There's
a link between the endless melodramatics of Giant Robo and the charm of
Howl's Moving Castle. That link is animator Akihiko Yamashita, who was
animation director for both projects. Turning lines and colors into
convincing moving objects is the eternal challenge of animation, but
both the robot story directed by Yasuhiro Imagawa and the tale adapted
by Hayao Miyazaki have large moving object that must be made to move on
screen as if they are truly huge and ponderous. "When you're working on
something really large, the part that is most important is that when
you have a large heavy thing, it's making it look large and heavy on
the screen," said Yamashita. "There's one scene in Howl's Moving Caste
where the castle is moving toward the main character; that's one of the
scene where you can feel the heaviness of the castle, in the way the
feet move into the ground.. That came from my work on Giant Robo,"
whose main "character" is an old-school fighting robot. Some of the
castle's movements are computer-aided, but all of the people in the
feature film were animated by hand, the way that Miyazaki insists it
should be done.
Yamashita
describes his animation career as being an example of good timing. He
joined the industry in time to work on Giant Robo, the sprawling,
often-delayed series that was one of the big titles of the late 1990's.
His goal was to work for Studio Ghibli, and he achieved that goal just
in time to join the team for Spirited Away. One of his sequences can be
spotted at the end of the film, where the Haku dragon transforms in
mid-air. "I was pleased because Miyazaki let me have my hands on
several different sequences," Yamashita said. And his animation role in
Howl's Moving Castle was larger than he expected, he said. Much of that
effort is storyboard creation, where scenes and basic layouts are
created in making a movie of sorts before the animation begins. "I've
done a bunch of different things, but when it comes down to it, I like
to draw - so my favorite thing is doing the originals (original
storyboard designs). What like about storyboards is that from the
beginning, I can decide how the characters should progress and their
expressions. That's what I like the most."
There's
a link between the endless melodramatics of Giant Robo and the charm of
Howl's Moving Castle. That link is animator Akihiko Yamashita, who was
animation director for both projects. Turning lines and colors into
convincing moving objects is the eternal challenge of animation, but
both the robot story directed by Yasuhiro Imagawa and the tale adapted
by Hayao Miyazaki have large moving object that must be made to move on
screen as if they are truly huge and ponderous. "When you're working on
something really large, the part that is most important is that when
you have a large heavy thing, it's making it look large and heavy on
the screen," said Yamashita. "There's one scene in Howl's Moving Caste
where the castle is moving toward the main character; that's one of the
scene where you can feel the heaviness of the castle, in the way the
feet move into the ground.. That came from my work on Giant Robo,"
whose main "character" is an old-school fighting robot. Some of the
castle's movements are computer-aided, but all of the people in the
feature film were animated by hand, the way that Miyazaki insists it
should be done.
Yamashita
describes his animation career as being an example of good timing. He
joined the industry in time to work on Giant Robo, the sprawling,
often-delayed series that was one of the big titles of the late 1990's.
His goal was to work for Studio Ghibli, and he achieved that goal just
in time to join the team for Spirited Away. One of his sequences can be
spotted at the end of the film, where the Haku dragon transforms in
mid-air. "I was pleased because Miyazaki let me have my hands on
several different sequences," Yamashita said. And his animation role in
Howl's Moving Castle was larger than he expected, he said. Much of that
effort is storyboard creation, where scenes and basic layouts are
created in making a movie of sorts before the animation begins. "I've
done a bunch of different things, but when it comes down to it, I like
to draw - so my favorite thing is doing the originals (original
storyboard designs). What like about storyboards is that from the
beginning, I can decide how the characters should progress and their
expressions. That's what I like the most."
