Very interesting article. As seems to be the pattern with Studio Ghibli they found someone uniquely talented, who ascended to the top of their craft over the course of their career, but never really found a successor to carry on their legacy.
But perhaps I'm doing an injustice to her apprentices at the studio, who maybe weren't covered in the article and who may have gone on to find work on other projects as Ghibli wound down.
I need to plug "Grave of the Fireflies". I initially didn't watch it with my kids because (at the time) it was only subtitled, and one of my kids was too young to read.
One night I decided to watch it after I put them all to bed, and the older ones snuck down and watched it with me. They loved it, and I cried at the end.
I watched Kiki's Delivery Service recently with my sisters and niece. I'm always amazed by the artistic vision when I watch a new (to me) Ghibli film. As a grown man, you'd be hard-pressed to get me to watch a cartoon about a young witch if it were made by any other studio. But Ghibli has the magic that makes it delightful for everyone.
The comparison in the article between Kiki drawn with "standard" colors and the final version is really telling. Even though the standard version is more saturated, which in my naive mind should make it more vibrant, it actually looks more bland when you put it side by side with the desaturated colors of the actual drawing. It goes to show how much these little choices influence the final product.
Another film she did the colors on is Whisper of the Heart. It's a Ghibli film that was written by Miyazaki, but directed by Yoshifumi Kondō. The colors are truly outstanding. Scenes at dawn, lamplit rooms, overcast school days, and fantasy sequences all look just wonderful.
WotH is such a great slice of life film.
Animation Obsessive continues to deliver some of my favorite reads online. Well researched, detailed, and interesting. I'd wondered about the Ghibli colors, feels like that's not talked about much. Cool article!
This really humbles me, someone who always thought the Ghibli AI art is okayish. So much time that the normal viewer never acknowledges.
Offtopic, but seriously:
>Read distraction-free on Substack
You are the people putting in distractions. You are not some savior with your tracker-filled, bloated app. It's your website!!!