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May 03, 2006
I just don't get it
I've bumped this entry to the top because of a series of comments from an extremely knowledgeable guy, who thinks I'm out to lunch when it comes to my take on Anime.
The novelist Roger L. Simon has a post on his blog discussing the end of hand-drawn animation at Disney, and his appreciation for the Japanese animated film, Spirited Away.
Simon mentions that he had an opportunity to visit a store in Japan that had stacks of cells from the film, which he found beautiful.
Let's discuss Miyazaki's work; while I'm willing to concede that individual cells may be stunning, I've never understood the acclaim he receives for his "animation."
I'm a life-long fan of the art, with a strong preference for the work coming from the boys on the Termite Terrace over at Warner Bros. While Disney's cartoons might have had a subtle edge when it came to the "art" component of the artwork, the men behind Bugs and Daffy had it in spades when it came to the writing and directing. Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and the rest of the fellas at Warner were light years beyond the more wholesome crew at Walt's studio.
Apart from the stellar writing and direction, what remains mesmerizing about the cartoons of the era is the fluidity of the movement, the way the animators were able to capture how things, people, shadows, move and interact with each other in two dimensions, creating the illusion of 3-D, without the benefit of computers.
Disney and MGM demonstrated the same flair thru the 40s, with eye-popping colors and incredible background work.
Anime, while boasting interesting and unfamiliar settings and themes, has some of the choppiest, awful animation this side of Speed Racer!
Seriously, to my eyes, Spirited Away looks little better than the flip-book animations we used to draw in fifth grade.
Yeah, yeah; great story, wonderful visuals, music, yadda yadda.
But the animation sucks. It would work much better as a graphic novel -- Manga -- at 0 fps, rather than the 8-12 fps they use to approximate the look and feel of a Wang Chung music video.
Posted by Mike Lief at May 3, 2006 08:28 AM
Comments
Well, you've certainly done your research. Good job :rolls eyes:! You should send what you wrote to John Lasseter of Pixar -- I'd like to see his response.
But you got just one thing wrong -- it's not five frames per second, it's alternating sequences of tightly-spaced drawings shot on the 3s (8 drawings per second) and the 2s (12 drawings per second).
Flight scenes appear to be done on 1s (24 drawings per second). I don't think that any animation in Spirited Away or any other Miyazaki film is done below the 3s. Most anime appears to be done on the 4s (6 drawings per second) and lower, though.
I wouldn't watch Miyazaki's movies (sometimes frame-by-frame) if there was too much flicker or if the motion was jerky. Anyway, even if there is a strobing effect to the motion, the animation is still extremely well-observed in the way people behave and react. There's enough room for both DaVinci and Paul Klee in this world.
Keep in mind, though, that Miyazaki and the animators at Studio Ghibli have been trying for the past 20 years or so to break free of Japanese limited animation conventions while still appealing to the tastes of the Japanese people in regard to animation style.
I do agree with you that anime is poorly animated crap, but I make an exception for Miyazaki. His work is actually much closer to vintage Disney than to Japanimation crud. Granted, his characters are stiffer and don't move as much as your typical Disney character, but the movement is still generally well-executed and as I said above, well-observed. In a way, I'm glad that he doesn't try to imitate the Disney style (or shall I say, method) completely.
Quality over quantity.
Posted by: ModernistRealist at December 26, 2005 10:52 AM
I appreciate your comment, but I'm not sure I understand your eye-rolling displeasure.
My stated concerns are the superior fluidity of classic American animation, with a preference for the Warner Bros. cartoons for their wit and writing, in addition to their visual style, while noting that Disney's efforts were beautiful on a technical level.
Your comment that you view Miyazaki's work sometimes on a "frame-by-frame" level serves to reinforce my earlier point: while his images are pretty from a static point of view, they don't do a good job capturing "realistic" motion. And I still look for the medium of motion pictures -- animated or live action -- to flow and not devolve into a herky-jerky approximation of reality.
