The animation studio Ghibli still relies on hand-drawn images. A particularly elaborate scene shows how long the process for an anime can take.
What kind of scene is it? The mentioned scene is from the movie “The Wind Rises”. The film is set shortly after World War I and tells the story of Jiro Horikoshi, who finds his great love while designing airplanes professionally.
Jiro travels to Tokyo and experiences the Kanto earthquake there. This is a real disaster that occurred in Japan in 1923, requiring thousands of casualties due to the subsequent fires.
In the film, the scene is portrayed as very oppressive and chaotic. The first ash particles float in the air, and a gigantic crowd is seen fleeing from the consequences of the earthquake. You can watch the scene in the Reddit forum.
The trailer for The Wind Rises
can be found here:
Ghibli animator spent 15 months on a short scene
Why did it take so long? To animate this scene, Eiji Yamamori, the responsible animator, took a full 15 months. There are several reasons for this:
- The individual images are all hand-drawn and colored with watercolor
- There are no copied people, each person has their own animations
- Every detail was considered, even the posture of the people
The backgrounds for the scene were shown in the documentary “10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki”. There, he added why it was so important to him that the scene contains so many details:
“Crowds are not a sad, faceless group. They are the people who make up society. That is why they must be drawn correctly. Even ordinary crowds must be drawn carefully.”
Miyazaki praises his animator for this and tells him that he did a good job. Even though the scene is very short, it was worth it. This emphasizes how much value Studio Ghibli places on small details.
The legendary animation studio has released numerous films. However, not all of them have been received as well by the audience as The Wind Rises
. There are some that were better, but many that were received worse. How the animes rank, we will reveal to you on MeinMMO: All Ghibli films ranked by IMDb
