There’s an analysis of some Akira pages by Josiah Leighton over at his blog Consequentialart’s Sequential Art Class (what a title), which is worth a read. He talks about the use of angled panels to increase the sense of action/movement/chaos and the way eyelines contribute to the effect.
As I’ve been reading about and watching movies by Ozu lately (here and here with more to come), this part interested me:
By contrast, he showed me that most homegrown manga had the character’s eyes always facing out towards the viewer. He attributed this to the filmic style of Yasujiro Ozu, director of Tokyo Story. He said it was Ozu’s belief that the character should not avoid looking at the camera, but rather face it directly. The camera is always the first-person subjective point-of-view, he claimed, and therefore the characters should address it as a means of telling their stories directly to the viewer.
I’m not sure who here is the “he” who says the camera is the first person viewpoint. I’m not sure I see that in Ozu’s work. Ozu often does have the characters talking into the camera because he tends to structure dialogue scenes so the camera is placed in the center of a table, for instance, so the the viewpoint is often similar to that of the other conversant. I’m not sure I’d consider this “first person”, one might say it falls into the reciprocal p.o.v. shot mentioned in my post yesterday, and becomes a kind of “third person” viewpoint. And while Ozu does use this method, he also has numerous scenes with characters not looking at the camera, and I don’t recall cases where the character is looking out at the camera, talking, where the camera isn’t in the place of another character.
It’s been a long time since I read Akira, but I still have all 38 issues of the Epic version piled up in my closet.