I'm hard-pressed to believe that the low frame rate of Miyazaki's work represents a stylistic choice; rather, I think it's simply the result of the economic constraints that prevent him from achieving the increased cel counts that all animators secretly desire.
Posted by: Mike at December 26, 2005 11:11 AM
BTW, just so you know, Disney animates almost always on the 2s (12 frames per second) except during fast camera pans, during which they animate on 1s (24 frames per second).
Posted by: ModernistRealist at December 26, 2005 01:15 PM
Well, certain scenes of Miyazaki's movies are herky-jerky, but there are scenes , especially flight scenes and such, that exhibit "flowing motion".
The boiler room scene near the beginning of Spirited Away was also meant to be a homage to Old Disney in terms of animation, and was animated by Shinya Ohira, "a full animator in a country of limited animation" (http://www.pelleas.net/animators/#18). And as I said, even if the movement lacks fluidity, the attention to the way people move, behave, react, and interact makes up for it.
I tend to see Miyazaki definitely approaching the full-motion style, though, within a couple of years. It's funny, though, how animators such as Glen Keane admire his work for the artistic aspect, not the technical aspect, of his animation. Sorta like how UPA was admired.
If you watch "The Art of Spirited Away", an extra on the 2-Disc Edition, Disney animators such as Glen Keane and Hendel Butoy talk about how they admire Miyazaki's realism in terms of motion, stemming from his attention to detail.
You know, it is possible to turn such a "limitation" into something interesting. And believe me, compared to other anime, his animation is "full".
The funny thing is that he started out as animator in the 1960 and 1970s at the animation studio, Toei Douga, Japan's answer to Disney studios. They produced high-quality, high-budget animated films with full-motion animation on the 1s and 2s.
And Miyazaki animated several scenes in each, mostly action scenes, that exhibit a great sense of timing and pace, as well as fluidity. So I guess what he does is incorporate elements of full animation into the style called limited animation.
Posted by: ModernistRealist at December 27, 2005 06:24 AM
Read what Miyazaki himself says in this article (http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/interviews/aboutanime.html). Note that this was written in 1987:
"Excessive expressionism in anime
There is no limit to the techniques of animation. You can make animation without drawing a picture. If you put a camera somewhere, and continue to film a frame, meaning 1/24 second, per day with the same angle, you can make a movie of about 15 seconds after a year. If you continue doing so in Tokyo, where there are a great many changes, it should be a very valuable work.
What kind of film will we get, if we keep filming a nude person one frame per month, from the time that person is a newborn?
There are countless techniques, and classy and excellent short works are still produced somewhere in the world. But we can pretty much say that our popular animation is made in the technique of cel animation.
Cel, meaning celluloid sheet, has become vinyl chloride sheet, but we still use the abbreviation today. In this technique, a picture on paper is transferred to cel (by adhering carbon via heat treatment). Then it is colored with water-based vinyl paint and filmed with the background. By the way, this technique was developed in Japan almost at the same time as in the United States.
Cel anime is a technique suitable for group work, and the images in cel anime are clear and have strong appeal. The clarity of the images at the same time means their shallowness. In other words, they are pictures with little information.
You can easily tell this by looking at picture books using cels. They are appealing and easy to understand at first glance, but you soon become tired of them. A really bad drawing can become tolerable when it is made into a cel picture, and a good drawing loses its power when it is made into a cel. In short, cels make both good and bad into mediocre. This characteristic makes the mass-production (of animation) with many animators possible.
To make cel animation with a certain quality, you need a group of technicians with talent and patience. At the core of this group are animators who give movement to pictures. And how difficult it is to foster a group of good animators! Some say that animators are the same as actors, but if so, an improvised play at a year-end party would be better.
The basic laws such as gravity, inertia, elasticity, fluidity, perspective, timing, etc.[3] There are too many lessons you have to learn before you think about acting, and animators get lost in the mountains of homework.
