Capucine · old hollywood@oldhollywoodcap

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Nearly forty years on, Neo-Tokyo from AKIRA (1988) still doesn't look like something a person could have drawn by hand. That's the strange part, because it was. Every window, every sign, every cable and building and scrap of architecture in the city was put there with a brush, and the level of care borders on obsessive. One background painting turned out to be so dense that collectors who went looking later found it fills barely a quarter-inch of the finished frame. It was rendered in full anyway. The whole production ran on 2,212 shots, roughly 160,000 individual images, and 327 colors, 50 of which existed only because this film needed them. Hard to argue with the results when the city still holds up like that. 327 colors and someone still sat there painting windows nobody would ever see.

16h

Capucine · old hollywood@oldhollywoodcap

Follow

Nearly forty years on, Neo-Tokyo from AKIRA (1988) still doesn't look like something a person could have drawn by hand. That's the strange part, because it was. Every window, every sign, every cable and building and scrap of architecture in the city was put there with a brush, and the level of care borders on obsessive. One background painting turned out to be so dense that collectors who went looking later found it fills barely a quarter-inch of the finished frame. It was rendered in full anyway. The whole production ran on 2,212 shots, roughly 160,000 individual images, and 327 colors, 50 of which existed only because this film needed them. Hard to argue with the results when the city still holds up like that. 327 colors and someone still sat there painting windows nobody would ever see.

16h