Sequential Imagery: Satoshi Kon and Editing in Animation

Few directors working in Animation can boast the filmography of the late Satoshi Kon whose style of animation differed greatly from much of what came out of Japan as it dealt with more human relationships and as a result Kon gained a reputation for having a more filmic style than his contemporaries. Kon is held in high esteem for many reasons, but most notably his surreal and fast editing, which allows for his characters to transition between various states of consciousness in a simple  match cut or graphic match. 

Kon's Perfect Blue deals with an idol who decides to pursue an acting career before going through sort of crisis of self.

Kon's stories often dealt with characters undergoing various crisis of self or dealt with surrealist dream sequences and Kon liked to blur this line between reality and fantasy with his editing and fast cutting. During the storyboarding stage of production Kon has said he would always plan out a scene with the next scene in mind, allowing him to draw connections between images from scene to scene for his films to flow in a very calculated way. He would also use the medium to its fullest in ways that were impossible in live action. For example, as he was working in the field of animation a medium in which visual information can be condensed and simplified, he would often include very short inserts, approximately 6-12 frames, which would be impossible in Live Action, making his editing appear faster than anything being done in Live Action.

Storyboards for Kon's final film, a short film called 'Ohayo'.

Kon was very much a visual storyteller and could bring the audience into the mind of his characters in inventive ways, such as using an establishing shot only to reveal it was a character's Point of View with the following cut.