'The Boy and the Heron': the animation that has high expectations among fans

Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, one of the founders of animation Studio Ghibli, is one of the last practitioners of hand-drawn animation.

Your new fantasy, “The Boy and the Heron” has been praised for a style that seems from the past. IndieWire critic David Ehrlich called it “one of the most beautiful films ever drawn”; He's also a likely Oscar contender.

But while much of the film was illustrated with pencil and paint, it makes—like virtually all modern anime films—extensive use of computer animation. The style of the film does not call attention to such techniques. They are most evident in the flourishes: the flicker of a flame, the flight of an arrow.

Atsushi Okui, director of animation photography for “The Boy and the Heron” and cinematographer at Studio Ghibli, said that the studio considers computer generated images (CGI) as “a complementary tool in graphic production that has as its main axis the hand-drawn 2D animation.

Many recent anime films have embraced computer-generated work, and in some cases have forgone the 2-D style entirely. “The First Slam Dunk” and “Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero,” both released in Japan in 2022, were animated in a style known as 3DCG anime, which combines the hard contours and planes of traditional 2D animation with 3D models. and movement. The result looks like a video game. These are extreme cases of a change that has been occurring across the industry.

“The First Slam Dunk” ($152 million to date) and “Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero” ($86 million) are among the highest-grossing anime titles in history. But for hardcore fans, the rise of digital sparks passionate debate. Message boards are rife with complaints about the look of CG animation and 3DCG in particular; On YouTube, videos highlighting egregious cases of poor imagery rack up millions of views. Writer Callum May addressed the topic in an article for Anime News Network, titled “Why Do We Hate 3DCG Anime?”

“The gap between good and bad CGI anime is wide, and fans can easily spot mediocre 3D animation thanks to having watched decades of top-notch American 3D films,” May said.

Certain 3D anime have had better luck among fans. The Orange studio series “Beastars” and “Land of the Lustrous” have been acclaimed for their innovative style. But these are exceptions.

The use of computers in the creation of anime is not new: animators have been integrating hand-drawn images with digital effects since the early 1980s, when rudimentary CGI was used to help bring models to life that would have been overly complex. to illustrate with pencil and paper. In “Golgo 13: The Professional” (1983), computer-generated helicopters fly through a 3D cityscape in a long action sequence. Although the bulky ships are dated by today's standards, they added a touch that would not have been feasible through traditional means.

“CG is still most commonly used when creators want to present a mechanical vehicle, which is something most 2D animators don't have the training to do, or when they want the camera to fly through an environment, because the backgrounds 2D animations require a lot of work,” May said.

In this way, CGI is basically another item in an animator's toolbox, a way to expand what's possible on screen. More practically, creating images on a computer is often much faster and cheaper than creating them by hand, frame by frame.

Okui said Studio Ghibli considers it “inevitable that tools are moving from paper, pencil and paint to digital tools.” But, he added, “I hope that in Japan the change does not come so completely.”

By: CALUM MARSH
THE YORK TIMES