Miyazaki, Disney and Eisenstein
Plus: news.
Welcome! The Animation Obsessive newsletter is back with a new Sunday issue, and this is the plan today:
1) The art of staging in animation.
2) A look at the 2025 edition of Cartoon Movie.
3) The week’s animation newsbits.
With that, let’s go!
1 – Animated filmmaking
The effect can be subtle, easy to miss. But you feel it anyway. So much in animation changes based on the way a scene is shot.
In an excellent interview last year, 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.
The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) and Disney’s feature The Rescuers (1977) came out around the same time. Looking at them side by side, Miyazaki’s was visibly less expensive: it uses limited frames, including shots where nothing moves except a character’s mouth. And yet it somehow feels more current in its style.
In Cagliostro, space is absolute. The characters look cartoony, but they inhabit a world that exists in three dimensions. Miyazaki’s camera choices, even during simple conversation scenes, put us right there with the characters in space. He stages shots almost like they weren’t drawn — like he was picking angles in physical locations as a scene played out in real time.
The Rescuers tends to take a different approach. Animation is the star here, and the filmmaking is designed around it. The team often trades an intimate sense of space for flatter staging, which allows the characters’ complex movements to read.
Instead of setting up a tangible space and “shooting” the “actors” in it, The Rescuers’ interest lies in performances. To show us those performances, it’s willing to flatten space, or to play fast and loose with it.
Jump ahead to the sequel, The Rescuers Down Under (1990), and something is different. Take one scene toward the start, when the main character frees a trapped eagle. The space is strongly defined through wide shots and closeups, and we’re right there in it with the characters. The staging (pulling out the pocket knife, talons scratching the ground in front of the boy) puts a sense of believability and presence above even performance.
This is the influence of Miyazaki. As Disney animator Glen Keane once said:
… it’s hard to ever separate the huge influence that Japanese animation has had on me. I was just in awe of Miyazaki’s work, and have emulated his sensitivity, his approach to staging. That had a gigantic impact on our films starting with Rescuers Down Under, where you saw the huge Japanese influence on our work. That’s part of our heritage now.
As Benoît Chieux noted, Miyazaki’s approach to space came from Isao Takahata, dating back to the film Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968). We’ve covered that film’s style in a past issue.
According to Takahata, much of Horus was designed with “temporal and spatial continuity” in mind. Discussing two of its central battle scenes, he wrote:
… we first thought about what Horus and the wolves or the monster fish were doing, and what kinds of events were occurring, and then exposed the whole thing before the audience in a, so to speak, play-by-play style (except that the camera position could be freely chosen). It relies only on the compelling reality of the action itself, and on a spatial composition with a strong sense of presence.1
Put another way, it’s like a live sports broadcast, only we’re down in it with the players. The events and the space are the stars. Takahata called it a “bluntly honest” depiction; Chieux called it “spatial cinema, which uses the full range of what film language can do.”
When you compare Horus to The Jungle Book, released a year earlier in 1967, the stylistic difference is stark. Their goals are completely at odds.
Horus creates three-dimensional spaces and gives us an intimate sense of the action unfolding within — but The Jungle Book has flatter staging than even The Rescuers. It could almost be a stage show. Everything falls below the performance: watching animated characters move at a high level of intricacy.
Horus doesn’t try for performances like these, and it would’ve been pointless. The team didn’t have the time, money or experience to produce movement like Disney could. In The Jungle Book, the acting is the real story: the way that characters move is more important even than what they’re doing.
It’s a specific form of acting, too. As Miyazaki once noted, early animators:
… came to the conclusion that, rather than the style of acting developed for dramatic films, stage acting was more suitable for animated films. This is precisely the reason that the gestures used by characters in Disney’s animated films look like they come from a musical, and that The Snow Queen depends on movements like those in a girls’ ballet.2
Horus staked out another approach. This is the one that Miyazaki would later use, in a more polished form, for Cagliostro and all of his movies to follow.
