Studio Ghibli, Part 1: How Miyazaki Directs Slapstick · 1:03pm Apr 1st, 2021

I used to think quality animation entirely boiled down to how detailed and smooth the character drawings were. In other words, time and effort, so it's simply about getting as much funding as possible. I blame the animation elitists for this attitude. If not for them, I might've wanted to become an animator myself. They killed all my interest.

It took a really long time to figure out there's something more important going on: direction. Just like in live-action film, imagine that.

The topic for this post is a bit difficult to explain, because I changed what I wanted to write about numerous times. While watching some anime movies I felt tired that they all apparently were trying to be like Spirited Away. I'll review them! But I hadn't seen Spirited Away in like 20 years, so I should probably watch it again to figure out what they're imitating. Then I decided to watch every single Studio Ghibli film in chronological order. I could review them all as I go!

(I won't. I'm tired of writing reviews. They're great movies, just watch them.)

So it took a year before I finally settled on this topic in my mind. And then I delayed for months because I didn't think anyone would be interested in reading such a niche topic. So that's my excuse for no updates for so long.

So, this is about what I observed from Castle of Cagliostro, even though it's years before founding Studio Ghibli. He referred to this period as "slapstick action films" that he was no longer interested in after Ghibli gave him full creative freedom. Yet here he uses distinctive techniques that he uses in all his animation. And even though just about everyone imitates his stories, or his settings, or the artwork... very few actually imitate his directing style.

Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro is a heist adventure that still holds up better than most James Bond movies. I guess thieves and spies are different, but they seem to share the same archetype, the cunning trickster. A superhero of the mind, rather than strength. The story's not that important, it's a fun action movie.

To go on a little detour, almost all Japanese fantasy in the 80s and 90s borrowed heavily from the story tropes and themes of Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. And then the rest of the world grew up playing Final Fantasy, which influenced them and so on. The original DNA is everywhere now.

Cagliostro's story isn't anything special to imitate, but it was more notable for its setting. The castle itself feels like a major character... I know that's an overused cliche, but in this case the setting has been imitated everywhere. For example, the first Time Crisis arcade game is a direct homage, with its ancient castle outfitted with modern weaponry and traps. Actually the plot's really similar too, just with John Woo style gunfights added in. But here's another title paying homage, this one far removed from the characters, genre, and time period...

If you've never played the original Castlevania, it uses the exact same plot beats. The castle walls, the drop into the watery dungeon, and even Dracula's chamber is a tower with no stairs - only accessible via a bridge from the neighboring tower. Which of course is a clock tower, filled with gears that must be climbed and jumped on. (The third game goes even further with the sunken Roman ruins.)

Now how many games were influenced by Castlevania? Hint, there's a whole genre named after it. Sure, the gameplay's more similar to the non-linear adventuring from Symphony of the Night (and Super Metroid), but the whole premise of this series is this cursed castle that keeps reappearing across time. It's not really about the stock horror monsters, or the storyline. It's not about the characters, nobody really cares who Simon or Dracula (or Samus and Mother Brain) are as people. It's about the environment and setting. You gain an intimate understanding of these mazes as you explore them, whether it's an action game, or requires careful study of its subtle scraps of lore (e.g. Dark Souls or Hollow Knight).

I think it's the real strength of videogames as an artform, the relationship between player and environment. It can portray place-as-character better than any prose fiction. I think level design is more important for their storytelling than all the dialogue and cutscenes, where they pretend to be movies.... Okay that's controversial and a whole different topic.

So what does environment even have to do with directing? Isn't that just a job for the background painters, not the animators?

While watching the daylight rooftop action scene, I was impressed by its use of multiple perspectives. Lupin's climbing down the roof, the gyrocopter's flying above and behind, the villains' gun turret pops out of a wall. All these scenes put together gave me such a strong sensation of the 3D space involved. More than any live action movie I can remember, even with swooping moving cameras. And most 3D games too. I'm not a video editor so I can't go shot-by-shot, but the action is directed and edited to show you the spatial relationship from one character to another so that you can follow. The 3D space is constructed within your mind.... yet there's no fancy technological tricks. The character animation isn't super detailed, and the backgrounds are nice paintings but not super detailed. It's holistic directing.

There's experiments where people are shown photographs and then tested on their memory. People from western cultures tend to remember the focal subjects, but not many details of the backgrounds. People from other cultures would naturally observe everything in a picture and had much higher accuracy when asked about the backgrounds.

The animated characters and the painted backgrounds work together in this style. It's a stretch to say that only Miyazaki does this, but I think he makes it impossible to NOT notice the backgrounds, because of the way the characters move through them, helping the viewer's eyes wander through the environment.

But there's an element of humor too. These slapstick heroes can perform stunts that are probably impossible for you, and here Lupin still drops the spool of thread (1:05). It's a gag to mislead you, so he can cross the gap another way.

Jigen tries to lean out to shoot the other car's tires (0:45) and is interrupted, he nearly gets hit by debris. And then a truck. The rest of the chase scene feels funnier and more exciting because of that. At least for me, the viewing lens of "let's watch the badass action hero do his thing" turns into "oh haha, this is actually really dangerous and harder than it looks." No matter how skilled the heroes are, they're vulnerable, they're human.

