This is what Miyazaki said in an interview in 1988:
"There is no limit to the techniques of animation. You can make animation without drawing a picture. If you put a camera somewhere, and continue to film a frame, meaning 1/24 second, per day with the same angle, you can make a movie of about 15 seconds after a year. If you continue doing so in Tokyo, where there are a great many changes, it should be a very valuable work. What kind of film will we get, if we keep filming a nude person one frame per month, from the time that person is a newborn?
There are countless techniques, and classy and excellent short works are still produced somewhere in the world. But we can pretty much say that our popular animation is made in the technique of cel animation.
Cel, meaning celluloid sheet, has become vinyl chloride sheet, but we still use the abbreviation today. In this technique, a picture on paper is transferred to cel (by adhering carbon via heat treatment). Then it is colored with water-based vinyl paint and filmed with the background. By the way, this technique was developed in Japan almost at the same time as in the United States.
Cel anime is a technique suitable for group work, and the images in cel anime are clear and have strong appeal. The clarity of the images at the same time means their shallowness. In other words, they are pictures with little information. You can easily tell this by looking at picture books using cels. They are appealing and easy to understand at first glance, but you soon become tired of them. A really bad drawing can become tolerable when it is made into a cel picture, and a good drawing loses its power when it is made into a cel. In short, cels make both good and bad into mediocre. This characteristic makes the mass-production (of animation) with many animators possible.
To make cel animation with a certain quality, you need a group of technicians with talent and patience. At the core of this group are animators who give movement to pictures. And how difficult it is to foster a group of good animators! Some say that animators are the same as actors, but if so, an improvised play at a year-end party would be better. The basic laws such as gravity, inertia, elasticity, fluidity, perspective, timing, etc.[3] There are too many lessons you have to learn before you think about acting, and animators get lost in the mountains of homework. It is not too much to say that if there are 100 animators, 100 of them can not make animation acting. If a director of an animated movie demands that characters in the movie act, he will immediately fall into distrusting animators and get frustrated. Rotoscope, which is a technique to draw poses and timing from live action film, was developed in the United States and the Soviet Union because the limits of animators' imagination and ability to draw was clear from early on. However, if you just transplant live-action into drawings, even the acting of a great actor can change into something peculiarly slimy and indistinct. That's because acting is not just movement. It is made of the subtle changes of shadows and lights, texture which can not be expressed with cels, wetness and dryness, and a succession of signs which are faster than one twenty-fourth of second.
Skillful staff members demanded the model actors to act in a more simple style that expresses itself through body silhouette. They thought that the acting style developed for theaters was better suited for cel animated movies than the style developed for movies. That is why the gestures of Disney characters look like a musical, and why (the characters in) Snow Queen [a film by Lev Atamanov] act like (they are in) girls' ballet. There are many disastrous failures in rotoscope. Bakshi's The Lord of Rings could not be a success when it was based on poor live-action. Also, Disney's Cinderella has proved that seeking "more realistic" movements using rotoscope itself is a double-edged sword. The search for "more reality" just expressed a common American girl, and it lost the symbolism of the story more than Snow White did.
In Japan, rotoscope didn't become popular. It isn't just because of economic reasons. I myself hate this technique. If animators are enslaved by live-action films, the excitement in the animator's work would lessen by half. Though we can also say that we didn't have an acting style after which we could model. Bunraku, kabuki, nou, or kyougen are too far apart from our works, and Japanese musicals or ballet which are just borrowed (from the West) didn't interest us.[4] We have been animating with our passion, hunches, and feeling, based on various experiences of movies, manga, and others, as much as time and money allowed us. Gestures (of the characters) tend to be constructed by symbolizing and breaking characters' feelings down to facial parts (i.e., eyes, eyebrows, mouths, and noses) and reconstructing them. But we tried to overcome the decay of symbolization by animating through "identifying with the character" or "becoming the character."
You shouldn't look down on the simple power (of such an approach). It is far from style or sophistication, but if you can capture the true essence of what you should express, a picture with a true feeling has power. I love such power much better than the smooth movement of rotoscope.
Let's get back to Japanese anime. Japanese anime make manga into anime, use character designs of manga, absorb the vitality of manga, and are made by staff members who wanted to be manga writers. Of course, there are exceptions, but I think that this is pretty much the case in general. Before 1963, when the TV series (anime) started, there were other styles of Toei Animation Studio than manga, but the mass production of TV series and manga severed this tradition (of Toei style). Based on manga, Japanese anime started as TV series with weekly production schedules, which is overwhelmingly shorter than feature-length movies. Due to limited time and budget, the number of drawings had to be reduced as much as possible. The lack of staff brought the mass introduction of unskilled and inadequate workers. That wasn't limited to animators. It was the case for all the divisions including direction and script, and there was unprecedented padding and promotion of staff. The horrific thing is that this trend continued for 20 years.[5]
(A TV anime) has to be ready in time for the TV broadcast at any cost. And we have to make the product by using "movement," the biggest characteristic of animation, as little as possible. The reason why such a strange (style of) animation was accepted by viewers was probably because the image language of manga, an older brother of anime, had already penetrated society.
Japanese animation started when we gave up moving. That was made possible by introducing the methods of manga (including gekiga). The technique of cel anime was suited to obvious impacts, and it was designed so that the viewers would see nothing but powerfulness, coolness, and cuteness. Instead of putting life into a character with gestures or facial expressions, (character design) was required to express all the charm of the character with just one picture.
