Yeah, I know Batman: Dark Knight opens tomorrow (tonight for those of you who saw the midnight showing), but Hayao Miyazaki’s new flick - Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea - opens this weekend, as well. Yes - it’s only out in Japan, but new Miyazaki is always something to be happy about.
Shamefully, I haven’t been following this one too closely, but AFP has a rundown of the film, which is apparently an adaptation of The Little Mermaid (the story, not the Disney film).
Miyazaki, who had used computer graphics since “Princess Mononoke” in 1997, decided to shun hi-tech effects in his latest film.
“Our experience told us that what you can do electronically doesn’t impress people much. We decided to go fully with pencils… That’s our strength,” he said in a recent interview with Japanese public broadcaster NHK.
The film used 170,000 hand-drawn pictures to animate characters and objects, a record number for a Miyazaki production.
It took one and a half years for 70 staff to draw the pictures, according to Studio Ghibli, which has released his works.
The film also uses numerous other manually drawn pictures as the background — with the succession of screens creating a slightly jittery atmosphere to the film.
“All things in the world are moving. I became an animator in order to move everything in the world. It’s not only human characters that move,” Miyazaki said.
