Few would be, as the stories Disney was looking to tell required computer graphics. But Disney Animation’s story of high-flying adventure and a huggable robot named Baymax was not that movie.
When it came time to mimic the animated sections of Mary Poppins for the 2018 sequel Mary Poppins Returns, Disney had so few 2D animators in house that it outsourced the work to another company.Ĭould Disney ever return to 2D animation? During the leadup to Big Hero 6, I asked producer Roy Conli my eternal question, and got a routine answer: Maybe, if the right project came along. On Disney’s 2014 film Big Hero 6, veteran animators like Mark Henn, who might once have illustrated the main characters’ most dramatic moments provided caricatured skeletons over which 3D artists could build bubbly characters. While the 2009 film The Princess and the Frog gave those animators one more chance to illustrate in the traditional Disney style, further layoffs eventually dissolved the company’s 2D animation team. “The general consensus was that audiences did not want to watch hand-drawn animated films, which is of course completely ridiculous.”
At the time, he scorned the company’s previous logic. But in 2006, after becoming chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar and Disneytoon Studios, John Lasseter (a devoted Studio Ghibli fan) rehired many of those artists. In hopes of financial success, the industry followed Pixar’s CG, prompting Disney to lay off most of its 2D animators after 2004’s disastrous Home on the Range. It’s absolute realism without photorealism, which in the three decades since My Neighbor Totoro, has become the language of Western animated films that hope to put kids on the fast track to adulthood.īy the mid-2000s, after the repeated box-office failure of 2D animated films like Disney’s Treasure Planet and Brother Bear, along with Dreamworks’ own misfires The Road to El Dorado and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, the pencil points of American hand-drawn animation were dulled down to a nub. Mei, in stark contrast to every animated character that came before and after her, looks like a kid, acts like a kid, and emotes like a kid. Frozen might be played and replayed ad nauseam in every house containing a 6-or-under, but Elsa and Anna are grown women and potential role models. Despite the target audience, Disney Animation, DreamWorks, Illumination, Pixar, and the other American majors whisk young audiences along on teenage coming-of-age quests, or cartoon romps with immature avatars. (Which makes sense, because preschoolers are terrible at taking direction.) But even though animation comes with limitless possibilities, it has rarely filled in the gap. Only a handful of live-action films have dealt with the raw emotions of preschoolers. What she can do is bolt up our stairs in search of her own “secret stairs,” scribble an orange line on a piece of paper and call it the “Catbus,” and comb through tall grass to find acorns for the tiny totoros who apparently lurk in our backyard. The film, made in 1988 and set in post-war Japan, clicks for my daughter in the year 2020, even if she can’t articulate the connection. In thousands of scanned pencil sketches and ink blots, Miyazaki rendered an actual little kid, imperfect and thriving.
#The art of my neighbor totoro full
Mei feels a thousand thoughts rush through her mind as she dips a hand into a puddle full of tadpoles. For my 2-year-old, who I’ve now seen the film with at least 50 times by her demand, the sequence is a moment of behavioral reassurance. The encounter puts smiles on their faces and charcoal dust on their hands.Īs an adult, it’s a transportive. They shriek with glee when they discover “secret stairs,” where a family of soot spirits scurry about.
In the film’s opening minutes, writer-director Hayao Miyazaki introduces two young girls, 11-year-old Satsuki and 4-year-old Mei, as they race around and wiggle through the hidden spaces of their new country home. The thrill of My Neighbor Totoro begins long before the film’s iconic giant bear-owl spirit takes to the skies on a spinning top.