Behind the Scenes: Disney, Miyazaki, Paley

I’ve been reading around in Hayao Miyazaki’s Starting Point, 1979-1996, a collection of short pieces by and interviews with Miyazaki. Among them is a speech he gave to Japan’s Association of Scenario Writers in August 1994. He observes (p. 103):

So, why don’t we script the film in advance? Well, it’s mainly because this is the way my brain has been trained to work. I’ve tried writing the story out many times before, but even if I think a story works great in text, when we render it in continuity sketches it’s usually unusable. It just doesn’t work, and usually reveals how shallow my original ideas were.

A bit later (p. 104): “In the old days, we always thought getting the sketches first was essential, but the problem is that drawing the continuity sketches seemed to always get behind schedule…” [ellipsis in the original text]. What emerges from this discussion is that Miyazaki and his colleagues start animation before the story has been completely worked out in continuity sketches (that is, story-boarded). “If you keep working, making adjustments here and there, in the process you really develop a much better understanding of the characters you are trying to animate.”

Though Miyazaki doesn’t discuss either the voice acting, the musical scoring, or overall sound design, I assume that that isn’t done until the film is completely animated. Given his “work it out as we go” improvisational process, Miyazaki’s not going to have a speaking script until it’s all done, nor will he know the sound effects required nor the music.

What I find so interesting is that this process is quite different from what I had understood the “classic” process to be, the process that used by Disney, to name an obvious example. In that process full animation would be the last part of the process. Before that could happen a script would be written, characters and settings would be designed, a complete storyboard would be worked out, the actors would voice their parts and the music would be composed and recorded. Then the animators go to work, synching their drawings to the sound where necessary. Of course, things might not quite work out as planned up front, so some revisions might be necessary along the way. But the basic idea is to create a detailed plan – storyboard and sound – before starting to animate. That, I assume, is what Miyazaki had in mind when he asserted that in “the old days” they did the sketches first.

I have assumed that this classical process arose, at least in part, as a way of coordinating the activities of what, in a feature film production, would be a very large team of artists, animators, writers, inkers, actors, and so forth. What Miyazaki found, however, is that it didn’t work for him.

Is this merely a difference between his personal style and Disney’s, for example? We know that Disney stopped drawing in the mid-1920s and thereafter functioned strictly as a director, albeit as a director who demanded control over every detail and often micromanaged his projects into chaos. Miyazaki, however, has always done a great deal of drawing in his projects, often doing most of the story-boarding himself. But it’s not entirely obvious to me how that difference would itself translate into the very different overall management styles, the classic and the Miyazaki.

Underbelly 10: In Process

BruceLabounty802 has some photos of The Underbelly Project in mid-stream. He's posted them as a set on Flickr. Here, for example, you can see Swoon at work.

Impaled leaf with saturated grass

Together

Music and Intermediaries

Red Leaves

Underbelly 9: A Documentary in the Works

As some of you know, some folks are making a documentary about public reaction to The Underbelly Project. They spent Sunday afternoon (yesterday) interviewing people at a Chelsea studio. I was among them.

I showed up at 2PM expecting to see, say, a half dozen or more people sitting around waiting to get interviewed. It wasn’t like that. I guess I over-estimated how many people would be interested – through, for what it’s worth, Google’s now giving me upward of 500K hits when I search on “the underbelly project.” It was 200K hits two weeks ago.

In any event, I was the only one there just at that moment to get interviewed. So I got miked up and started talking. While Stephanie was interviewing me, some more folks showed up.

I stuck around for about an hour afterward and listed to four or five more interviews. One woman hadn’t known anything about graffiti and street art until she’d read about Underbelly. Except for one ex-writer from Staten Island, most of people tended to treat it all as graffiti and didn’t recognize street art as a different movement. But then, the Project itself didn’t make any distinction, did it?

From what I heard in that one hour, they’ve got an interesting range of views. Everyone was positive about it.

Stay tuned.

Animal Passion? Hyacinth Hippo and Ben Ali Gator

This is a slightly revised version of a post from The Valve, Slapstick Onto-logic in Dance of the Hours.

