind. The first two images show a confrontation: one eye of each character lies on the image’s centerline. The latter two convey intimacy, bringing the two heads closer to the centerline and compressing depth. This is the most basic form of centered framing in a dialogue sequence.
How, then, does classical Hollywood handle movement? The first method is through the movement of the camera itself. In this example, the woman in gray first exchanges a few words with someone on the left, then approaches the heroine. The camera follows her to the right, reframing. Next, the man on the left and the woman on the right both exit to the right; someone else enters from the left, and the camera moves forward and left, reframing again. The shot continues for quite some time, but the principle remains the same: camera movement follows the subject, continually reframing to keep the characters at the center of the image.
The next method is editing. In the first example, the rider in the left-hand image would move out of frame if he continued riding. The film therefore cuts to the image on the right, where his departure is presented as movement into depth, with the character still positioned close to the image’s central axis. In the second example, the heroine runs from left to right and then forward. This camera position is no longer suitable, because the wall will obscure her. The film cuts to the next shot: she enters from the left edge and stops just as she reaches the vicinity of the central axis. She calls to the man, and they enter the doorway at the center of the image together.
In “Time and Space in Classical Hollywood Cinema,” David Bordwell analyzes in detail how Hollywood establishes its classical continuity system through the regulation of time and space. Discussing space, he argues that Hollywood compositional practice brings together numerous older traditions, including late Renaissance painting: “An outstanding example is the Hollywood cinema’s interest in centered compositions.” Most classical Hollywood shots use a T-shaped area of the screen’s planar space: on Bordwell’s account, the upper one-third and the central vertical third of the screen constitute the “center” of the shot, a center that determines the composition of long shots, medium shots, and close-ups, as well as the grouping of figures.
Behind classical Hollywood’s use of centered composition lies a stylistic presupposition: the human body is the center of narrative and graphic interest. Once a compositional rule is established that concentrates characters at the center of the image, the exclusion of offset framing follows. In its treatment of the relationship between subjects and the frame’s edges, classical Hollywood considers edge-framing a “taboo.” This taboo does not apply only to principal characters. Even unimportant bodies or objects are either kept intact or placed offscreen, rather than being cut by the frame. When a subject moves away from the screen’s center toward its edge, classical Hollywood either reframes through camera movement, or arranges matters so that “as the body crosses the frame line, the cut reveals the figure entering a new shot, with the body still crossing the (opposite) frame line.” This gives rise to cutting on action. In a frame cut, as Bordwell describes it, the image’s edge becomes only a bridge over which figures or objects pass on their way to center stage. Within this conception of direction, offset framing cannot appear.
But what about art cinema? Art cinema is always seeking to break Hollywood’s formal and stylistic conventions. Has it not used offset framing? Although art cinema can be described and classified in broad terms around its breaks with the Hollywood model, it is difficult to find a high degree of consistency among its specific techniques. This does not mean that such techniques do not exist: dead time (temps morts), for example, is widely used. But for our subject, offset framing, we can find only individual cases.
First, One and Eight. Many film enthusiasts will know it as the inaugural work of China’s Fifth Generation cinema. It was directed by Zhang Junzhao, with cinematography by Zhang Yimou, who would later become enormously famous. One and Eight makes extensive use of offset framing and incomplete composition as conspicuous means of visual construction. Compositions such as the two in the lower row, where great expanses of hillside and ground squeeze the figures and the sky, were developed further in Yellow Earth, which Zhang Yimou subsequently photographed, as a symbolic treatment of its motifs. Although One and Eight uses this bold framing to depict distorted states of mind and characters oppressed by extreme circumstances, its use of offset framing as a basic expressive device remains weak. Fundamentally, it is still an experimental work: a break with established conventions accompanying the emergence of a “new cinema” and the succession of one generation of directors by another.
Another relatively well-known filmmaker is Paweł Pawlikowski. In Ida, Pawlikowski also makes extensive use of offset framing, pressing characters as far down toward the bottom of the frame as possible and leaving a vast amount of negative space above them. He would rather leave only half a character’s head in the frame than surrender that vacant space overhead. Here, too, there is no shortage of basic expressive effects. Overall, however, the device serves a more symbolic function: the abnormality of the offset composition emphasizes the dominance of the space above over the characters below.