Strangely, theorists who justified this situation appeared during these times. There were people who said that it was time for limited animation, or that a still picture was a new expression and we no longer need movement.
Not only the design and personalities of the characters, but time and space were also completely deformed. The time needed for a ball thrown by a pitcher to reach the catcher's mitt was limitlessly extended by the passion put into the ball. And animators pursued powerful movement (to express) this extended moment. Depicting a narrow ring as a huge battlefield was justified as it is equal to a battlefield for the hero. Strangely, the way of such storytelling has become closer to koudan.[6] How these animations resemble the depiction of Heichachiro Magaki running up the stone steps of Atago mountain on horseback.[7]
The role of the techniques to move pictures was limited to emphasizing and decorating the extended and skewed time and space. The depiction of characters' action in everyday life, which (Japanese anime) was not good at to start with, was actively eliminated as something unnecessary and out-of-date. Absurdity was strongly pursued. The criteria for judging an animator's capability was changed to (the capability to animate) battles, matches, or detailed drawing of machines, an emphasis on the power of any arm, from nuclear to laser weapon. If there were a depiction of (character's) feeling, the method of manga was easily borrowed to get it done with music, angle, or decorating one still picture, without motion. It came to be considered as a rather uninteresting sequence, a section where the animators could take a rest. Animators became more inclined to judge only on the flashiness of the movement when they considered the value of the sequence they were to animate.
For example, a hero who can only sneer, since if he smiles that would screw his face up. A heroine with huge eyes that suddenly turn into dots without any connection between these two types of eyes. Extremely deformed characters with no sense of existence pretend to be cool in a deformed colorful world by extending time as much as they want-- that has become the major characteristic of Japanese anime.
When this expressionism first appeared, it was justified by "passion" which was in fashion at that time. Indeed, when the audience got excessively involved with the piece of work, and sympathized with it more than the work expressed, this method was overwhelmingly supported (by the audience). Kyojin no Hoshi in the high-growth era was one example[8]. However, as the passion wore out, it merely became the easiest pattern of technique. And to turn around the adverse situation, expression in anime more and more became excessively decorative. At first, two robots were combined to be a robot, then it became a three robot combination, then five, and finally the twenty-six robot combination. Character design became more and more complicated. Huge eyes had seven-colored highlights. More and more shadows were painted in different colors, and hair was painted in bright colors of every possible shade. It makes animators suffer, by increasing the workload of those who are paid by the quantity of animation they drew. The pattern has become prevalent to a frightening degree.
Maybe I, too, am exaggerating (the situation of) Japanese anime. Not all Japanese anime is run by excessive expressionism. I do not say that there was no effort made to establish their own (style) of acting under various constraints. I do not say that there was no effort made to depict time and space with a sense of existence. I do not say that there was no effort made to refuse to be a subordinate of manga. However, most of them followed this trend of expressionism, and many of the young staff have joined the anime industry because they admired this excessive expressionism.
As the formula of "anime = excessive expressionism" becomes widely accepted by society, anime hit a wall. In the same way that koudan cannot meet the needs of today's audience, anime creators lost the support of the audience. They brought it on themselves by losing their flexibility and humility towards the diversity of the world. Even so, many of them are still unaware of the strangeness of their views on anime. They are still convinced that excessive expression is what makes anime appealing.
Actually today in 1987, excessive expressionism has been forced to retreat as it loses share with the end of the anime boom. The remainder has moved to videos, but the market remains small although it (the video market) has been hyped a lot as a new medium. It has been pigeonholed as a market for anime maniacs by anime maniacs in typical reduced reproduction. Rather than feeling pity, I cannot help being reminded of the frog with a ballooned stomach in Aesop's fable. Meanwhile, there is now a strong trend in the TV anime world to return to works for children, as we regret that we have raised the age of the targeted audience too much. However, none of the conditions that created the expressionism of Japanese anime have changed. Because the conditions which leade to anime using few moving pictures haven't changed, many animators think that it is just a degradation, rather than think that they are making anime to please children.
There is a phrase, "Saturday Morning Animator," in the United States. On Saturday morning, TV is filled with animated programs so that it can babysit while parents sleep late. It is a self-mocking phrase of the animators who make such programs. After the boom has ended, it is likely to be very difficult for Japanese animators to rediscover their work as a craft that they can put their love into."
http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/interv ... anime.html
Also, read what I had to say on another thread on this forum:
"If all you care about is how many images they use per second, then you're pretty shallow. The quality of the animation has little to do with how many drawings are used.
Anyway, as a student of animation, this is what I can tell you:
DIsney films are done on 1s (24 drawings per second) much of the time because they use rotoscope, which is tracing over live-action footage frame-by-frame. Hand-drawn animated films from Studio Ghibli (which never use rotoscope), in comparison, are done on 2s (12 drawings per second at 24 frames per second), 3s (8 drawings per second at 24 frames per second), and even occasionally 4s (6 drawings per second at 24 frames per second), going to the 1s only during action scenes or scenes with really subtle and detailed movement because that's their style, and each different motion rate has its own unique and wonderful feel. It's a more abstract, impressionistic approach to movement compared to the realism of Disney, Don Bluth, or Ralph Bakshi, and is extremely similar to the work of the Fleischer Bros., Warner Bros., and UPA in their stylization of the medium."
http://www.ultimatedisney.com/forum/vie ... 473#225473
Hercules and Tarzan were the least emotionally involving to me. Their animation was gorgeous, but in the case of Hercules, that really didn't amount to much when it came to humanizing the artwork.