When I watched Fantasia six or seven years ago, this episode, a setting of Dance of the Hours, was hard to take. Frankly, I felt a bit embarrassed to be watching it. It seems so silly, cute, and cloying. But Ward Kimball convinced me to give it a chance. He was one of Disney’s premier animators from the early days and he remarked, in “The Making of Fantasia” (included on the DVD): “Every once in awhile you see something that’s perfect. That was one of them.” If Ward Kimball thought it was perfect, then I figured I should give it a chance.

So I watched it, and watched it, in whole, in segments, stepping through some parts frame-by-frame, and came to appreciate it, even to like it. Really.

In its original setting, Dance of the Hours was a ballet within an opera, Amilcare Ponchielli's La Gioconda; that is to say, it was a play within a play. This music was a bit long in tooth by the late 30s and ripe for parody. Disney's basic conceit is to have ungainly animals dance the roles normally taken by graceful ballet dancers. Beyond this, as I have argued in an exchange with Michael Barrier (animation historian and Disney biographer), these animals have a hard time keeping in role.

And that leads to the issue I want to examine: Just where is baseline reality in this segment? What’s a role and what’s reality? Just what is being staged, and by whom?

Dance of the Hours Framed

As its title suggests, Ponchielli's ballet depicts the succession of the hours of the day. Disney picks up on that and divides the ballet into five segments: 1) ostriches, early morning; 2) hippopotami, mid-day, 3) elephants, dusk, 4) alligators, night, and 5) finale, night. The climax of the sequence occurs in the second half of the fourth segment, when Ben Ali Gator woos Hyacinth Hippo - who'd been introduced in the second segment and was sleeping on a chaise longue during the third segment. (Note that these names never appear in the film itself; they are names used by the production staff.) The wooing is at once absurd and dramatically intense, set to a sustained crescendo in the strings that bespeaks consummation. This is followed by a moment in which Ben proudly presents Hyacinth in a promenade:

It was somewhere in this sequence that, on one occasion, I said to myself: “They're not acting! They're for real!” For what it's worth, that's the observation that prompted me to think seriously about Dance of the Hours. This promenade gives way to several turns, which then give way to the finale, when everyone is back on stage in furious zigzagging motion.

When Dance opens we see the doors to a large room, the doors open, and the camera zooms through (perhaps) a hallway to face a stage with lowered curtains in front. The curtains rise and we see an ostrich awakening and beginning to dance. Clearly we're looking at something happening on a stage. But, as we will see shortly, we leave the stage near the end of this first segment and go out of doors, where the action remains into the finale. Two thirds of the way through the finale it suddenly becomes obvious that we are watching something take place on stage. As the music comes to an end, the camera zooms back so that we see the entire stage, with dancers arranged in a final tableau, and keeps zooming back until we are outside the hall, looking at the doors, which then fall off their hinges.

So, this five-section drama begins on-stage and ends on-stage. In between it is out of doors, in the “real world.” Except that it is not - by which I do not mean that it is all a cartoon. That is obvious. What is not obvious is just how this cartoon works.

Look back at the previous frame grab. This action is taking place outdoors. Ben and Hyacinth are on walkway with grass in front of them and behind them. But they also appear to have a spotlight shining directly down upon them, for their shadows are directly beneath them. Nowhere in this garden do we see lights up on poles, much less strung out over open spaces. But if we imagine this promenade to be taking place on stage, then the light is readily interpretable as standard stage lighting. Thus, on the simplest interpretation of the visual cues before us, this space is ambiguous, it is both outdoors and onstage.

Let's look at that ambiguity. Even as the cartoon presents us with a line of foreground action where animal dancers have difficulty staying in role, it also presents us with a distinction between being onstage and being in reality. It then proceeds to elide that distinction.

Sex, Identity, and Social Space on the Web

A couple of days ago I posted about sexy photos publicly posted on Flickr. One thing I neglected to say is that most of these photos are posted under pseudonyms and a good many do not show a person’s face. They are thus more or less anonymous images. I have no way of knowing, of course, whether or to what extent these people share these images with people they know in real life. Sharing such images with people you know, however, IS quite different from sharing them with the anonymous public at large.

That’s what I want to explore a bit: what images we reveal on the web, under what circumstances, and to whom.

I note that this is a special case of playing different roles in different social ‘spaces.’ We do it all the time. We act one way at work, another way at the school board meeting, another way at the family reunion, and still another way in the privacy of our own homes. These various roles generally are not completely discontinuous.

