The Artist Who Colored Ghibli

I watched Kiki's Delivery Service recently with my sisters and niece. I'm always amazed by the artistic vision when I watch a new (to me) Ghibli film. As a grown man, you'd be hard-pressed to get me to watch a cartoon about a young witch if it were made by any other studio. But Ghibli has the magic that makes it delightful for everyone.

The comparison in the article between Kiki drawn with "standard" colors and the final version is really telling. Even though the standard version is more saturated, which in my naive mind should make it more vibrant, it actually looks more bland when you put it side by side with the desaturated colors of the actual drawing. It goes to show how much these little choices influence the final product.

It’s horrible to think that this kind of creative handiwork could be replaced entirely by automatic processes within my lifetime. It’s reminiscent of how blacksmithing and weaving have almost entirely been replaced by machine process, except that those industries were mostly drudgery, at best. Maybe to the artisan coloring animated films, their work becomes drudgery too. But even if it is objectively more efficient to mechanize, something of the humanity of the craft has left even those simple things, that touched daily life of people in their local community, and has now been replaced by efficient, cost-optimized plain commodity. Probably looking back at such things romantically now would have seemed very silly at the time — it’s just a tool, a garment, or an implement — but hindsight makes it seem so much more alive than the dead plastic and stamped sheet metal things of today, and even now people will still sometimes pay a premium for handmade simple objects.

I hope at least that even if many creative artisan industries are devoured by the efficiency demon, many people will still have a fondness for true artwork and handicraft, and be willing to pay those talented souls the true value of their offerings.

Still, when a huge factory can make millions of garments far more cheaply than an army of weavers and sewers can be paid to, it’s hardly a surprise if the craftwork shop closes its doors. Food for thought.

Very interesting article. As seems to be the pattern with Studio Ghibli they found someone uniquely talented, who ascended to the top of their craft over the course of their career, but never really found a successor to carry on their legacy.

But perhaps I'm doing an injustice to her apprentices at the studio, who maybe weren't covered in the article and who may have gone on to find work on other projects as Ghibli wound down.

I really enjoyed watching this Ghibli background artist pain and explain his process in real time. There's a lot of artistry that go into these films:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hup0lsrY07I

I've also been watching the 1979 anime adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. Hayao Miyazaki worked on it (7 years before founding Ghibli), and although the TV animation is more limited than a film's, I think it looks awesome. It's pretty funny too. Miyazaki's reasons for quitting halfway through production are really interesting to read in the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_Green_Gables_(1979_TV_...

I looked into it because I've always wanted to read Anne of Green Gables, and I had heard that PEI is a big tourist destination for older Japanese women who grew up watching the series. It's one of the few I don't mind dubbed, since it's an adaptation of an English-language work and the acting fits really well. It's probably not supposed to be on Youtube, but the entire series is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2CmEYEeDSU&list=PLV4Ztn9euy...

Animation Obsessive continues to deliver some of my favorite reads online. Well researched, detailed, and interesting. I'd wondered about the Ghibli colors, feels like that's not talked about much. Cool article!

I need to plug "Grave of the Fireflies". I initially didn't watch it with my kids because (at the time) it was only subtitled, and one of my kids was too young to read.

One night I decided to watch it after I put them all to bed, and the older ones snuck down and watched it with me. They loved it, and I cried at the end.

Another film she did the colors on is Whisper of the Heart. It's a Ghibli film that was written by Miyazaki, but directed by Yoshifumi Kondō. The colors are truly outstanding. Scenes at dawn, lamplit rooms, overcast school days, and fantasy sequences all look just wonderful.

Example: https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/46202

The blog itself, Animation Obsessive, is also all high quality if this kind of thing interests you

This really humbles me, someone who always thought the Ghibli AI art is okayish. So much time that the normal viewer never acknowledges.