Video: Japanese Disney Secrets: Why Hayao Miyazaki's Cartoons Are So Different from Western Cartoons
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The great master of Japanese animation creates completely unique pieces. Each of his cartoon plunges the viewer into a separate, fully-fledged world. It seems that outside the frame, its inhabitants continue to exist according to their own laws. To better understand the famous cartoonist, it is worth looking into his creative laboratory, because Miyazaki creates special paintings and he does it according to his own rules.
The fate of Hayao Miyazaki can serve as an example of the fact that "real talent will always break through", because in childhood, it seemed, nothing could help this boy to become a famous animator. He was born in 1941, and in the very first years he was forced to experience all the horrors of bombing and evacuation with his family. His father was the director of a factory for the manufacture of aircraft parts, his mother suffered from a serious spinal disease for many years and was often in hospitals.
Post-war Japan was clearly not a place where there would be excellent conditions for the development of artistic talent. But it is in the childhood of the master that you can find echoes of those important themes that he will then rethink and reflect throughout his life an infinite number of times in his work: war, fear of losing parents, military equipment and machines, which often resist nature, but can become quite themselves independent and positive characters.
It was the technique that became the first touchstone for the young artist. The boy dreamed of becoming a manga artist - a master of creating manga, and while still at school he tried to draw, but then he was met with the first disappointment. It turned out that he fatally does not know how to portray people, and there is nowhere to learn this. But the cars turned out great, it was them that he then drew for many years. In his senior year, Hayao saw two cartoons, which, according to him, made him finally accept his choice of profession. This is "The Legend of the White Snake" - the first Japanese full-length film and, surprisingly, our "Snow Queen" by Lev Atamanov. By the way, in an interview Miyazaki admitted more than once that his favorite director is Yuri Norshtein ("Hedgehog in the Fog" is a masterpiece of all times and peoples!). So we can talk about the "Russian trace" in modern Japanese animation.
However, the dreams of becoming a professional artist, it seems, did not find support in the Miyazaki family, and therefore the young talent after school entered the university at the Faculty of Politics and Economics. However, after finishing it, he immediately got a job in an animation studio and then continued his own development only in this direction. As a result, he never received a special art education, but, as his fans believe today, maybe this is for the best, because the absence of cliches and an independent, unique approach to animation became the main components of his author's style. So the master brilliantly turned this minus into a huge plus.
Throughout his life, the self-taught Miyazaki in his work was completely free to do without many things that professional animators consider necessary. For example scripts. Only a few of his works were created along this dull beaten path. In most cases, the master started from the image itself and from the new universe. Sketching the character and his environment in pencil and watercolors, he begins to fantasize and imagine what could happen to a newborn creature in this world. Taking a stopwatch to mark the scenes scrolling in the head, and sketching them, the master gradually creates a storyboard. We can say that Miyazaki's cartoons are a visualized stream of his consciousness. As Hayao himself said,
Another great idea that explains a lot in his work was expressed by the animator in a conversation with Western journalists:
This is probably why his creations and some images seem so unusual to us - any hero who causes fear by the end of the story may not be so bad. By the way, this idea has already been picked up by the filmmaking community and has literally been "in the air" lately.
In 2013, at a press conference in Tokyo, Hayao Miyazaki announced the end of his career, but for a long time "Japanese Disney" did not stay out of work - literally three years later he announced his return to the world of animation and has since created a short film "The Boro Caterpillar" … The master is currently working on a new cartoon, How are you ?, which he plans to complete before the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
"Hedgehog in the Fog", inspiring Hayao Miyazaki, is not for nothing considered a masterpiece of world animation. Read on to learn more about How the best cartoon of all time came to be.
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