Slow Stories Don't Have to Be Boring
Plus: news.
Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the slate:
1. On the art of pacing.
2. Animation newsbits.
3. The last word.
With that, let’s go!
1. Going for popcorn
During the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Jeffrey Katzenberg had immense creative pull at Disney. He was behind The Little Mermaid’s over-the-top ending, for example.
“Die Hard had been a box-office hit,” recalled director John Musker. “So he came into the office saying, ‘We need The Little Mermaid to be more Die Hard.’ That’s how we got the second action sequence, with an Ursula who is as big as … Nakatomi Plaza.”1
Disney movies of that time reflected Katzenberg’s taste — his crews struggled to get around it. And there was one note, in particular, for which he became notorious. “I’m going for popcorn,” he said, often. In other words: the film was slow, and the audience was tuning out.2
Pacing was a fixation of Katzenberg’s. He wanted to keep kids in their seats — and he would make a movie bigger and faster until they stayed put. “He felt that unless a movie raced nonstop to its conclusion, an audience would inevitably lose interest,” wrote one director.3
For this reason, Katzenberg famously tried to cut Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid. It was too slow, he argued — it was losing kids. Howard Ashman (who co-wrote the song) ultimately saved the sequence. Yet he echoed Katzenberg’s worries.4
“Kids have such a short attention span,” Ashman said in 1989. “Cinderella sings a ballad while she’s scrubbing the floor. It’s a brilliant piece of animation … but the kids run up and down the aisles and get popcorn.”5
Katzenberg’s sense of pacing shaped many, many Hollywood projects — at Disney and beyond. Most of his films have a degree of similarity: they tend to be fast, loud and sharp-edged. Like the Disney artist Francis Glebas wrote:
He sat and watched [a] movie imagining that his kids were sitting next to him, and he would take notice whether they were glued to the screen or were fidgeting around needing to go to the bathroom or get popcorn. In other words, he was thinking about the film, not from the filmmaker’s point of view, but rather that of the audience.6
There’s no doubt that Katzenberg had a method. He turned out big hits. And current Hollywood producers rarely take the risks he did in his heyday — like Chicken Run, which he backed despite market research predicting it would fail.7 Even so, his notes frustrated lots of people. Katzenberg movies typically had little use for subtlety.
That was one reason Hollywood artists idolized Hayao Miyazaki back then. He was willing to be subtle, quiet — slow. “The biggest impact Miyazaki’s work had on me was seeing how he had the courage to let simple things entertain us,” said Glen Keane, the Disney animator. “A situation doesn’t always require a big explosion or a crazy gag.”8
As it happened, Miyazaki came to this approach in the face of pushback, too. In Japan as well, there were higher-ups who worried that kids wouldn’t sit through a quiet film.
Miyazaki’s first major creative role in animation was on Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968), directed by Isao Takahata. They made it at Toei Doga in Tokyo — and it was meant to be boldly different from the studio’s normal work. It was darker, more cinematic and more experimental.
Looking back on Horus, Takahata recalled a sequence maybe 30 minutes into the movie. The hero (that is, Horus) walks through an abandoned, flooded town — looking for the source of a haunting song he hears. It’s slow and atmospheric. Miyazaki designed the area, and many others on the team filled out the sequence’s rich look and feel. Toei Doga’s usual cartooniness and spectacle vanish here.
As Takahata wrote, “[F]or me it was a truly enchanting moment ... [but] at the premiere, small children were running noisily around the theater.” Later, when Horus aired on television, he noticed that the sequence had been omitted.9
It was dispiriting. For years, Horus in general was a source of pain for Miyazaki and Takahata — it didn’t turn out as they’d hoped. “The film’s got everything I feel embarrassed about in it,” Miyazaki said in the ‘70s.10
But the experience with the village sequence didn’t end his and Takahata’s desire to make quieter work. In fact, they went much further in that direction with Panda! Go, Panda! (1972), a short film for theaters.
Panda is based in everyday life and has little in the way of a dramatic arc. Producers were nervous. The whole team was nervous. As Takahata said:
… Japanese animation at the time went at a very fast pace. Because children’s ability to steadily watch wouldn’t last that long. We were told we had to make rapid noises and make things intense and detailed. So, this kind of leisurely film, where it’s kind of soothing and relaxing, was something that everyone thought would be difficult to present. … You see, we were very worried. Even after it was made, there were people at the company who looked doubtful. They were like, “I don’t know, something this slow is...” 11
The team wasn’t sure whether kids would sit through Panda. It was another experiment. But it was an experiment built on ideas that Takahata and Miyazaki had developed.
After Horus, the two of them had tried to make a Pippi Longstocking series in 1971. It didn’t happen. Yet that project was about everyday life as well — and Takahata’s outline for Pippi went into detail about the team’s theories. It would take finesse to keep kids engaged with a show like this one, he wrote. Pippi would need to be carefully handled, moment by moment.
