When you look at light effects in pre-digital animation, there’s a magic to them.
Think of the motorcycle headlights or alleyway signs in Akira, or the Running Man segment from Neo Tokyo (1987), or any explosion, light beam, aura or impact effect you’ve seen in classic anime. It has a certain quality that grounds it to reality. There’s a feeling of danger to it, heightening the action and adding a kind of volume you can sense through the screen.
From the ‘80s onward, it was commonplace. Then the medium shifted toward digital, and it disappeared. {read}