Miyazaki, Disney and Eisenstein

On directing styles in animation.

A still from The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)

Welcome! This Thursday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter is all about directing animated films.

In an excellent interview published last month, Benoît Chieux (of the French movie Sirocco) spoke about his process as a director. It’s a long, winding piece that reveals many secrets. But one of his key points has to do with creating a sense of space.

Although Sirocco is a 2D project, Chieux’s goal was to make space feel real in his film — like the action is unfolding in an actual, three-dimensional place. As he said:

… the more you think about space, about how you can make it believable, the world as a whole and the characters in it become alive, and it all becomes almost tangible. In other words, you feel everything that happens there, you’re literally into it, you’re fully alive within it.

To sum up a bit, it’s something I found out when I discovered Miyazaki’s work. … What I see when I watch his films isn’t something far away; it’s very close to me and very personal. And so I believe that I quickly understood that, to achieve this, I had to put my energy into the staging. It’s not just about the drawings: you have to think about where you put the camera so that this feeling of life [will] be as strong as possible.

Chieux contrasted Miyazaki’s approach against the “pictorial staging” of retro Disney. The Disney classics are shot “flat” and feel “far away” compared to the intimacy of Miyazaki films, he said. In pictorial staging, the point is “to create beautiful pictures” rather than physical space.

It’s a fascinating topic. Space is something that Miyazaki has discussed a lot — and it’s one of the key ways that his work changed animation.