It is not too much to say that if there are 100 animators, 100 of them can not make animation acting. If a director of an animated movie demands that characters in the movie act, he will immediately fall into distrusting animators and get frustrated.
Rotoscope, which is a technique to draw poses and timing from live action film, was developed in the United States and the Soviet Union because the limits of animators' imagination and ability to draw was clear from early on.
However, if you just transplant live-action into drawings, even the acting of a great actor can change into something peculiarly slimy and indistinct. That's because acting is not just movement. It is made of the subtle changes of shadows and lights, texture which can not be expressed with cels, wetness and dryness, and a succession of signs which are faster than one twenty-fourth of second.
Skillful staff members demanded the model actors to act in a more simple style that expresses itself through body silhouette. They thought that the acting style developed for theaters was better suited for cel animated movies than the style developed for movies. That is why the gestures of Disney characters look like a musical, and why (the characters in) Snow Queen act like (they are in) girls' ballet.
There are many disastrous failures in rotoscope. Bakshi's The Lord of Rings could not be a success when it was based on poor live-action. Also, Disney's Cinderella has proved that seeking "more realistic" movements using rotoscope itself is a double-edged sword. The search for "more reality" just expressed a common American girl, and it lost the symbolism of the story more than Snow White did.
In Japan, rotoscope didn't become popular. It isn't just because of economic reasons. I myself hate this technique. If animators are enslaved by live-action films, the excitement in the animator's work would lessen by half.
Though we can also say that we didn't have an acting style after which we could model. Bunraku, kabuki, nou, or kyougen are too far apart from our works, and Japanese musicals or ballet which are just borrowed (from the West) didn't interest us.[4]
We have been animating with our passion, hunches, and feeling, based on various experiences of movies, manga, and others, as much as time and money allowed us. Gestures (of the characters) tend to be constructed by symbolizing and breaking characters' feelings down to facial parts (i.e., eyes, eyebrows, mouths, and noses) and reconstructing them. But we tried to overcome the decay of symbolization by animating through "identifying with the character" or "becoming the character."
You shouldn't look down on the simple power (of such an approach). It is far from style or sophistication, but if you can capture the true essence of what you should express, a picture with a true feeling has power. I love such power much better than the smooth movement of rotoscope.
Let's get back to Japanese anime. Japanese anime make manga into anime, use character designs of manga, absorb the vitality of manga, and are made by staff members who wanted to be manga writers.
Of course, there are exceptions, but I think that this is pretty much the case in general. Before 1963, when the TV series (anime) started, there were other styles of Toei Animation Studio than manga, but the mass production of TV series and manga severed this tradition (of Toei style).
Based on manga, Japanese anime started as TV series with weekly production schedules, which is overwhelmingly shorter than feature-length movies. Due to limited time and budget, the number of drawings had to be reduced as much as possible.
The lack of staff brought the mass introduction of unskilled and inadequate workers. That wasn't limited to animators. It was the case for all the divisions including direction and script, and there was unprecedented padding and promotion of staff. The horrific thing is that this trend continued for 20 years.[5]
(A TV anime) has to be ready in time for the TV broadcast at any cost. And we have to make the product by using "movement," the biggest characteristic of animation, as little as possible. The reason why such a strange (style of) animation was accepted by viewers was probably because the image language of manga, an older brother of anime, had already penetrated society.
Japanese animation started when we gave up moving. That was made possible by introducing the methods of manga (including gekiga). The technique of cel anime was suited to obvious impacts, and it was designed so that the viewers would see nothing but powerfulness, coolness, and cuteness. Instead of putting life into a character with gestures or facial expressions, (character design) was required to express all the charm of the character with just one picture.
Strangely, theorists who justified this situation appeared during these times. There were people who said that it was time for limited animation, or that a still picture was a new expression and we no longer need movement.
Not only the design and personalities of the characters, but time and space were also completely deformed.
