I played Inside the Animation Studio with Don Hall and Chris Williams of Big Hero 6, Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable of The Boxtrolls, Dean DeBlois of How to Train Your Dragon 2, Tomm Moore of Song of the Sea, and Isao Takahata of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. The questions were simple and more personal and the responses were engaging and insightful.
Bill Desowitz: What makes your movies so personal for you?
BD: Why do you think your movie resonates so strongly with audiences?
DD: I have heard from so many people who find different aspects of the movie emotionally resonant. And others that I’m quite surprised by. I think the honesty of it and our dedication to tell a story that didn’t shy away from the tough, emotional moments seems to have been very welcome. I feel that animation as a medium is so powerful and yet so often treated as light entertainment. There’s almost a conventional wisdom that you can’t provoke your audience, you can’t go for deep, meaningful emotion. That’s been proven wrong time and again with many of the Pixar films and the early Disney films that I grew up on.
TM: I think all the family stuff that I drew from my own family, the sibling rivalry between older brothers and little sisters, that seems to resonate, and also a sense of disconnection with the landscape and the environment, even though that’s on an unconscious level in the movie. And the whole idea of not keeping your emotions bottled up.
IT: Nothing would delight me more if this is true. The reason, no doubt, is because audiences can identify with the story and its characters. I also think that audiences felt a fresh appeal in the ease and freedom of the drawings, as if a breeze were blowing through the screen, which is different from fantasy films that confine people inside their works and lead the audience by the nose.
BD: What was the biggest story challenge?
DD: When Toothless is ordered to blast Hiccup and Stoick dives in the way and takes the blast instead, that moment was particularly difficult to get right because it was paramount to us that there wouldn’t be a single audience member young or old that would fault Toothless after the fact. So orchestrating it in such a way that the audience understands and sympathizes with Toothless. I wanted it to feel as though these two have overcome this terrible obstacle and now they’re stronger than ever.
TM: The biggest storytelling challenge was integrating the folklore into the family story we were telling. We kind of found the family story in the folklore, so we wound up refining and rewriting some of the folklore to fit the family story, but we also wanted to be true to all the folklore references. The mythology was getting complicated but looking at all the Miyazaki stuff, we realized that we didn’t have to explain everything. It could just be kind of the flavor, the backdrop to all the emotional arcs of the characters.
IT: My intent was to take up the challenge of reviving in our time The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, written at the end of the 9th century, a story familiar to all Japanese from children to adults. The original has the appeal of containing aspects that are enigmatic or amusing which are contradictory. But the tale is impossible to comprehend and the feelings of The Princess Kaguya, the main character, are totally unfathomable. My aspiration was to recreate the story into one that is understandable and to turn it into a film that allows us to identify with The Princess Kaguya’s feelings without changing the surface plot line and episodes of the original story.
BD: What was the biggest design challenge?
TM: Definitely finding a clever way to design the sea and keep that organic hand-drawn look in a way that we could afford and have it be a character in the film. It’s calm, sometimes it’s quite violent. So we had to design our way around the budget. We couldn’t do a Pixar and write amazing software or even what Ghibli did in Ponyo.
IT: I put my full trust into the wonderfully gifted talents of character design and directing animator Osamu Tanabe and art director Kazuo Oga. Even so, our effort to show on the screen what I intended — that is, to search out the most fitting expression for the spiritual or psychological meaning in each scene — required endless trial and error by the three of us. For each shot we considered how rough, how strong, and what colors to make the lines; how much to allow for blank, unfinished spaces; how much difference to make in the expression between parts where the movement is fast and intense and parts that are calm; and on and on. This meant we couldn’t use the “assembly-line” method that is normal for animation film production.
BD: What was the biggest animation challenge?
AS: Technologically, the rapid prototyping of faces had a reached a place where they were able to make them smaller and give them really subtle performances and really elaborate paint textures, so we weren’t held back by the technology. We could go as realistic as we wanted or as grotesque as we wanted with the caricature. But early on, Snatcher was more of an old style Disney/Zero Mostel type villain: he was big and bubbly. He was still bad and doing terrible things, but he went through a lot of permutations until Sir Ben really nailed him down in that first recording session.