What is exercising that dominance? God—or, rather, the characters’ inner awareness of God, which governs them. Offset framing here is thus a distribution of visual power across the plane of the screen. In Ida, it becomes a compositional device sustained throughout the film, providing formal support for its religiosity. The allocation of image space to the surroundings and to “emptiness” frequently “squeezes” the film’s believers, making them seem small and subsidiary by comparison, so that religious elements dominate the image. This contrasts sharply with the normal camera positions and framing used for secular settings and the human body.
Pawlikowski used compositions with negative space overhead again in Cold War two years ago. His use of offset framing remains incomplete. There is a pronounced stasis to his filmmaking, which is precisely why some people call it “PowerPoint cinema”: his editing shows a deliberate severing of flow. We can also see that pressing characters against the bottom of the frame remains the basic form of his offset framing. Even when it serves no religious symbolism, he makes few further experiments with it.
Japanese Animation—Offset Framing as Convention
In Japanese animation, offset framing is neither an unconventional technique intended to break audiovisual conventions nor a symbolic means of distributing visual power across the screen. It is a widely and systematically used part of the standard audiovisual vocabulary.
Offset framing has a fairly long history in animation. It was already appearing when the paneling techniques of shōjo manga entered the general repertory of direction. Its frequent use in animation was established, at the latest, in Mamoru Hosoda’s episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena, where it was used to construct unconventional shot/reverse-shot sequences. In episode 14, for example, the antagonist lures the supporting character Sanae to the resting place of a hundred duelists, brainwashing her into dueling the protagonist. Within a single editing sequence, Hosoda designs two shot/reverse-shot patterns with different compositions. In the first, shown in the upper row, both characters appear in medium-long shots, with more visual space in front of their gaze than behind them. In the medium shots and medium close-ups of the second pattern, shown below, the frame blocks off the space in front of their gaze, leaving roughly two-thirds of the image on the opposite side. This second pattern is common in Japanese animation but extraordinarily rare in live-action traditions. I will call it “offset shot/reverse-shot.”
Shot/reverse-shot is one of filmmaking’s most important traditions and conventions, used extensively in the overwhelming majority of films. Standard film instruction lays down a specific set of rules for it: the 180-degree axis, the 30-degree rule, the matching of compositional elements, and so on. Two principal rules govern the composition of the individual shot: appropriate headroom and look room. In figure 1 above, the person’s eyes lie on the upper third line, with an appropriate amount of headroom above. When we shoot a shot/reverse-shot and turn the character into a three-quarter view, as in figure 2, we move the right-facing figure toward the left of the image. Her head now occupies the upper-left point of interest, and her body lies on the left third-line. The space in front of her is look room. The space ahead of a character’s gaze carries greater visual tension than the space behind them; perceptually, this empty area “balances the weight of the head on the left side of the image against the weight of the empty area on the right.” Deliberately violating the look-room principle gives us figure 3: an offset-framed character shot. The image is now highly unbalanced. The space on the right is visually tense, with a strong tendency to point offscreen.
Apply this composition to a shot/reverse-shot pair, and we arrive at the technique I call offset shot/reverse-shot. In a normal shot/reverse-shot sequence, conventional composition preserves an appropriate conversational distance between the two people, giving their relationship a sense of psychological stability. In offset shot/reverse-shot, their relationship is perceived and understood either as having its distance abolished or as becoming dislocated.
We should note that Hosoda is not using offset shot/reverse-shot here to break a convention. On the contrary, offset shot/reverse-shot itself has become one of Japanese animation’s conventions. Nor is it intended to achieve a symbolic effect. It directly serves the expression of the plot: Sanae realizes that she is in danger, and her normal communicative relationship with the antagonist “breaks.” The blocking of look room through offset framing, together with the misalignment of the characters in the shot/reverse-shot editing, expresses a violent change in the two characters’ relationship and psychology, and the sudden danger of the present moment.