Not that he understood these ideas in the ‘60s. Although he worked on Horus, Miyazaki wasn’t a filmmaker at the time. He’s admitted that the theories all came from Takahata. Still, he was absorbing them. Revisiting Horus in the ‘80s, he said, “Takahata-san’s direction is rather orthodox, creating a continuity of legitimate time and space. I’m deeply influenced by that.”3
In the fight between the two directing styles, the Miyazaki-Takahata approach came out ahead. Disney and Pixar borrowed it, as did other studios around the world. After The Rescuers Down Under, the direction of Disney renaissance films had more in common with Castle in the Sky than it did with The Jungle Book.
Still, these weren’t the only ways to direct animation, even at the time. In fact, when Takahata wrote about his theories in The Visual Expression of Horus (1983), his focus wasn’t on their differences from Disney. He contrasted them mainly against montage.
The most famous proponent of montage is Sergei Eisenstein, who used it in films like Ivan the Terrible (1944). Its basic idea, he wrote, is “the collision of independent shots — even shots opposite to one another.” He argued against the idea that movies should “follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language.” For him, each shot was like a “molecule,” or a word in a sentence.
He gave this simple example in the ‘20s, which he acknowledged as a cliche:
A hand lifts a knife.
The eyes of the victim open suddenly.
His hands clutch the table.
The knife is jerked up.
The eyes blink involuntarily.
Blood gushes.
A mouth shrieks.
Something drips onto a shoe...
Instead of showing us what’s going on in a concrete space, everything is insinuated. The staging of each individual shot is nearly abstract, noted Eisenstein.
This isn’t Takahata’s “bluntly honest” account of events — Eisenstein was willing to break down space. He put different types of shots in tension to create new meanings, and to get an emotional effect. The excitement didn’t come just from the content of each shot, but from the way they were timed, framed and contrasted.
Montage theory had an impact on animation. Film artist Slavko Vorkapich, a contemporary of Eisenstein’s, taught these ideas to a student named Art Clokey in the ‘50s. And then Clokey used them to create Gumby.
Through that show, montage ended up on American children’s TV. Like Clokey said:
Slavko Vorkapich, my film teacher at USC, taught that it’s more like poetry and music. He would refer to the shots and the definite cuts as notes. Visual notes to combine and use in various ways, to get across your feelings. […] It’s the balance of repetition, variety, tempo. And just a split second of rest. It’s all a mysterious combination.4
The theory strongly took hold in Japanese animation as well. Today, the fragmentary images on Eisenstein’s list come across like an anime or manga sequence. By the early ‘80s, Takahata noted, montage was “in full bloom in Japanese animation.”
Many directors were using it even during the ‘70s. The most respected of them might have been Osamu Dezaki (1943–2011). His work wasn’t as influential outside Japan as Miyazaki’s, but it still reached people around the world.5
An iconic scene from Dezaki’s boxing anime Ashita no Joe shows what he could do by warping time and space through montage. He creates an emotional continuity rather than a physical one. It’s different from the Takahata-Miyazaki approach, but effective nonetheless:
Takahata wasn’t strictly opposed to montage — Horus uses it. Even so, he had his criticisms.
In the early ‘80s, he argued that the most powerful kind of filmmaking creates a sense of reality — and montage undermines reality because it feels like a parlor trick. On some level, we know that the shots in Eisenstein’s example aren’t really connected in time and space.
Here, Takahata echoed one of his influences: the mid-century critic André Bazin, whose essays (like Montage Prohibited) argued for ideas like “spatial unity” and “concrete continuity” in filmmaking. Stringing together snippets to create illusions annoyed Bazin. He wanted longer takes in which multiple events coexist on screen.
Miyazaki’s own distaste for montage runs deeper than even Bazin’s: “films that are made in that fashion are the worst kind,” he said in the 2000s. Shortly before that remark, he complained that “Japanese films [today] are boring because they are not infused with multiple meanings on the screen.” He saw montage in them — bits and pieces arranged in a row, instead of shots that portray several events in space.6
Which is what you find in the eagle rescue sequence from The Rescuers Down Under. Even when the film adds quick closeups for emphasis, it doesn’t lose its sense of space, or the feeling that these characters are together in the same location. It’s a close study of Miyazaki’s filmmaking: it isn’t Eisenstein.
