Ghibli’s Iconic ‘Princess Mononoke’ Scene Took Nearly Two Years To Draw By Hand

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Video screenshot via moviegeek1111

Studio Ghibli animations aren’t the sort of films that are made to be watched only once. It can take up to decades for fans to uncover Easter eggs and other meaningful tidbits ridden in these movies.

Such belated discoveries might just be worth the strenuous efforts taken by the Studio Ghibli crew in producing its films. The latest to bedazzle Japanese users on Twitter is a hand-sketched scene from the 1997 Princess Mononoke movie that appears to have been created with CG.

As Japanese movie buff and Twitter user ‘hitasuraeiga’ has just pointed out, the smooth-flowing, two-minute intro scene that shows the ‘Tatarigami’ (Curse God)—a demon covered in black snakes or works—for the first time actually took almost two years to illustrate by hand.

“The part where the snakes move sluggishly was so difficult that—even though the scene is only a couple of minutes long—it took one year and seven months to finish!” the user detailed in a tweet, translated by SoraNews24.

The scene apparently required about 5,300 drawings, with one artist described that it got “so confusing to draw that it ended up bogging us down.”

The opening wasn’t wholly animated by hand, though. Since Princess Mononoke was the first Hayao Miyazaki-directed film that leveraged CG, it comprised a mixture of hand-drawn and CG animations through “trial and error.”

The parts in the introduction that utilized CG animations might surprise you: “there are bits of CG animation like the snakes that slither around on the arm of ‘Ashitaka’, but it’s largely hand-drawn,” the user explained.

Hand-drawn scene

『もののけ姫』の冒頭シーンに出て来るタタリ神はCGじゃなくて手描きの作画なんだけど、グニョグニョ動くヘビの動きが複雑すぎて、わずか数分のカットなのに制作期間は1年7か月!動画枚数は5300枚もかかったらしい。原画マン曰く「段々わけがわからなくなって泥沼にはまってしまった」とのこと。 pic.twitter.com/krPT7KxKZQ

— タイプ・あ~る (@hitasuraeiga) October 26, 2018

Areas that utilized CG

『もののけ姫』は(宮崎駿監督作品としては)初めて本格的にCGが導入された作品なので、スタッフも試行錯誤していたらしく「手描きのカット」と「CGのカット」が混在しています。タタリ神のシーンでは「アシタカの腕に絡みつくヘビ」等がCGで作画されました(基本的には手描きが多いです) pic.twitter.com/hfsd5Bg4rh

— タイプ・あ~る (@hitasuraeiga) October 27, 2018

[via SoraNews24, images via various sources]

Ghibli’s Iconic ‘Princess Mononoke’ Scene Took Nearly Two Years To Draw By Hand
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November 12, 2018 at 02:11AM
via TAXI Daily News http://www.designtaxi.com/news/402339/Ghibli-s-Iconic-Princess-Mononoke-Scene-Took-Nearly-Two-Years-To-Draw-By-Hand/