To say that offset framing is a convention in contemporary Japanese animation is to say that it is used consciously, systematically, and very widely, and that its use is directed toward basic expressive effects in audiovisual language.
Beyond offset shot/reverse-shot, another conventional use of offset framing is “interruption as a salient point.” This concept comes from Ernst Gombrich’s The Sense of Order. Because the sensory system tends to economize on attention, the transition from order to disorder provides a fresh stimulus that puts us on the alert, making the interruption a salient point. An offset-framed shot can readily be designed as just such a point within an editing sequence, interrupting the normal space and time of narration. Take a sequence from Wandering Son. In shots 1 and 2, the female lead goes to draw lots for a role in a play; she hopes to get Romeo. During the drawing of the lot in shot 3, offset framing expresses intense psychological suspense, until shot 4 suddenly gives us an extreme close-up of her surprise. Finally, in shot 5, we discover that she has got what she wanted: Romeo. We can see how readily offset framing, as an unconventional configuration of the relationship between character and space, becomes a salient point of interruption.
Let us now return to some of the examples from the beginning of the article, to gain a more immediate grasp of offset framing’s expressive functions. FGO was still airing when I wrote the original paper, so I chose this sequence from its first episode. In shot 1, the three people at the back leave, but Mash lags a beat behind, then stops in shot 2. The blocking leaves Mash and Dr. Romani together, creating the situation for a private conversation. Mash asks him a question with her back turned to him. Shots 3 and 5 use offset framing to block look room; together with the view of Mash’s back and the cut to a close-up, they reinforce the implications of her question.
The suspense anime Denpa Teki na Kanojo contains this discontinuously edited sequence. The storyboard alternates shots without characters with offset-framed character close-ups. In the dialogue, the two speakers speculate about the murder suspect’s specific characteristics, while antagonistic implications are concealed in their language. Through subtext, the male lead asks the female lead: “Are you the murderer?” She gives an equivocal reply. Offset framing is used here to structure suspense visually; a psychological and semantic thread runs through the entire editing sequence. Once their analysis is over, the final shot returns to the actual setting to establish the scene’s space.
Of course, offset framing is not limited to creating suspense. In I“s Pure, four friends go to karaoke. The male and female leads have feelings for one another, but they are not yet a couple. The male lead gets drunk. Drink lends even a coward courage, and he takes the opportunity to ask the girl whether there is someone she likes. Shots 1 and 2 form a fairly normal pair of over-the-shoulder reverse shots, but for their relationship as it stands, this is abnormal: sober, he would never be able to speak to her so flirtatiously, let alone put a hand on her shoulder. In shot 3, he suddenly realizes that although four of them came to karaoke, only he and the girl remain. He sobers up at once. She asks him why he wants to know whether she likes someone—the subtext is an invitation for him to confess his feelings. Shot 4 is a forty-second long take, something relatively rare in animation. At the end of this protracted inner struggle comes a sequence of offset shots: he formally declares his love, and the scene ends. Here, offset framing does not accentuate visual tension. On the contrary, it expresses intimacy.
Finally, an example from the current season. There are many possibilities, but I will use Sing “Yesterday” for Me, a show I am particularly enjoying. In episode 2, the male lead happens upon Shinako lingering in a park at night. After they talk, he offers to walk her home. The first three shots follow a forward montage pattern, the shot scale progressively tightening, until a flash to white in shot 3 takes us into shot 4: Shinako’s memory. Looking at the male lead’s back, she cannot help recalling the person she loved, who has died. Shot 5 uses offset framing: Shinako’s heart sinks along with her head. The male lead should occupy the space in front of her gaze, but shot 5 blocks her look room, suggesting her inner entrapment and a psychological severance from him. Immersed in memory, Shinako cannot move forward along the path of her own life. Her thoughts of the person she loved ultimately lead her to refuse the male lead’s offer of company.
Why Japanese Animation?
Let us return to our initial question: Why is it Japanese animation, rather than any other cinematic tradition, that has developed an audiovisual convention such as offset framing?