Not that one approach is right and the other wrong. Miyazaki hates montage, but Eisenstein called long takes “utterly unfilmic.” These are the opinions of master filmmakers, each wholly dedicated to their style. That dedication helped to make them great — but there are gradations here.
For example: Satoshi Kon’s work is a mishmash of Takahata-style continuity, montage and even staginess. When he made Tokyo Godfathers, he pulled back on the camerawork to focus everything on the acting — a little like a retro Disney film. And Frédéric Back, one of Miyazaki’s heroes, could be called a kind of montagist himself.7
The three styles mentioned today are just examples — there are more (UPA, for instance). All of them have their uses, and they’ve all powered successful work. The key isn’t finding the correct one so much as it’s understanding what these styles mean, and what they can do. Thoughtful direction can make even the tiniest project shine.
This is a revised reprint of an article that first ran in our newsletter on May 9, 2024. It was exclusive to paying subscribers then — now, it’s free to everyone.
2 – Worldwide animation news
2.1 – Europe’s next wave
Like we wrote last week, Flow’s Oscar is a big deal. And it shows, once again, the value of the European co-production system. The film’s team was spread across Latvia, France and Belgium, and its budget was assembled piecemeal: government grants, film funds, investments from broadcasters and more.
Cartoon Movie is a hub of this system. It’s held each year in Bordeaux, France — an early iteration of Flow appeared there in 2022. The event’s latest edition took place this week. Here’s how Euronews explained it:
Unlike a traditional festival or fair, Cartoon Movie prioritizes pitching in intense direct-to-financiers sessions for animation makers. Producers for all the 55 films selected are given slots — a maximum of 30 minutes — to sell their projects.
Among the most hyped pitches was the stop-motion feature Hyacinthe. Its teaser trailer (watch) stands out right away: the animation is technical fireworks, and rich with personality. Director Gerlando Infuso, based in Belgium, has done stop-motion shorts since the 2000s. With this story about a baker in a fantasy world, he’s aiming for 80 minutes.
Also hyped were The Dreamed Journey of Alpha Two and Prudence, both French.
Prudence is a horror film whose premise brings to mind The Thing, and its dark, intense teaser (watch) was one of the best-animated and -shot at Cartoon Movie 2025. By contrast, the clip for Alpha Two (watch) is just audio over stills — not uncommon for the event. Yet the vibe and storytelling pull you in regardless. The director here is Susanne Seidel, who animated on Sirocco, and she has our attention.
Elsewhere, the projects Zako (Armenia, France) and The Twilight World (Germany, France) are about World War II. Zako won a cash prize from Eurimages, a key backer of Flow. And The Twilight World has stolen headlines this week for a simple reason: its director is Werner Herzog.
He’s new to animation. Herzog’s film adapts a novel he wrote about Hiroo Onoda, a real-world Japanese soldier who continued to fight the Pacific War into the 1970s. “It wasn’t until the producers at Psyop approached me about adapting Onoda’s story into an animated film that I realized the potential that animation had to tell this story,” Herzog said. Over the teaser (watch), we hear his voice reading these lines:
The night coils in fever dreams, crackling and flickering like loosely connected neon tubes. Onoda’s war is of no meaning for the cosmos, for history, for the course of the war. Onoda’s war is formed from the union of an imaginary nothing and a dream. But Onoda’s war, sired by nothing, is nevertheless overwhelming, an event extorted from eternity.
Michael Arias (Tekkonkinkreet) is involved in the script, and the film is planned to be 85 minutes. “The project has a budget of €7.8 million and is seeking international pre-sales, private equity, broadcasters, financiers, distributors, key talent and a French co-director,” reports Cineuropa. “Production is slated to commence in 2026.”
