Welcome to My Geeky Side

So I know this is a class about 3D animation, but this post is strictly 2D. Since we're drawing figures this week I thought it'd be appropriate to write a post on my favorite animator, Hayao Miyazaki. I bet a lot of you haven't heard of him, but he's basicaly the Japanese Walt Disney. I've known about him since I was a kid because he was the animator and master mind behind my favorite movie... My Neighbor Totoro.



It's a really sweet movie and the animation is amazing, just like in all of his movies. I'm normally not a fan of fantasy anime, but his films are beautiful to watch and many times he draws the most imaginative characters you've ever seen. This is especially true in his film, Sprited Away, which won an Oscar for best Animated Film. It's like nothing I've ever seen before.



On his more recent films he has started to combine computer generated animation with his traditional hand animation and also computer technology to boost his hand animations. His last (award-winning) film, Ponyo, went back to being completely hand animated. This just shows that no matter how advanced animation technology gets, traditional techniques still have their place in modern animation.

Comments

arturo said…
Hayao Miyazaki is indeed one of the greatest animators and his influence spans the globe. Miyazaki's own influences were, among others, Ozamu Tezuka and Sanpei Shirato. Shirato is considered a pioneer of Gekiga, what Will Eisner called "graphic novels".

Tezuka is considered in Japan (and the world) the Godfather of Anime, the father of manga and the god of comics, to name a few epithets. His influence in visual storytelling is simply enormous, probably only comparable to Will Eisner in the US.

In fact Disney shamelessly stole one of Tezuka's most popular stories, The Lion King! without giving him any credit. Disney of course was notorious for his many ripoffs that not many could fight against, giving his enormous popularity and his political connections.

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