We can, of course, readily find some answers in the basic features of Japan’s animation, comics, and games culture: the Japanese animation industry’s tolerance of formal and stylistic diversity, for example, or the somewhat greater authority of episode directors (enshutsu) relative to key animators in Japanese commercial animation. These provide a basic freedom to explore further expressive possibilities in direction—a freedom often absent from other cinematic traditions. But none of this comes close to the heart of the problem. What is that heart?
Let us recall why this became a problem in the first place. Animation’s other general characteristics—its fundamental nonreality, for example, and the wealth of possibilities available in designing movement—lead most people to assume without hesitation that it is a medium better suited, or at least more readily suited, to unfettered imaginative expression. The task of realism falls more obviously to live-action cinema. For offset framing, however, there seems to be no basis for such a distinction. It is easy to achieve in either animation or live action: in animation, one need only draw the shot with an offset composition; in live action, it takes little additional effort. Even allowing for the various problems of image quality at the edges, live action’s neglect of offset framing remains astonishing.
Is that really so?
In fact, this is precisely what distinguishes offset framing from animation’s more general characteristics and techniques, making it a distinctive point of entry for animation studies: what it reveals is not the medium’s ontological possibilities, but the medium’s imagination. This imagination grows out of the basic constituents of Japanese animation—montage and layers.
In examining the origins of otaku culture, Eiji Ōtsuka identifies a crucial background to the formation of the Japanese animation system: the widespread influence of Eisenstein’s montage theory in Japan during the 1930s and 1940s. This owed something to the popularity of montage theory and avant-garde art among young people at the time, and something to Eisenstein’s use of montage theory to analyze and interpret Japanese culture. He argued that montage-based thinking was present in a wide variety of Japanese cultural forms. We can quote an example through Ōtsuka to show how deeply this influence ran:
“In Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Before the Dawn, an intertitle concerning Edo-period consumer culture appears, and the film cuts between roadside prostitutes, a lord’s procession, and temple ceremonies. Someone in the audience shouted, ‘Montage—that’s montage,’ and everyone in the cinema expressed their admiration.”
This influence ultimately found expression in “Japan’s first feature-length animated film,” Momotaro: Sacred Sailors. Ōtsuka describes its visual style as “an unholy alliance of Disney and Eisenstein”—a hybrid of Disney-style character drawing and Eisenstein’s visual and montage construction of images. Here we can genuinely see the most basic formal features of later Japanese animation: the combination of characters and backgrounds on separate layers; the montage construction of images; a cutting between stationary points; the combination of one fixed shot with another. These formal features directed the development of Japanese animation’s techniques toward two things: composition within the individual fixed shot and the editing relationships between compositions. This is precisely the first reason offset framing could truly develop.
The second reason lies in layers. In The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, Thomas Lamarre distinguishes two kinds of spatiality: cinematism and animetism. In cinematism’s closed compositing, space is integrated “seamlessly” into a Cartesian model, with changes between images geometrically situated within a consistent, homogeneous space. In animetism’s open compositing, the closure of space is disrupted from within by multiple planes. Cinematism and animetism produce very different perceptual characteristics. The former abolishes the distance between viewer and viewed: viewers identify with a coherent, unified space of depth as they enter it. The latter pulls viewer and viewed apart, directing viewers to the relationships among distinct, independent layers.
Think again about offset framing, and we discover that it skirts the limits of what live-action cinema can imagine. Offset framing is unlikely to be a product of cinematism: its emergence requires an explicit formal awareness of the relationship between the frame and the subject. Just as our vision in the real world contains no “offset framing,” this formal awareness cannot arise within the coherent unity of a space in which distance has been abolished. It can arise only in animetism’s multilayered space. Equally important, of course, is the prior predisposition toward planar composition that accompanies it.
Fixed-shot montage and animetism’s layered space rest on the material conditions of Japanese animation: a production workflow based on storyboarding, layout, and the animation stand. These, in turn, ultimately secure Japanese animation’s imagination as a medium. It is this imagination that gives rise to offset framing in Japanese animation and makes it difficult for offset framing to emerge in live-action film traditions.