The internet has given us another space in which we can create yet other roles. This general issue has, of course, been subject to considerable discussion and investigation over the last 15 to 20 years. Privacy has always been an issue and so has community. I take it as given that online communities need not be a means of escaping from life, but that they can function to extend and enhance our lives. I certainly don’t want to rehash all of these arguments here but that’s the general ball park I want to play in.

I want to look at three online spaces: 1) the Flickr space, which I previously contrasted with 2) the pornography space, and 3) a private online community. My discussion will be relatively quick and simple. I’m not going for detail or subtlety, just a quick characterization.

Flickr vs. Pornography Space

Let’s start with the first two. Flickr is a social networking space where photographs are the medium of interaction. I rather suspect it started as a place to display photographs and only later became a networking space – in fact, I suspect that it still is more of a display space than an interaction space. But it IS an interaction space, even if much of the interaction is relatively minimal – designating someone as a contact, friend, or family; picking a photo as a favorite; commenting on a photograph. There are also provisions for discussions associated with opt-in groups of photographs.

Blue Skies

Virtual Underbelly

SmallWorlds is a 3D virtual worlds space. One of the folks there, Kota Phillips, has created a virtual Underbelly Project:

I've been wanting to create a graffiti art space for the past year.
The NY Underbelly Project with all it's controversy and attempt to regrasp the original intent and experience of street art is a wonderful inspiration.

So I'm checking to see if there are artists out there who would want to participate in this.

This is what i propose:
To make it more fun and Underbelly-like the artists would paint in the actual space, in the dark. They would bring their own canvas (up to 3 or 4), pick their area of the "subway" and work at their convenience over the next few weeks. Graffiti art only please.

And here's some virtual underbelly pieces by Hallusinosis Dreams.

And so it grows. Where will it end, this underbelly?

World Building: Hayao Miyazaki

This is reprinted from The Valve, 2006. Neither Howl's Moving Castle nor Ponyo had been released at the time and I'd not yet seen The Castle of Cagliostro.

I'm vaguely and generally interested in the ontology, if you will, of fictional worlds. Not ontology in any direct philosophical sense, where one worries about the nature of ultimate reality and the relationship between fictions and the real world. Rather, more in the sense that ontology has come to have in cognitive science and computer science: What kinds of things exist in the world, what are its laws?

Realistic fiction offers an ontology that is (supposed to be) congruent with the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, mind, and society. I supposed I ought to add the caveat “as they are locally understood,” but I wish to bracket that for awhile. Yes, it's a necessary qualification. But I'm in a down and dirty intellectual mood at the moment and so can't yet be bothered with cultural complications.

But not all fiction is realistic. Much fiction contains beings and events that defy various laws of mundane reality. Though it is easy and convenient to think of mundane reality as a baseline condition and other realities as elaborations upon or deviations from such reality, I suspect that any dispassionate survey of fiction in all its forms will lead us to the conclusion that the realistic is but one mode among many, adopted at certain times and places under certain circumstances. Something like that.

To focus this discussion I am going to concentrate on the films of Hayao Miyazaki. And, truth be told, I would be perfectly happy to confine the discussion to those films as I find them exceedingly rich. I started thinking about this problem while asking a very specific question about one of those films, Porco Rosso: Why a pig? Early in my foray into anime I read a paragraph about this film that said that, except for the fact that the protagonist is a pig, it is more realistic than most of Miyazaki's films. By contrast, the line on Spirited Away, which won the 2002 Academic Award for best animated film, is that it is fantasy gone riot. So there you have it, from almost realistic to fantasy squared.

Though I have considered trying to arrange Miyazaki's films on a continuum from Porco Rosso to Spirited Away, I haven't made any serious attempt to do so. What I have done is written a relatively brief paragraph or three about each film and provided a phrase characterizing its ontological style. The descriptions will be more meaningful if you've seen the films, but should be somewhat intelligible even if you haven't. (Summaries and dialogue transcriptions are available on the web.)

Though, as indicated above, I recognize the limitations of treating mundane reality (as recognized in the 19th century European novel) as a baseline, I have, in practice, found it convenient to assume such a baseline. This runs into trouble with the first film I consider, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which is set in some exotic world. Exotic though it is, the world of that film nonetheless seems to recognize a distinction between the mundane and the extraordinary, which is associated with princess Nausicaä. As a cognitivist, one of the questions that confronts me, then, is: How is it that we recognize such a distinction when the world as a whole is strange?