The time needed for a ball thrown by a pitcher to reach the catcher's mitt was limitlessly extended by the passion put into the ball. And animators pursued powerful movement (to express) this extended moment. Depicting a narrow ring as a huge battlefield was justified as it is equal to a battlefield for the hero.
Strangely, the way of such storytelling has become closer to koudan.[6] How these animations resemble the depiction of Heichachiro Magaki running up the stone steps of Atago mountain on horseback.[7]
The role of the techniques to move pictures was limited to emphasizing and decorating the extended and skewed time and space. The depiction of characters' action in everyday life, which (Japanese anime) was not good at to start with, was actively eliminated as something unnecessary and out-of-date. Absurdity was strongly pursued.
The criteria for judging an animator's capability was changed to (the capability to animate) battles, matches, or detailed drawing of machines, an emphasis on the power of any arm, from nuclear to laser weapon.
If there were a depiction of (character's) feeling, the method of manga was easily borrowed to get it done with music, angle, or decorating one still picture, without motion. It came to be considered as a rather uninteresting sequence, a section where the animators could take a rest. Animators became more inclined to judge only on the flashiness of the movement when they considered the value of the sequence they were to animate.
For example, a hero who can only sneer, since if he smiles that would screw his face up. A heroine with huge eyes that suddenly turn into dots without any connection between these two types of eyes.
Extremely deformed characters with no sense of existence pretend to be cool in a deformed colorful world by extending time as much as they want-- that has become the major characteristic of Japanese anime.
When this expressionism first appeared, it was justified by "passion" which was in fashion at that time. Indeed, when the audience got excessively involved with the piece of work, and sympathized with it more than the work expressed, this method was overwhelmingly supported (by the audience). Kyojin no Hoshi in the high-growth era was one example[8]. However, as the passion wore out, it merely became the easiest pattern of technique.
And to turn around the adverse situation, expression in anime more and more became excessively decorative. At first, two robots were combined to be a robot, then it became a three robot combination, then five, and finally the twenty-six robot combination.
Character design became more and more complicated. Huge eyes had seven-colored highlights. More and more shadows were painted in different colors, and hair was painted in bright colors of every possible shade. It makes animators suffer, by increasing the workload of those who are paid by the quantity of animation they drew. The pattern has become prevalent to a frightening degree.
Maybe I, too, am exaggerating (the situation of) Japanese anime. Not all Japanese anime is run by excessive expressionism.
I do not say that there was no effort made to establish their own (style) of acting under various constraints. I do not say that there was no effort made to depict time and space with a sense of existence. I do not say that there was no effort made to refuse to be a subordinate of manga. However, most of them followed this trend of expressionism, and many of the young staff have joined the anime industry because they admired this excessive expressionism.
As the formula of "anime = excessive expressionism" becomes widely accepted by society, anime hit a wall. In the same way that koudan cannot meet the needs of today's audience, anime creators lost the support of the audience. They brought it on themselves by losing their flexibility and humility towards the diversity of the world. Even so, many of them are still unaware of the strangeness of their views on anime. They are still convinced that excessive expression is what makes anime appealing.
Actually today in 1987, excessive expressionism has been forced to retreat as it loses share with the end of the anime boom. The remainder has moved to videos, but the market remains small although it (the video market) has been hyped a lot as a new medium. It has been pigeonholed as a market for anime maniacs by anime maniacs in typical reduced reproduction.
Rather than feeling pity, I cannot help being reminded of the frog with a ballooned stomach in Aesop's fable. Meanwhile, there is now a strong trend in the TV anime world to return to works for children, as we regret that we have raised the age of the targeted audience too much.
However, none of the conditions that created the expressionism of Japanese anime have changed. Because the conditions which leade to anime using few moving pictures haven't changed, many animators think that it is just a degradation, rather than think that they are making anime to please children.
There is a phrase, "Saturday Morning Animator," in the United States. On Saturday morning, TV is filled with animated programs so that it can babysit while parents sleep late. It is a self-mocking phrase of the animators who make such programs. After the boom has ended, it is likely to be very difficult for Japanese animators to rediscover their work as a craft that they can put their love into."
