Tokyo Roar
2015 · 4m · United States
Directed by Brandon Li
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, sensual
A kinetic, sensory portrait of Japan distilled from a three-week railway journey through Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Hiroshima, cut to a recited reading of A. D. Hope's poem 'Tiger.' The city's many moods surge past in a rhythmic audiovisual rush.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people would call this a travelogue and move on; Li instead hijacks A. D. Hope's primal tiger poem and turns Tokyo into a beast stalking through frame after frame—it's the kind of perverse re-contextualization that makes you forget you're watching a city at all.
The formal architecture here is what matters: pairing kinetic city footage to an incantatory poem creates a deliberate conversation between documentary sequence and mythic language, positioning the work squarely in the essay-film tradition where image and recitation become equal partners in meaning-making.
The entire piece lives or dies on that decision to cut to the *rhythm* of Hope's spoken cadence rather than the city's own tempo—and Li commits hard enough that you feel the poem's pulse controlling the frame, making every street and train station bend to its syntax.
Reviews
A beautiful short film featuring scenes of life in Tokyo, Japan set to a reading of the A. D. Hope poem 'Tiger.'
Selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick (June 2015).