MP15 | Asian ink wash animation and the digital age

Posted on by Claude Lau

In the class on Chinese animation, we saw works done in a painstaking ink wash style, creating moving Chinese ink paintings.

Te Wei is the principle founder and master of working in Chinese ink-wash animatoin (水墨动画, shuimo donghua). These works were made on many separated cels of ink strokes, meticulously organized and layered in compositing. The results combine the dynamism inherently suggested by ink wash brush-strokes with actual movement, as well as the stylistic minimalism that Chinese ink paintings have.

Te Wei‘s Tadpoles Searching for Mother (1960)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE5F78_PUTM
Te Wei’s Feelings of Mountains and Waters (1988)

Although how aged these films are would suggest ink wash animation is an experimentation of the past, it lives on into the digital era, albeit perhaps as an uncommon fringe style. The late Ghibli master Isao Takahata’s film The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013) was done entirely in a sumi-e style, to a beautiful hand-drawn effect. The coloring was done with digital paint, but the fact that it is computer-made does not take from the visuals at all.

Expresii, a drawing program aimed at simulating ink and watercolor with digital software. The results are very high fidelity. Demonstrations of the app in action are as follows:

Rooftop animation, a Hong Kong animation studio lead by SCAD alumnus Angela Wong, had been working on a film using Expresii. Though the project was unfortunately cancelled, a demo teaser can be seen here:

Another completed film by Rooftop animation is Green Earth (2017), created with a combination of traditionally hand-painted and digital ink-wash drawings.

The power of digital programming has in fact facilitated the ease of (re)creating the unique Asian ink wash style. Though it would be wildly unrealistic to say it can compete against both 3D animation and other sharp, comic book-like 2D animation, I hope that it can continue to be used in animation productions, and appreciated by wider audiences as an aesthetic steeped in history and culture.