A look at Studio Ghibli’s 2-D magic
Image via WikipediaI sat down with my son a week ago to watch Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and was once again reminded how much I despise computer animation. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a luddite by any means (if I were, I doubt I’d be typing this right now) - but I do lament the fact that Pixar and their progeny have all but destroyed the traditional animation industry in the United States.
As a corollary, whenever anyone asks me why I watch anime my first inclination is to point out that at least the Japanese still appreciate the craftsmanship of hand-drawn animation, which no computer animated film to date has approached. Of course, one of the best studios still kicking it old-school is the aforementioned Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. I was heartened to hear of a recent exhibition at Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghibli Layout Designs: Understanding the Secrets of Takahata/Miyazaki Animation, which takes an in-depth look at the painstaking process behind Ghibli’s films.
If, like me, you’re on the opposide of the planet from Tokyo, you might want to take a gander at this nice writeup at the Daily Yomiuri. It’s not as good as the real thing, but it does give one a sense of the kind of undertaking each film represents.
Arrows are also used to indicate movement, as in a scene from Kaze no Tani no Naushika (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, 1984) in which two parallel lines–each labeled “slide” in katakana–slice across a cloud bank. One shows the path of the titular heroine’s gliderlike flying machine, while the other shows the path of the machine’s shadow.
More complex movements are shown by a sequence of sketched figures, as when Nausicaa does a broken-field run toward the viewer across a jungle clearing, with her pose and position changing as she gets nearer and larger.
Some layouts contain several types of movement at once. An early scene from Laputa shows heroine Sheeta doing a slow-motion plunge from the sky into a mining pit (a straight downward arrow) while hero Pazu runs around the edge of the pit, and away from the viewer, to catch her (a curving series of diminishing figures).
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