Posted by: ModernistRealist at December 27, 2005 06:30 AM
While I'm not a convert (yet) to the school of Miyazaki-style animation, I'm willing to give it a second look.
Thanks for the erudite lesson; this kind of exchange is the most edifying aspect of using the internet.
Best wishes for the New Year.
M
Posted by: Mike at December 27, 2005 07:29 AM
You're very welcome. Sorry for the belated respose, though.
I just have one suggestion -- in your article, you should really change "5 frames per second" to "from 8 to 12 frames per second" -- your article will be much more accurate, so therefore you'll sound more enlightened about the subject.
Also, please remember that American studios such as Disney and Warner Bros. use rotoscope -- in other words, tracing over live-action footage frame-by-frame in order to achieve what you consider to be "lifelike motion" --whereas Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli does not.
Also, just a little anecdote -- I was talking to a friend of mine, an animator, who said that at Disney they used to screen scenes from two early films by Hayao Miyazaki -- My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service -- for their animators. Pixar, of course, does that all the time.
Best Wishes,
ModernistRealist
Posted by: ModernistRealist at January 24, 2006 07:33 AM
Hi, again!
If you're interested, I've just done a bit more research. Here are the average frame rates for all of Studio Ghibli's films:
Panda! Go Panda = 6.02
Castle of Cagliostro = 9.87
Chie the Brat = 10.13
Goshu the Cellist = 9.56
Famous Detective Holmes = 10.77
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind = 8.03
Castle in the Sky = 9.30
My Neighbor Totoro = 9.41
Grave of the Fireflies = 10.30
Kiki's Delivery Service = 10.92
Only Yesterday = 10.34
Porco Rosso = 10.44
The Ocean Waves = 5.91
Whisper of the Heart = 9.68
On Your Mark = 19.73
Princess Mononoke = 18.00
My Neighbors the Yamadas = 19.49
Ghiblies 1 = 7.37
Spirited Away = 19.15
The Cat Returns = 17.63
Ghiblies 2 = 20.96
Innocence, Ghost in the Shell = 19.67
Howl's Moving Castle = 18.82
Also, here is a trailer for Studio Ghibli's newest film, "Tales from Earthsea" directed by Hayao Miyazaki's son Goro Miyazaki and being released in Japan this July: http://rose-schwarzes.hp.infoseek.co.jp/gedo/gedosenki-trailer2-320.wmv
The animation is really poor by American standards, just like Spirited Away ;), but please watch it and at least give it a chance -- see if the subject matter interests you at all. Here is a synopsis of the film: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/GedoSenkiSynopsis.html
Posted by: ModernistRealist at April 29, 2006 02:32 PM
Greetings.
No response?! That's alright, I've got more to say anyway on this topic.
I was reading your article again, and I may have said this before, but while the amount of movement in a Warner Bros. or Disney cartoon film is realistic, the kind of movement is not.
The movement is usually very cartoony and overdone, not realistic or naturalistic at all. It may give an impression of reality, but it's an alternate reality, and is not suitable for some kinds of stories, mature stories that would otherwise be done in live-action if not for the vision of its creators ;).
Hayao Miyazaki himself is a fan of Chuck Jones, and you can see this in some of his early animation work at Toei Douga such as "Puss in Boots" and "Animal Treasure Island", which is very lively.
You also mentioned that Warner Bros. and Disney have "eye-popping colors and incredible background work", something Studio Ghibli excels at as well, if not more. In fact, Studio Ghibli's 1995 film "Whisper of the Heart", directed by Yoshifumi Kondo and written by Aoi Hiiragi and Hayao Miyazaki is notorious for its use of light and shadow that at times surpasses a Disney classic such as Pinocchio.
