It was completed when Miyazaki was 56 years old: not a decrepit old fool but neither a spring chicken with something to prove. Now, there's a reason that I've finally brought all this up, because Princess Mononoke was the last film produced this way. This, I shouldn't wonder, is the very reason that Miyazaki films are so uniform in quality, and so deeply felt. That level of control - call it micro-managing if you like, I'll not stop you - is not just rare: to my knowledge, no other filmmaker working on the same scale has ever come close to that level of direct personal involvement in the creation of the animated features he put his name to. In the case of tonight's subject, Princess Mononoke, that translates to 80,000 out of a total of 144,000 frames that the director personally approved (though by no means did he himself draw 80,000 frames - we'd still be waiting on the film if that were the case). The reason we get to in the case of a Miyazaki film is that he oversaw the production of literally every cel of key animation and if he didn't like one, he personally redrew it. We're ten films into this Miyazaki Hayao retrospective now, and so far I've said barely a word about how they've been made and it's worth discussing, because it's fairly special, and explains why thus far I've made so freely with "Miyazaki did this" and "Miyazaki did that", despite the fact that one usually doesn't treat feature-length animation using auteur theory.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
February 2023
Categories |