There's some parallels of what I'm saying with this famous video essay on Jackie Chan, you've probably seen before. The argument is that all this makes action scenes funnier (slapstick?), but I think it goes a step further than just setting up jokes. The "vulnerable hero" is there to make you empathize with the character, putting you in their shoes, so it feels like the action is happening to you. It's funny because it all feels relatable, not because you're watching a clown get hurt from far away. It's thrilling because you feel the danger, not because you're watching a hero's feats from far away.

There's a part in Jackie Chan's autobiography where he wrote about his experiences switching over to the American studio system. He noticed that in American action movies, the action scene's primary purpose is to show off how cool and invincible the star is. It pauses the story so you can admire the protagonist's ideal qualities. But to Jackie, action scenes had a different purpose: they progress the story, you learn more about the protagonist.

One amusing detail he mentioned was that American screenwriters would try to describe an action scene for him in the script, which Jackie would always toss out and coordinate his own sequence instead. After a while, the writers learned to not bother anymore, instead putting a note like [Jackie action scene here].

So here's a direct example of why this is rarely imitated, from The Great Mouse Detective. Disney Studios admitted the Big Ben scene was an homage to the clock tower in Cagliostro. They weren't trying to copy it directly, just give a similar feeling. The result is very different.

By the way, Sherlock Holmes is another variation on the spy/thief archetype, isn't he? Miyazaki also made a Sherlock Holmes cartoon series in the 80s, where the characters are dogs (though the plot of Great Mouse Detective is suspiciously too similar to one of those episodes). And whether it's Basil or Cumberbatch or etc., every single version of Holmes that I've seen is meant to be an enigma. The audience isn't supposed to understand him or keep up with his insights, because you're always grounded in normal Dr. Watson's perspective. You observe and admire him from afar. Remember what Jackie said about action heroes? Even in his board game, Holmes is going to explain how he solved each case more efficiently than you did. However, Miyazaki treats this character with his own spin. He puts you in Sherlock's shoes, you study the evidence from his perspective, and the story is presented so that children can solve the mystery together with him. It's such a departure that Holmes fans usually find the cartoon disappointing, like it's just an excuse for cartoon action.

Ok that tangent wasn't important, back to Basil of Baker Street. The background of the shot is rotoscoped over a CGI 3D space, showing every cog rotating around the characters. However, the environment still isn't that important. Take away the machinery and this could easily be a cliff or rooftop. The positions of the characters aren't as important as their actions and their expressions. (In an essay Miyazaki argues that western animation was based on the traditional acting styles of theater and ballet). The clockwork itself only matters at the beginning, to establish the setting, and afterwards only during the moments where it's relevant to a character's emotion, i.e. their life is threatened.

Here's part of the scene it's paying homage to. It's a very similar concept of course, but even as the characters lunge at each other you can see them trying to move along with the cogs. The shot at 0:30 would be impossible anywhere except inside a clock. One character runs against his spinning cog while the other rides his for added momentum. It almost is like a videogame, it takes only seconds to understand the physics of the moving background and imagine yourself moving through it.

This isn't to make fun of Disney animation, because their scene is impressive on its own merit. It's a particular style, and it's accomplishing what it intends to do. It's just very different from what Miyazaki cares about.

Watch his quiet slice-of-life movies with an eye for action, and you can see how he animates common everyday motions with care, as if they're action scenes. Like in Totoro, how the girls run around exploring their new house, or when they trip while running outside. Also: eating scenes. You can learn a lot about a character by the way he shows them eating food. (I remember hearing how he forced the animators of Spirited Away to redo the scene where the parents are eating, over and over, because they couldn't draw it the way he wanted). These types of movement aren't funny, but still relatable. And they're all directed with a similar eye for the relationship between characters and backgrounds.

Or the one thing that everyone remembers, flight scenes. There's billions of ways to direct "someone flying", and it can be very easy to just lose the character in some empty sky, like you're watching them from the ground. It can be tricky to make the viewer feel like they're the one in the air.

So neither am I making fun of other movies I mentioned back at the beginning, for having similar stories to Miyazaki (these days they're all imitating Makoto Shinkai's movies instead, heh). Even if the stories aren't as good, directing animation is its own thing.

Now, the one I WILL make fun of is the director's son, Goro Miyazaki. That guy can not direct at all. I'd suggest skipping Tales From Earthsea, but if you do try to watch it.... ignoring the bad dialogue and dull story and boring characters -- turn off the subtitles and just try to follow the story by visuals alone. Every shot feels so mechanical, showing whatever character or landscape is mentioned in the script, and nothing more. These are the same Studio Ghibli artists and animators like all the other films, and their animation and backgrounds are beautiful like always. But the directing is so bad, it's completely boring.

From Up on Poppy Hill is slightly more coherent, and still boring to look at. It pretends to be slice-of-life style, but the visuals aren't very interesting on their own. Oh no, Goro's made a 3rd movie, releasing this year? Please stop him.

In part 2, I'll look at Isao Takahata's films, the overlooked side of Studio Ghibli.

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