Princess Mononoke.. This film was one of the best that I have seen so far. The story line was actually interesting and the art and animation style of the film was done very well, especially considering it was created in 1997 when we did not have a lot of the animating technology that we do now. One thing that I loved and think was used brilliantly was the combination of hand drawn artwork and computer animation. It was done in a way that made it visually interesting but still hid the fact that it was done in a completely different way than the rest of the animation.
I have seen in some amines that the combination of the two doesn't work very well, but Princess Mononoke did it promisingly good. The mixture of the two can often come off looking like two different people made the specific scene in the film, but princess has a unique style. This film uses a lot of well saturated colors to give off a sort of "bright" feeling in most scenes, which they used to help them keep the style of the hand drawn art and computer animated art the same. They also did a good job not overusing the amount of computer animated material that they put in the film, otherwise it could have conflicted with certain parts of the story by distracting the viewer from what is going on. They only used about 5 minutes worth of computer animated material throughout the entire film, which for their situation was very good. Their smooth use of these two types of animation is one thing that made this film very successful.
They were also able to keep the art in the movie very sharp, but still sketchy in areas that sketchiness was needed. That is something that is also very difficult to do. If an art style is too sketchy in a film, it can still come off as just moving drawings. Yes, they are just animated drawings, but the smooth quality of the art is also what gives character a more "human-like" quality
I agree that the animation in this film is simply amazing. It is awe inspiring that Hayao Miyazaki hand drew the majority of the film. I love this film and I think that it is one of my all time favorites of the ones that we have watched so far.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting how Miyazaki has grown to hate using any computer animation in his movies now- his latest movie The Secret World of Arrietty is completely hand drawn. He was hesitant to use it in Mononoke but it ended up looking great; I would say almost seamless. I really hope they can continue to make movies to this standard- there's nothing quite like them in the world.
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