In order to tell a compelling and
effective story, storytellers must
construct an immersive world in which
that story takes place, a process known
as world-building. Some stories require
more detailed world-building than others
but in the end the point is the same:
suspend our disbelief, draw us in, make us
buy into the world you've created.
I'd like to explore the films of Studio
Ghibli through the lens of
world-building and how they use
world-building to achieve a sense of
immersive realism, a quality I have long
admired in all of Ghibli's films. Through
masterful animation and attention to
detail, Studio Ghibli consistently crafts
immersive, unique films that strike a
difficult balance between fantasy and
reality. Worldbuilding is a daunting
task for animators because every visual
element in a film must be created from
scratch.
There's nothing there until it's drawn.
This is where Ghibli excels. Their
animators demonstrate a mastery of
technique and a strict attention to
detail with every single scene, to really
bring the world that was in the writer's
mind, the storyteller's mind, to life.
No matter how far-fetched and imaginary
the story, the world of a Ghibli film
consistently feels tactile and realistic.
To quote Hayao Miyazaki: "Anime may depict
fictional worlds, but I nonetheless
believe that at its core it must have a
certain realism. Even if the world
depicted is a lie
the trick is to make it seem as real as
possible. Stated another way, the animator
must fabricate a lie that seems so real
viewers will think the world depicted
might possibly exist." Consider Ghibli's
approach to animating movement. Watch
how their characters run and interact with
their environment, how their clothes and their
hair move—the illusion of physics.
Animators must construct a sense of
scale, gravity, weight, and momentum from
frame to frame to emulate the semblance
of physical world where there isn't one.
This is the unique challenge of
animation: to create a realistic world
through an inherently unrealistic medium.
This trait isn't unique to Ghibli's films,
but they consistently achieve a realistic,
tactile, seemingly effortless sense of
realism through their approach to
movement. This helps ground us within the
reality of the animated world, even if
that world is far removed from our own.
Think about that word: animate. It means
"to bring to life"
This is acting. Miyazaki argues that
animators are themselves actors; they
must understand and empathize with their
characters. Animators share in part of the
actor's process. They must consider: what
is their character's motivation in the
scene?
In the words of Hayao Miyazaki: "their
emotions will become yours. And, as is
often said, you'll become both an
animator and an actor." Of course, voice
actors to a lot of the acting, but voice
acting is disembodied until it's
attached to a drawn character. A character's
unspoken mannerisms and facial
expressions are equally important in
establishing a character as what they
say, so an animator's mastery of technique
must be tempered by an empathy for the
character being animated. To get a better
sense of this let's look at running in animation.
To convey the illusion of running,
because animation is an illusion,
animators use what's called a run cycle.
It's an animated sequence that depicts
running strides of a character, so when
you loop it looks like the character's
running. Of course there are many
different ways of running and every
character runs a little bit differently
depending on the circumstances and their
reason for running. Running almost always
has a clear motivation and is an
opportunity for an animator to
communicate something about that
character; it's a chance for the animator to act.
Whenever you see a character running
in a Ghibli film, the animators
considered the character's motivation
for running, and imparted that motivation
into the way the character moves. Quick
side note here: achieving realistic
movement in animation is so notoriously
difficult to accomplish that many
filmmakers have used the technique of
tracing live-action footage as an easier
shortcut to accomplish a realistic
result. It's a process known as rotoscoping.
The thing is though, it usually
ends up looking kind of creepy to be honest.
It just lands right in the
uncanny valley. Take Ralph Bakshi's
infamous animated adaptation of
"Lord of the Rings" for example.
But, that's a topic for another video.
Point is, it was never
animation's task to emulate real-life
exactly. It's instead just to create an
analog, so to speak, some imaginary world
adjacent to and reminiscent of our own
but not necessarily identical.
