Anime Cinematography Blog

This finale heavily used white and red for compositional purposes. White is often associated with purity and good. Red is an intense and eye grabbing color that’s attached to strong emotions, whether they’re positive (love, passion, excitement) or negative (hate, pain, violence). The latter being the representative meaning of red in this episode. The centered wide shot of Kaneki and Rize gives a strong visual of what each character represents. The white flowers are an imagery of what Kaneki aspires to be, which is kind, pure and caring just like his mother. Rize is the ghoul side of Kaneki that infringes upon this vision of himself and tries to awake his real emotions. This is reinforced by the white flowers turning red within her vicinity. In Kaneki’s memory sequence about his mother the white and red flower imagery continues to hold significance. In the first shot, the white flowers are symbolic of a happy moment that exemplifies his mother’s kindness. In the second on...

This early scene immediately establishes the dark tone of the show with the heavy use of shadows and silhouetted characters. I also liked the used both warm and cold colors to add to the grimness. Red obviously symbolizes violence while purple has that cold hearted intensity to it.