Nor does this imagination operate only through offset framing. It also profoundly determines Japanese animation’s construction of space. Let us take the animation notes for SSSS.GRIDMAN as a starting point—for grown-up reasons, I cannot reproduce the full image, only one of its sketches. When two characters confront one another in the same shot, the instructions tell the animators not to turn their heads diagonally toward each other. Instead, they should be oriented perpendicular to the screen, looking sideways with their eyes. These perpendicular and parallel relationships are something Japanese animation naturally tends toward, reducing the difficulty of drawing while refining and regularizing the visual composition. In this note for SSSS.GRIDMAN, avoiding diagonal eyelines removes particular depth cues, encouraging us to understand the shot’s space as a simple relationship among layers, rather than a unified space with depth. Of course, SSSS.GRIDMAN is not actually the clearest representative of this way of thinking. Quite the opposite, one might say: watching it, we discover a strong awareness of how to present depth naturalistically, and an understanding of camera focal length and perspective, matching the series’ loose temporal construction as a whole. The best examples of a thoroughgoing use of perpendicular and parallel spatial relationships are the many adaptations of four-panel manga and anime using the Shinbo school of direction. These are distinctive aesthetic styles born of Japanese animation’s imagination as a medium.
Conclusion & Addenda
This article is adapted from my paper “Offset Framing in Japanese Animation” and its accompanying lecture script. The original paper was published as part of the 2019 Chinese Young Animation Scholars Forum. To accommodate a different readership, I have substantially reworked, cut, and revised its presentation here, with the result that many important questions can only be filled in here, in the conclusion.
First, although this article briefly mentions Kyoto Animation and Naoko Yamada, that is far from enough. It was in fact Kyoto Animation, and Yamada in particular, that played the principal role in spreading offset framing through Japanese animation. Readers of the original paper will know that I devoted a separate section to extensive analysis of Yamada’s use of the technique. There was simply nowhere to put that material here, but I will discuss it later—next month—in a systematic account of Yamada’s directorial system.
Second, someone is bound to object to the concept of offset framing. General discussions of composition already distinguish “open composition” and “incomplete composition.” Do we really need to introduce another term, “offset framing,” to explain this? I addressed this in detail in both the original paper and the lecture script, but following the line of argument here has left no room for a full account. I can only place it here, copying part of the paper’s first section directly:
“It should be noted that the offset framing examined in this article is not identical to ‘open composition’ or ‘incomplete composition.’ Their areas of application overlap considerably, but offset framing differs greatly from the latter two in its conceptual positioning and use. In Principles of Art History, Wölfflin establishes closed and open form as basic concepts of art history in his discussion of traditional painting. Closed form is ‘a style of composition which, with more or less tectonic means, makes of the picture a self-contained entity, pointing everywhere back to itself,’ while open form ‘everywhere points out beyond itself and purposely looks limitless.’ In practice, the latter makes the image as a whole look ‘more like a piece cut haphazard out of the visible world.’ When discussing open and incomplete composition in film, scholars frequently use these terms to analyze differences between film and painting as media. As an art that unfolds in time, film need not conceptually adhere to the closed compositional forms of traditional painting. Openness and incompleteness of composition are precisely ways of constructing tension through images over time. Moreover, from the beginnings of traditional film theory, scholars such as Kracauer and Bazin have consistently emphasized live-action cinema’s remarkable capacity for reproduction. For a time, they even made this unprecedented capacity for mechanical, automatic reproduction the theoretical core distinguishing cinema’s aesthetics—and even its ontology—from those of other arts. Insofar as the aim is to reproduce and conform to reality, the regularity and closure of traditional painting become obstacles. Redundancy and incompleteness in the presentation of time and space become important means by which a new cinema depicts reality. These ideas originated in neorealism and New Wave cinema, and in turn profoundly inspired the art filmmakers who followed.
“One principal reason this article does not use the terms open composition and incomplete composition is to avoid their usual meanings in film-theoretical discussion. Offset framing here does not designate a basic characteristic of film aesthetics or ontology, nor a departure from closed composition in painting that breaks its constructive rules. It designates an ordinary technique that is anomalous yet has become conventional. It is not difficult to see how the specific formal requirements in the definition of offset framing make it a more appropriate term for this article.”