None of Miyazaki's other films seems to posit such an exotic world. All the rest seem earth-based. What is interesting is that from Nausicaä through Porco Rosso Miyazaki seems to be positing a base world of some type, but then allowing highly focused deviations from, or, if you will, extensions to that base world. But two of his most recent three films - Mononoke, and Spirited, (I do not characterize Howl's Moving Castle as I do not have it at hand, though I saw it when it was in theatrical release) - don't seem to be quite like that.

In Mononoke there doesn't seem to be a focused extension. Conversely, in Spirited the “extension” swamps the film; that alters the dynamic between the baseline reality and the extension.

Ultimately I would like to arrive at some characterization of the relationship between the film's basic ontology and its thematic concerns. This is obvious enough in Nausicaä and Mononoke, where Miyazaki's ecological concerns are well served by worlds in which animals can marshal effective resistance against human encroachment. But this goes a bit beyond my immediate concerns.

Obscurity

Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is unleashing them on the world under a copyleft license.

Naked Flickr Sex Erotic Bodies

I’ve been told that the internet floats on a sea of pornography. That there is pornography there, I know. About the ratio of porn to non-porn traffic, I don’t know, though I’m prepared to believe there’s a lot of porn, if not quite enough to float the rest.

But this isn’t about porn. Or, more precisely, it’s not about the sexual and erotic images, still and moving, which are for sale on the internet. It’s about images which are available free, many of which would be considered pornographic, but not necessarily all. These images are on Flickr, a social networking site based on photographs. You put your photos there so others can see them. And you look at other peoples photos according to your interests.

Flickr Naked

I joined Flickr in 2006 so I could post photos of graffiti. As I photographed other subjects, I posted them as well. But it wasn’t until a year or so ago that I realized that Flickr also had photos of naked people, some of them engaging in sexual activity. Anyone can see these photos; you don’t even be a member of Flickr. To be sure, Flickr has ways of restricting photos and there are nude, sexual, and erotic photos that are restricted. But I haven’t seen any of them. I’m just talking about the ones anyone can see – though, of course, you must be old enough, or be willing to misrepresent your age.

My basic impression of these photos is of the enormous variety. Youthful, middle age, old; varying degrees of dress; various postures; solo, couples, and more; hetero, gay, lesbian; good looking, plain, unattractive; color, black and white; technically excellent, mediocre, poor; attentive to composition, indifferent to it. Various in those and other ways.

And then there’s the matter of motivation and intention: Why are these people taking these photos and putting them on public display? I assume there are various answers to that question, but I don’t know off hand what they are. Why, for example, would a man take a snapshot of his erect penis laid over a dollar bill and covering much of it? Who’s he want to see it? What’s he expect them to think? Is he looking for feedback?

Lots of people are. This is, after all, a social networking site. You can comment on the pictures, and some people explicitly ask for comments; some even ask for dirty comments. Not only that, but you can make notes on the picture surface. You draw a rectangle around part of the photo and make some comment. Some photos have 5, 10, 20, or more notes on them, most about strategic bits of anatomy and what the annotator thinks about or would like to do with / to that bit of anatomy.

Artistic Nudes

But let’s consider a specific example. I’m not going to put the photo here because doing so would impact THIS blog in a way that I can’t control. And it’s not obvious that the photographer and model would let me do so – though I suppose I could ask. Yes, the photo is where anyone on the internet can see it, so why should it make any difference if I post it here? Well, on Flickr they’re among friends. They have some kind of relationship going with people who comment on photos there – this particular photo has over 20 comments, but it has been viewed over 1600 times (what do the anonymous viewers think?). If I were to post it here, well, this is a different place, different bunch of people, and I’m using the photo for a purpose quite different from what the photographer and model intended. In any event, you don’t really need to see the photo. A description is good enough for my purposes.

Let’s call the photographer David and the model Denise – not the screen names they actually use. David is not a professional photographer. According to his profile he’s a middle aged tradesman who took up photography a few years ago. He’s quite serious about photography and has photographed a wide variety of subjects. He’s taken many photographs of Denise, with nude and partially nude photos in the minority. She’s the only model he’s photographed in the nude. I’m guessing, though I don’t know this, that they’re lovers.

Gravity Begets Levity

Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is unleashing them on the world under a copyleft license.