Creative Theory

Verisimilitude These two words are surprisingly often conflated. Not just by young students, but by professionals as well. I would like to think about that a little. Animation is, above all, a job that involves drawing a great many pictures. Twenty-four per second. In the days of film, early animation drew every single one of those frames. One drawing per frame — each one drawn individually. Then it was discovered that shooting each drawing for two frames did not greatly alter the movement. ...

The Lines Humans Draw The lines in a drawing made by human hands carry momentum, languor, suppleness, hesitation, sensuality. Some of these qualities are consciously sought; others emerge unconsciously. In a picture drawn by a person, such qualities are naturally adjusted and woven in. The word “sensuality” does not mean only sex appeal. We often speak of “mature allure,” but this is a complex thing, and eroticism is no simple matter either — because sex appeal has no pattern. ...

What Is the Bank System? Long ago, Osamu Tezuka — creator of Astro Boy, the pioneering television anime — devised a method called the Bank System to produce 30-minute episodes every week. “Bank” means to store. Unlike today, animation at that time was drawn on paper, traced onto cels, and painted by hand. Normally, cels were discarded after a production was completed. But Tezuka decided to keep and organize certain cels rather than throwing them away — bust shots, waist shots, close-ups, walking shots, flying shots, crying, laughing, lip-sync shots, and other footage likely to be reused. This was the Bank System. ...

There is a work called The Congress (2013, directed by Ari Folman) that blends live-action film with animation. It is based on a novel by Stanisław Lem (born in Ukraine, raised in Poland), the author famous for Solaris. A producer approaches an actress whose prime is passing and asks her to sell her current likeness — her image rights. Struggling with a difficult illness and crushing medical bills, she agonizes but ultimately accepts the offer. She is then recorded from head to toe by a full-body 3D scanner — and so the story continues. ...

There is one more thing I want to put down in writing. I considered three people my mentors. The first, needless to say, was Osamu Tezuka. The second was Junichi Ushiyama. The third was Shinobu Hashimoto. I wrote about Hashimoto in the second post on this blog, and I mentioned producer Ushiyama briefly in my first post about “Computopia.” Here, I want to write about what Ushiyama taught me about filmmaking — and one more important thing. ...