What I did not say in the paper is that even arriving at this definition of offset framing was difficult. The definition of décadrage in the Dictionary of Film Theory and Criticism actually differs from the word’s general usage. An important essay in film theory is itself titled “Décadrage”; in Chinese, it has been translated as “counter-composition.” Its argument returns us to the ontological characteristics of cinema previously raised through “open composition” and “incomplete composition.” This, naturally, provides further evidence that offset framing has never been treated as important in the live-action tradition.
The next question, naturally, is to supplement our examples for identifying offset framing, lest the concept be used so indiscriminately that it loses all meaning. The shot above comes from episode 1 of Princess Connect! Re:Dive. Is it offset framing? No. Although both characters are indeed close to the right edge of the frame, this is in itself a shot presenting a complete scene. The slight shift in framing seeks an aesthetic effect; the overall composition is balanced and closed.
Is this sequence from episode 1 of Snow White with the Red Hair an example of what I call offset shot/reverse-shot? Again, no. Although shot 1 blocks the character’s look room, shot 2 and the subsequent image on the right showing their positions make clear that shot 1 is not framed to produce an anomalous representation of space. On the contrary, it provides an analysis and reconstruction of the two characters’ spatial relationship. In the narration, the backward glance the female lead casts in shot 1—which provides the cutting point—and the dialogue between them both guide viewers toward an understanding of this overall spatial relationship. Because the male lead is following behind her, the space behind her in shot 1 should actually be understood as a connection between them. Shots 1 and 2 also match compositionally. We can readily imagine her turning around in shot 1 to speak to him; the effect would be the same.
Finally, another example I have already analyzed from Sing “Yesterday” for Me. Is this shot’s composition offset framing? It is. As I wrote previously: “The frame cuts Shinako’s eyes in half, on the one hand to emphasize the smile at the corners of her mouth when she sees the protagonist, and on the other to introduce an implication through offset framing.” What matters here is the composition’s dual function: it does produce an offset-framing effect, but the presentation of that trace of a smile at the corner of Shinako’s mouth is not itself “offset.”
These examples show that offset framing cannot be identified simply through graphic relationships. Within a story and an editing sequence, a shot is not merely a picture: it is part of an overall narration and context. These profoundly affect the viewer’s understanding of a shot. Any judgment of offset framing must therefore remain inseparable from the particular narration and context.
Then there are examples of offset framing in live action. To preserve the main line of argument, I left out two works that use it: The Matrix and the American television series Mr. Robot. Relatively speaking, Mr. Robot is not especially worth discussing, but The Matrix is very interesting. For one thing, offset framing is genuinely used there as a basic expressive device rather than a consciously unconventional technique. For another, in 1999, when The Matrix premiered, offset framing was still far from widespread in Japanese animation. Its use in The Matrix is therefore considerably more puzzling than its use in Mr. Robot. We can nevertheless venture a simple conjecture: perhaps the Wachowski sisters’ long immersion in Japanese animation inspired them to use offset framing. There is no direct evidence for this—the two rarely give interviews—but we know that they were deeply influenced by Japanese animation. The Matrix itself was directly inspired by Ghost in the Shell. And in their 2008 film Speed Racer, adapted from the anime of the same name, we can see that, in imitating animation’s form and style, they display an explicit awareness of its layered structure.
Other live-action films also employ visual strategies similar to those described here. Some readers will no doubt think of the use of offscreen space in certain films by Lynne Ramsay and Robert Bresson. These visual strategies clearly belong to the same order, but their concrete techniques differ substantially, so I will leave them aside here.
I will end here.
Further Reading
- Wuzhimao (@田鸡牌收音机) on the cinematography of Ida: douban.com.
- Lamarre’s “anime machine” theory — @实在狗子 @动画学术趴: zhuanlan.zhihu.com, zhuanlan.zhihu.com.
- Eiji Ōtsuka on the origins of Japanese animation and montage — @王晗 @红茶泡海苔: zhuanlan.zhihu.com, zhuanlan.zhihu.com.