Animators can take the rules of
our world and bend or break them however
they wish,
that's part of the magic of animation,
but to achieve a level of immersive
realism as Ghibli so often does there
must exist in underlying familiarity
with the characters and the world where
the story takes place. All this comes
back to how Ghibli depicts movement in
animation. Movement must be used to
convey a sense of relative scale and
weight.
Ghibli not only accomplishes this with
grace but also conveys the emotions and
traits of their characters through
attention to minute details of their
behavior. "The scene where she wrote puts
her feet into her shoe, and it would just
be a very simple scene, you might just
animate it and she puts her shoes on and moves,
runs off. But [Miyazaki's] observed the way a
real little girl does it, she doesn't just put her
feet in her shoes she make sure that
it's snug and tight and in this scene you
can see her kind of tap her toes into
there and then she goes running off. And
it's these little just magic moments
that convince you that this is not an
imaginary world this is real."
In Spirited Away, the bathhouse feels alive and
real. While it's inherently unbelievable,
we believe it exists in the context of
the world of Spirited Away because it's
so well established. There are employees
with jobs to do,
sleeping quarters, a coal-powered furnace
that heats the baths, different kinds of
soap for different clients, even a
process by which to call certain kinds
of soap for different kinds of baths. If
you followed another employee, what would
their day be like? That's fun to imagine.
With all of these details it feels like
there are untold stories unfolding in
the background.
This is the importance of proper
world-building. It doesn't feel like a
cheap facade put up for the convenience
of the story we're being told;
instead, there's depth and richness to
the world. It feels like it extends
beyond the edges of the frame.
Case in point, Princess Mononoke. It's set
in a medieval world inspired by
Japanese folklore. Despite the fantasy
elements of Princess Mononoke it's not
an overtly outrageous film. It feels
grounded by its realistic, nuanced
characters and attention to detail.
The film exhibits Ghibli's signature style of
animated movement complemented by an
established society and even
infrastructure. Look at Iron Town as an
example: the society and culture is
established to the point where we can
infer clear gender roles; the women work
the bellows while the men venture out
with Lady Eboshi to collect resources.
These details aren't the focus of the
film but they build a periphery which
strengthens the main story. They help
create a world believable to the
audience. Their attention to detail is
best exemplified whenever Ghibli uses
wide establishing shots, especially in
towns and cities with lots of people.
This illustrates the immensity of the
animator's task: to create every single
element of a world from scratch.
Notice how every background character is
placed, the actions they're given, the
intentions they may have. In animation,
everything is on screen on purpose.
Watch the background. See what the
animators put there for you to find,
consciously or not, to help create a
sense of realism and a well-rounded
world that extends beyond the edges of
the screen.
Pay attention to the ordinary, the
inconsequential, seemingly unimportant
actions and elements of the background.
Every single one was a conscious choice.
Another unique quality you'll notice of
Ghibli's filmography is the range of
stories that they tell.
Studio Ghibli is often referred to synonymously
with Hayao Miyazaki, their famous,
imaginative, and visionary director of
fantasy stories. There are, though, a few
other Studio Ghibli films that favor
subtle, subdued storylines. Look at films
like Ocean Waves, From Up on Poppy Hill,
and Only Yesterday, which tell minimal
understated stories with a strong yet
subtle emotional core. These stories
would be difficult to pull off with a
lesser mastery of animation. On their
surface these are hardly films you'd
expect of animation. For the most part
they very well could have been live
action but they weren't. Animation seems
to suit these stories perfectly well, and
through another medium they'd be
inherently different. It's by telling
stories like these; at once understated,
extravagant, mature, magical, nostalgic, and
emotional; that Ghibli films epitomize
the coming of age of a medium.
After all, as Ghibli has so eloquently proven,
animation is a medium, not a novelty,
valuable not only for its vivid
expression of fantastical worlds and
magic, but for communicating universal
ideas and pure emotions in a way that
only animation can. The films of Studio
Ghibli circumvent our expectations of
what animation can be;
leaving us vulnerable to their magic.