The depiction of everyday life had to be concrete and real, noted Takahata. Kids wouldn’t stick with Pippi unless they felt they could reach out and touch this world and its characters. “[W]e should not only depict the intentions and outcomes of Pippi’s actions,” he argued, “but also clearly depict the process of the actions in such a way that they themselves evoke enjoyment and interest.”
He went on:
While depicting the behavior of the quirky girl Pippi, it is necessary to heighten the expression in a way that expands children’s imaginations and lets them feel the freedom of play and the joy of discovery. …
Can people feel a sense of reality if the expression is just symbols or rote patterns? Unless there’s a tangible portrayal of the lively Pippi as lively, beautiful things as beautiful to the audience, joyful things as joyful and tasty things as tasty, only the story will be able to hold the audience’s interest, especially in the case of children.12
In other words, the viewer needed to viscerally feel the world on the screen. It wasn’t enough for the characters to call food delicious: kids should be able to sense its deliciousness at a glance. Something that makes the characters happy should make the audience happy. Something beautiful in the story should be beautiful to the viewer.
Panda! Go, Panda! grew out of Pippi. It was the implementation of these ideas — the proof of concept. Here was a quiet, slow-paced story about everyday realities, aimed at small kids. It drew attention to the things that most animation glossed over. “[I]n order for the people watching to truly feel and believe,” Takahata argued, “first of all, we had to carefully concoct that foundation, which is what kind of life is being lived.”
When he and Miyazaki went to the Panda premiere with their own children, they were afraid that the younger viewers in the theater would get bored and run around again. But they didn’t. They were rapt. Seeing children immersed in this world was life-changing for Panda’s team. “I’m really glad I made something like this,” Takahata remembered feeling.
Here’s Miyazaki:
At the time it was thought that children liked flashy, noisy films. But we thought that fun and excitement are best found in the small moments of everyday life. We made Panda! Go Panda! in the hope it would be something children would fully enjoy. … [T]he children who came to watch it enjoyed it immensely. At the end they sang along with the theme song. I was thrilled.13
This willingness to slow down, to bring out the interest held in quieter things, became a trademark of Takahata’s and Miyazaki’s projects. It soon got them a megahit with Heidi: Girl of the Alps (1974), one of the biggest animated shows on TV.
They were following through. “[A]fter that [experience with Panda], even though other works such as Heidi had a rather slower pace,” Takahata said, “we thought maybe the children would focus and watch them … as long as the way we were making things and what we were going to show were done properly.”
By the ‘80s, when Miyazaki’s and Takahata’s work really came to Hollywood’s attention, they were masters of this style.
Even in stories about magic or adventure, like Nausicaä or Castle in the Sky, mundane things get a chance to shine. The films don’t rush from one set piece to another: the audience is given time to immerse itself in the visceral believability of the world. This grounds the bigger moments. Miyazaki wrote that, in his early career, he “logically and consciously structured a film with ... a calm scene followed by a dramatic scene.”14
Movies like Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) took over without the help of theme-park-ride pacing. “It can be something as simple as the way the wind moves flowers,” said Glen Keane, “or the sound of a bee buzzing around a girl as she watches the clouds drift overhead. It encouraged me to find atmospheric moments in our films to animate.”
Miyazaki was very important to the Pixar people, too. Which led to battles: Toy Story’s team tried to add breathing room to the story, but the film was subjected to Katzenberg’s popcorn notes. Eventually, though, he left Disney — and Pixar got a bit more freedom to follow Miyazaki’s kind of pacing.
That said, even with Katzenberg out of the room, it’s hard to brush off the sense that the audience might start fidgeting. That’s a persistent worry — not just in Hollywood. The Takahata–Miyazaki approach to pacing was always a bit unorthodox, and it requires a deft touch and a keen eye for detail. The point isn’t simply to add slowness: it’s to hold the audience’s interest by other means.
Some years ago, Pixar’s Lee Unkrich went to the Ghibli Museum. There, he caught one of the Ghibli shorts it screens — the exclusive ones that don’t get home releases. As he explained:
There was a character, a little girl, sitting in a field, unwrapping a piece of candy. [Miyazaki] goes in on this close-up of the hands, holding the piece of candy that’s kind of coveted and very important to this little girl. And she just slowly opens the wrapper, very meticulously. He spends so much screen time on this that part of my brain is just blowing up, thinking, My God, how can he get away with just focusing on this one little detail? But at the end of the day, it’s just this wonderfully, beautifully observed moment. His films are just filled with moments like that.15
Today’s story is an edited reprint of an article that first ran in our newsletter, behind the paywall, on April 17, 2025.
2. Newsbits
We lost Marjane Satrapi (56), co-director of Persepolis and author of the graphic novel.
After decades as a lost film, The Legend of Miragaia (1931) turned up at a flea market in Portugal. It’s an early achievement in Portuguese animation — and “thought to be the first animated silhouette film” from the country.16
In Ukraine, the government’s new “Thousand Springs” grant program includes funding for Ukrainian animation teams.
