TOKYO (AP) – The princess laughs and floats in sumie-brush sketches of faint pastel, a lush landscape that animated film director Isao Takahata has painstakingly depicted to relay his gentle message of faith in this world.
But his Oscar-nominated work stands as a stylistic challenge to Hollywood’s computer-graphics cartoons, where 3D and other digital finesse dominate. Takahata says those terms with a little sarcastic cough.
The 79-year-old co-founder of Japan’s prestigious animator, Studio Ghibli, instead stuck to a hand-drawn look.
Edo-era woodblock-print artists like Hokusai understood Western-style perspective and the use of light, but they purposely chose to depict reality with lines, and in a flat way, with minimal shading, and that is at the heart of Japanese “manga,” or comics, said Takahata.
“We want to fuse the styles, the Japanese and the Western. To express things with a stroke of a line is Japanese tradition, but we do it with a proper understanding of dimension,” he told The Associated Press at the picturesque Ghibli offices in suburban Tokyo.