For more on Cartoon Movie 2025, check out the full project list and the trailers page.
2.2 – Newsbits
We lost George Lowe (67), the voice of Space Ghost in Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
Gints Zilbalodis “received a hero’s welcome” after landing in Latvia, reports Cartoon Brew. Flow remains front-page news in the country — its Oscar win is a national event.
An intriguing experiment from Britain, Triple Bill, is online after its debut last month. It’s three shorts in one, done with replacement animation and 3D printing.
In America, Deaf Crocodile put out its Blu-ray edition of Gwen and the Book of Sand, the French cult film from the ‘80s. (Meanwhile, a release of Marcell Jankovics’s Tragedy of Man is on the way.)
Nezha 2 passed $2 billion at the box office in China. And it continues to spread abroad: it’s due in Ireland and the UK this month.
American animator Jonni Peppers is finalizing Take Off the Blindfold, her feature-length follow-up to Barber Westchester. That film is one of our favorites of the decade, and we’re looking forward to the new one. Details via her Patreon page.
In America, production workers at Walt Disney Animation Studios now have a union contract.
A new Japanese book collects Hayao Miyazaki’s 219 image boards for My Neighbor Totoro. The goal, according to the team, was to get as close as possible to the original art.
Lola Aikins of South Africa watched the teaser for her film Naledi blow up online this week. After that happened, SABC News got her into the studio for a televised interview.
Lastly, we looked at Rintaro’s Labyrinth Labyrinthos (1987) — a gorgeous, surreal anime film.
Until next time!
From The Visual Expression of Horus, our source for Takahata’s quotes today.
From Starting Point 1979–1996 (“Thoughts on Japanese Animation”).
Miyazaki said this (and spoke about his reliance on Takahata’s theories during Horus) in his interview for the Little Norse Prince Valiant Roman Album.
Quoted in Gumby: The Authorized Biography of the World’s Favorite Clayboy.
In 1995, Peter Chung (Aeon Flux) called Dezaki “probably my biggest influence.”
From Turning Point 1997–2008 (“Animation Directing Class, Higashi Koganei Sonjuku II School Opening”). It’s worth noting that Miyazaki did, in fact, use a form of montage in his music video On Your Mark, paired with his usual sense of spatial continuity. The effect is very unique.
"The key isn’t finding the correct one so much as it’s understanding what these styles mean, and what they can do." Well said. Artists ought to be opinionated, it's a sign of their craftsmanship and originality. But we as audiences shouldn't be granted that privilege so easily, although we can certainly develop our own preferences alongside our increasing understanding of the medium.
Miyazaki's growing distaste for montage strongly reminds me of Tarkovsky's own rejection of Eisenstein's theory, so much so that I think it might have been an influence as well. I recommend the chapter "Time, rhythm and editing" from his book Sculpting in Time if you haven't read it, and maybe revisit Miyazaki's thoughts on Stalker.
"I reject the principles of 'montage cinema' because they do not allow the film to continue beyond the edges of the screen: they do not allow the audience to bring personal experience to bear on what is in front of them on film. [...] (in October) The construction of the image becomes an end in itself, and the author proceeds to make a total onslaught on the audience, imposing upon them his own attitude to what is happening. [...]
I see it as my professional task to create my own, distinctive flow of time, and convey in the shot a sense of its movement [...]. Assembly, editing, disturbs the passage of time, interrupts it and simultaneously gives it something new. The distortion of time can be a means of giving it rhythmical expression. Sculpting in time! But the deliberate joining of shots of uneven time-pressure must not be introduced casually; it has to come from necessity, from an organic process going on in the material as a whole. The minute the organic process of the transitions is disturbed, the emphasis of the editing starts to obtrude; it is laid bare, it leaps to the eye. If time is slowed down or speeded up artificially, and not in response to an endogenous development, if the change of rhythm is wrong, the result will be false and strident."
Akira is still my favourite. Best of everything story and innovation