Also, Disney, as I have said before, does not animate at a full 24 cels per second, but actually 12 cels per second, and at least 3/4 of Spirited Away is done at the same frame-rate. But while Disney traces over live-action footage frame-by-frame, Studio Ghibli does not. Therefore, Disney has the greater fluidity while Ghibli has more "inventive" movement, such as the way the Gods move, the flying of the dragon, the subtly detailed movement when Chihiro ties something around her, or the massive movement of Kaonashi (No-Face) when chasing Chihiro.
I would hardly say that the animation in any Studio Ghibli work is jerky -- stop-motion work such as Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit shorts are much jerkier, but I doubt you are turned-off by them.
Well-observed details are the crux of Ghibli animation, even if the cel-count is lower than a rotoscoped Disney or Bakshi film. Animation -- true animation, not rotoscope -- is really nothing like live-action when it comes to the visuals.
An important facet of animation technique is the spacing of the frames to make a movement seem natural -- in other words, the drafting of the frames. While fully-inbetweened Disney animation seems virtuosic and all, it leaves nothing to the viewer and if done carelessly, can actually distance the viewer away from the characters.
Miyazaki leaves some of the tweening up to the eye of the beholder, and when it works (which it usually does) it makes the movement very interesting and exciting. It's stylized, yes, and it may be as far from realism as Disney's work -- yes, that brings me back to rotoscope, the tracing of live-action drawings, which might logically be deduced as more realistic, but in fact, when applied to hand-drawn figures, can result in stilted and cartoony movement, far removed from realism -- a "double-edged sword", so to speak.
I strongly urge you to watch 'Spirited Away' once more (in the original language w/subtitles), and give it a second chance -- it really does have some truly believable and convincing character animation despite the alarming minimalism in the movement throughout the film.
I think what bothered you the most when you saw it was that the characters were not continuously moving, which seemed strangely limited to you, so you deduced that they used very few drawings to depict the movement, which is plainly untrue.
In fact, the little flicker there was in the animation elements, which is barely noticeable, as I have said, was a result of animating rather than rotoscoping. I can't really say anymore except that your blog entry is really biased and uninformed, and is really hard to take seriously.
Lastly, here's a link some of the critical acclaim from some of the best American animators for Miyazaki: http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/miyazaki/impact.html
And two of my favorite quotes, which are not on the webpage:
On Hayao Miyazaki: "I enjoy dreaming along with him: He's the original dream merchant. . . . It's not a regular cartoon, but a work of art that moves; its pacing is beautiful and symphonic in its rhythms."--Joe Grant, animator and storyboard artist for Disney Studios from 1933 to 2005 (his death)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Grant
“Miyazaki is the greatest living animator… His frames are brilliantly, sunnily ‘lit’, with exhilarating shifting perspectives and cinematic movement, and a drawing style that is as detailed and dense as Brueghel.” — Philip Lopate, Film Comment
So, just give it a chance. It really is worth it.
Best Wishes,
ModernistRealist
Posted by: ModernistRealist at May 3, 2006 08:43 AM
Also, I forgot to say that the more restrained character movement is very indicative of Japanese culture in general. It may not seem that filmic, but it appears in Japanese live-action films as well, even the best of Kurosawa.
Best Wishes,
ModernistRealist
Posted by: ModernistRealist at May 3, 2006 08:48 AM
Whilst this is ... hahah... 3 years too late to the conversation, I need to make it clear that, whilst I fully appreciate the skill that Ghibli animators have describing movement with a lower frame rate, the Disney animators never traced, and this is just as sweepingly uniformed statement to make. They relied on purpose-made reference for animation, but they also gave something else as animators too, otherwise the classic films wouldn't look so great. Back in the 40s and 50s Disney had far more resources, time and budget than Ghibli did when it started in the 70s, so this probably has something to do with the fact that the animators could spend more time on a scene, and be generous with their frame-rate. They did not, however, trace, and to suggest so would be denouncing all the beautiful animation created.
Posted by: Yibble Jibbles at February 23, 2009 02:53 PM