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Hayao Miyazaki is globally lauded as a master director of the Japanese animated feature. His and the late Isao Takahata’s animation studio Ghibli is well known for its track record of making beautiful traditionally animated films ever since Castle in the Sky in 1986. (It should be said, too, that Japanese anime generally has retained its stylistic preference for 2D animation rather than CGI, unlike US feature animation which has generally turned 3D.)

However, Miyazaki’s more recent work that marked his breakout on an international level show a turn to digital techniques in order to fully achieve his films’ artistic visions. Starting with Princess Mononoke (1998), Miyazaki began to integrate computer graphics (CG) into his traditional pipeline, and his subsequent films Spirited Away (2001) and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) included progressively more CG. Miyazaki’s techniques for these films is based around the philosophy of “CG that doesn’t look CG”. Still using cel animation and hand-painted backgrounds as starting points, 3D elements are included in order to better support three-dimensionality and visual effects that are not doable in traditional cel animation.

For the CG animation in Mononoke, the majority of which was still traditional cel animation, Studio Ghibli worked with Microsoft to develop Toon Shader, a software to make 3DCG made in Softimage look like hand-painted cel images. This was one of the first forays (if not the definite ‘first’) into creating crisp ‘cel’ shading on 3D objects, which is now commonly used in anime and games to evoke a 2D aesthetic.

The cel shading 3DCG method was important for the creation the demon sequence in the beginning of the film, where the tendrils were very difficult to animate individually. Fig. 1 shows the breakdown of one of the shots: the first two images show the tendrils’ wireframe and the resulting 3D object generated with Softimage, the third image is the 3D put through Toon Shader for a cel-shaded effect, and the fourth image shows the tendrils composited on to the hand-drawn character cel. Other uses for 3D simulation include water, which features prominently in Spirited Away.

Generation of particles was another important 3D technique. In Fig. 2, the Nightwalker’s main body animation was done on cels, but the bioluminescent dots are generated in 3D and controlled by input variables. The same principles of particle generation were applied to generation of smoke and steam.

Background animation was another issue that was aptly addressed by CG. Fig. 3 shows a shot from Miyazaki’s earlier work Porco Rosso (1992) in which the camera tracks the moving airplane over a long distance. The background hills are entirely animated on cels, while the sky and clouds are a BG painting.

For a similar moving-over-a-hill shot in Mononoke (Fig. 4), 3D mapping was used to ‘move’ an otherwise hand-painted background in physical 3D space. The top image in Fig. 4 shows the 3D plane, and the 2nd image shows the background painting mapped onto the plane. This would allow for better immersion, as seen in the finished animation (Fig. 5); it gives the illusion of the camera moving through space, as the hill is not an animated cel like in Fig. 3.

It is important to note that it is a POV shot, unlike Fig. 3, and using a mapping technique for a background is more apt for the shot’s function in the story. The purpose of the shot is for the black plume to be slowly revealed behind the hill, so the hill in the foreground cannot distract the audience by appearing as flat cel animation.

Mapping hand-drawn images onto 3D surfaces or objects was once again used in Spirited Away; in the sequence when Chihiro finds her parents have turned into pigs (Fig. 6) Miyazaki faced the issue of animating the Chinese bowls with the flatness of cels while being shown against a painted background, alerting the audience that it would move before it actually did. This was solved with texture mapping, in which the bowl was first painted with the same quality and detail as the background, and then mapped onto a 3D generated bowl that was later animated.

Another important part of the digital pipeline is digital compositing, which allowed for theoretically infinite layers of scanned (or computer generated) images to composite for the final result, as it did not depend on optical photography of ‘books’. A highly complex shot like Fig. 7 requires separate layers for the limbs, body and shading/lighting of each susuwatari and each piece of charcoal.

Many shots end up becoming a combination of techniques: hand-drawn materials mapped on to 3D (or otherwise digitally manipulated), pure 3D generated effects, and digital compositing. Fig. 8 is a Spirited Away still from a shot seen from the window of a moving train. The house and island were cut from the original background painting and manipulated as a 3D object to achieve the slight change in angle as the camera passes by the scene. The water effects were created largely with 3D software. The parallax effect is achieved by the many layers possible in digital compositing: the water, island, and clouds at different distances are tweened at different speeds.

Through careful and deliberate integration of handmade and digital, Miyazaki was able to take advantage of CGI in order to push his film quality to new heights. It is interesting that his implementation of digital techniques coincided with his works’ exposure to the Western market. Perhaps there is a correlation, or perhaps it is just a result of a director willing to experiment with whatever would best help him to “make something beautiful”. And indeed, made something beautiful he has.

References

• Hayao Miyazaki. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayao_Miyazaki.
• The Art of Princess Mononoke: A Film by Hayao Miyazaki. English adaptation by Takami Nieda. Viz Media, San Francisco. 2014.
• The Art of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. English adaptation by Takami Nieda. Viz Media, San Francisco. 2013.
• The Art of Howl’s Moving Castle. Tohan, Taipei. 2005.