In Australia, makers of children’s shows are undergoing a crisis caused by lost government quotas and the disappearance of streamer commissions.
The theatrical premiere of the Amazing Digital Circus finale has earned a strong $21 million in America — a real win for indie animation.
Artist Alice Rossi spoke to Fumettologica about low pay in Italian animation. Reacting to the uproar around My 2 Cents, Rossi called it “not even the worst-paid project” in Italy, and argued for more nuance and industry-wide reforms.
In Russia, animator Vasilissa Afanasyeva created a music video for the vintage song Na-Na-Ni, Na-Na-Na. It’s well done, and now on YouTube.
Also in Russia, a top aide proposed total government control over state-supported films. “[O]versight needs to happen at every stage: the idea, the script, the shoot, the release. … I don’t idealize Soviet censorship, but it had an undeniable artistic benefit,” he said.
In India, Studio Eeksaurus posted the first episode of its series You Know Who, made for an environmental org.
Finally: a personal reflection on Disney’s Atlantis and the place of criticism.
3. Last word
Hope you’ve enjoyed today’s issue! Like last Sunday, we’re closing out with personal asides from the two of us (co-runners of the newsletter):
John: Hard to believe it’s already June! I dedicated part of my week to a hobby project: a new translation of Jiří Trnka’s Good Soldier Švejk (1954) film series, built on existing subtitles and the English versions of the Švejk novels. I’ve been at it for around a month, and it’s giving me a lot of appreciation for these shorts (and for the original Švejk stories). Trnka’s work is something I cherish more and more, and spending time in his world, studying his mastery, is like a refuge for me. If you haven’t looked into him before, good entry points are his film The Hand and the sketches and photos in this book.
Jules: I started reading the Odyssey for the first time earlier this week (I think I read a heavily abridged version as a child), and I’ve been especially struck by the specificities of everyday life that appear throughout. For example, squires tipping a chariot against a wall to store it, or an assistant using his hands to show a blind bard where to reach his instrument, or Princess Nausicaä asking her father if she can use their good wagon — “the high one, with good wheels” — on a trip to wash clothes in a river. It’s not what you might imagine when you hear the term “epic poetry”! I don’t recall similar details in the later romances I’ve read from medieval Europe, and they lend a sense of nearness and humanity to the story that I find really amazing.
Until next time!
For details on Katzenberg’s popcorn note, see the foreword to Starting Point 1979–1996 and the book iCon Steve Jobs.
From the Starting Point foreword, a key source.
See the National Post (October 7, 2006) and this Polygon interview.
See The Rock Hill Herald (December 14, 1989).
Glebas wrote these words in his book Directing the Story.
Katzenberg’s big risk on Chicken Run is recounted in A Grand Success! – The Aardman Journey, One Frame at a Time.
From the Los Angeles Times (October 24, 1999), an important source.
See Takahata’s book The Visual Expression of Horus (1983).
From “Speaking of Conan,” collected in Starting Point. The book dates this interview to 1983, but it’s actually a shortened reprint of the one published in Future Boy Conan: Film 1/24 Special Issue (1979).
Takahata spoke these words during a later video interview, included on the GKIDS Blu-ray release of Panda. Most of the quotes from him today derive from there.
See Takahata’s documents in The Phantom Pippi Longstocking.
From “Panda! Go, Panda! Creator’s Message,” collected in Starting Point.
From Miyazaki’s afterword to Turning Point 1997–2008.
See this feature on Unkrich.
Quote from Animation: A World History (Volume I).
Great read!
Humanistic detail in animation is all I ever want, and Miyazaki has a fantastic eye for it. Though my personal favorite goes to another Japanese director: Yoshiyuki Tomino, the father of Gundam.
Miyazaki and Ghibli create really appealing human motion, but no one captures the weird little idiosyncrasies of people like Tomino. A friend made an incredible duo of video essays that explain what is so deeply appealing about his style of directing, highly highly recommended: https://youtu.be/6XG-Haqd0iU?si=EyYlnfBv96jhhoSQ
Like the piece says, it's not really about going slower, but rather about going quiet. There's always something interesting going on, but it's quiet rather than loud.
There's a lot of peace and joy to be found when going quieter in real life. Like when you take a deep breath and close your eyes for a second, and then you can hear the birds singing and see the wind through the leaves better and take all of it in. It's like you are slowing down your radio frequency and get to capture a different level of information about the world, one that was too quiet to notice before you turned down the volume.
I've seen films going slow rather than going quiet, and they do get boring a bit. Even if I ultimately loved them. Last year I saw Angel's Egg in theater in Annecy, and I wished I did so with a cup of coffee in hand. I think the film was wonderful on many aspects, but despite gorgeous backgrounds, many scenes were also very *empty*. There were moment with simply nothing happening, and I would call these slow scenes rather than quiet scenes. I don't think I can remember a Miyazaki film when truly nothing is happening: it's not slow, it's quiet.