DD: I’ve often heard [animation supervisor] Simon Otto talk about how the human animation in How to Train Your Dragon 2 is the best that the studio has ever done. And a lot of it was trying to fine the line between having it feel naturalistic without losing a cartoony playfulness as well. It’s a subtle thing because Hiccup is very close to human proportions and so there isn’t a lot of caricature in him. And finding the moments where we could be playful with the acting and at the same time keep all of the physics in check and deliver performances that are truthful and well observed was the toughest animation challenge.
TM: Again, the sea. It ended up being a real hybrid between hand-drawn animation and then using the computer to make the most out of the hand-drawn animation that we could do.
IT: No matter how talented the two lead staff are and no matter how many pictures they drew, it was impossible for their drawings to be the only ones used throughout the entirety of this film with a running time of over two hours. It was essential to divide the labor in order to complete the enormous number of drawings needed for the film in a set amount of time. Despite the incredibly difficult task of copying the non-design style drawings of the two, the entire animation staff worked with dedication and total cooperation in their efforts to complete this film. In my mind, this was a near miracle.
BD: What was your best day?
GA: Yeah, sitting comfortably on the couch and watching Dario running the show and elevating everything with the music and the live orchestra. I don’t even have words for it — it was amazing.
DD: The best day overall was hearing John Powell play us back the first melodies for our story because I have such respect for musicians and I can’t play music myself but I love it and look forward to that moment after we’ve been crafting the story and building up the scenes to having the composer come in and lay a custom piece of music and deliver a good third of the storytelling.
TM: My best day was maybe the day with the orchestra because that day was like magic. Most of it was finished and then hearing the orchestra play the score and it was overlaid with the music we’d already recorded by Kila.
IT: That was the day when I felt that the staff, upon watching the daily rushes, realized how good the result was and I could sense that it boosted their feelings of anticipation to complete the film. They were able to strengthen their solidarity at that point. But the very best day would have to be the day of the initial screening of the completed film for the entire staff. It was when I saw the faces, faces, faces of satisfaction for what they had accomplished by joining together as one to work so hard.
BD: What was your worst day?
DD: When I’m writing and confronting my demons and force the story out of myself and have the courage not to throw it all away.
TM: I think one of the worst days was early on when we only had 18 months and much less money than we thought we needed to get it made. It came together in the end, but there was definitely a period there where it looked like it was going to be impossible to really do it justice.
IT: My character seems to be foolishly optimistic so that I immediately forget anything bad, so I don’t remember my worst day.
BD: What was the hardest scene to get right?
IT: The hardest was the scene where The Princess Kaguya and Sutemaru fly through the sky. When I first thought of this scene, I was overly ambitious, wanting them to fly not only above the Earth, that is above Japan’s wonderfully varied landscape, but also within the landscape. At the design stage I went through a lot of trial and error to attempt to realize this, to no avail. But that was during the design stage. Since I am basically steeped in frugality, as with other scenes, once a scene was animated, I did not waste the staff’s work by choosing to throw out any scenes. There were no shots that I cut after they had been animated.
BD: What’s your favorite moment?
DH: The portal scene, the goodbye, finding that less is more. It’s a really silent scene but getting that emotion just right took iteration after iteration. We were tinkering with that all the way to the end because it was so important.
CW: Even when we played an early version of that scene that was just layout, there were 30 people sitting in a room in tears. And yet we were a long way from finding the exact version of the scene.
DD: I think that the funeral was very special in the way it turned out. Craig Ferguson did a wonderful job reading that eulogy and I think Hiccup speaks the words I wish had done with the clarity and maturity I could’ve spoken at my own dad’s own funeral. It’s a quiet, cathartic moment.
IT: I am fond of all of the scenes, so I can’t name just one. If I do, then I would feel sorry for the other scenes.
Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.