The Artist Who Colored Ghibli
Plus: news.
We’re back! With the mid-year break over, the Animation Obsessive newsletter returns with a new issue. We’ve done a ton of prep over the past few weeks to get ready for the rest of our 2026, which begins today.
Here’s the slate for this Sunday:
1. On Michiyo Yasuda, a master of color.
2. Animation newsbits.
3. The last word.
Now, let’s go!
1. Ghibli’s colors
The art of Studio Ghibli isn’t really duplicable. People have tried: the internet is full of attempts, the bulk of them machine-generated. Even when those images vaguely recall Ghibli, though, it’s not so simple to paint light like Kazuo Oga did in My Neighbor Totoro, or to animate a smile like Makiko Futaki did across the ‘80s.
Many tiny and hyper-specific choices, down to the individual frames, made Ghibli films what they are. These choices came from stars like Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, but also, critically, from the way less famous people on their teams.
Among the most central of the less-famous people, for most of Ghibli’s existence, was Michiyo Yasuda. She’s far from a household name. Yet the one-of-a-kind colors of Ghibli’s animation, which shape the whole look and feel of its films, were selected mainly by her.
Miyazaki once called Yasuda “three times sharper and more particular than me.”1 Takahata, who worked with her on Grave of the Fireflies (1988), said glowing things about her abilities. He pointed to the worn-out pants of one character in that film:
[S]he chose a color that looked faded from many washings. Although I say ‘chose a color,’ in reality, she was choosing texture. Whether the fabric is thick or flimsy depends on the color chosen. Yasuda-san has a subtle perception that allows her to grasp such things.2
As Ghibli got established, its colors stood apart. They were more nuanced, more subdued, richer than the norm. That was Yasuda’s area. “The reason animation films suffer creatively has to do with the fact that they all use the same colors,” Miyazaki argued in the ‘80s. “It’s like, ‘Oh, the color of animation.’ … I believe that Ghibli is the only studio that has really managed to develop such unique colors.”3
Yasuda didn’t brag about what she did. Her work was, she emphasized, just a step in the process. “I create colors to add life to the drawings and to communicate the director’s intentions as much as possible,” she once said.4
Even so, the influence of her eye on the films is hard to overstate. Per the writer Yasuko Shibaguchi, Yasuda was a “right hand” to both Miyazaki and Takahata.
The main gist of Yasuda’s job was straightforward. On Ghibli’s early classics, she defined the colors of the characters and objects drawn on cels — the transparent plastic sheets laid atop the background paintings. If you’ve seen Totoro or the Catbus or Kiki, you’ve seen colors in which Yasuda had a hand.
Her credits are impressive by themselves. She was there for Ghibli’s first, Castle in the Sky (1986), whose 300-plus colors she designed without much of an initial plan by Miyazaki.5 From that point, Yasuda touched most of the studio’s output: Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, My Neighbors the Yamadas and more. As Ghibli switched to digital coloring in the ‘90s, she adapted her process to the new tech.
If the gist of her craft was straightforward, the exact specifics weren’t. Yasuda worked to convey the feelings of each film, and cultures and places and times of day, and beyond. She said during the 2000s, “In order to determine colors I always take into consideration the personality and emotional development of each character and the director’s aim.”6
More than that, her decisions played no small part in the sense of reality that typifies Takahata’s and Miyazaki’s films. As Yasuda put it:
Miya-san’s world is fantasy, but he mixes in truth in some way. That is why the Catbus can’t be pink. It needs to have the warmth of a real animal. Then it looks believable to the viewer. We always create elements that are close to the real thing. They have to be such colors that make you say even Totoro might really exist.
Miya-san often says, “Please make it look convincing.”7
It was a preoccupation of Yasuda’s. From Ghibli’s start, her colors were subtler and more diverse than the industry standard. With Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies, she began to design new paints in intermediate shades, many of them on the muted and natural-looking side.
“At the time, society was becoming busier and busier, and there were lots of strong, flashy plastic colors,” Yasuda said. “So, looking for a little more gentleness, I set out to create my own paints.”8
In her mature work, Yasuda shot for color with a “feeling of transparency,” in which the viewer can “sense the air” in the scene. It was a careful balance, she noted, because it’s possible for muted colors to fall into murkiness.9 Yet selecting just the right “restrained” ones creates an impression of depth. If a palette of bright, primary colors tends to flatten an image, Yasuda’s designs did the opposite.
Her color choices on Totoro leaned soft and quiet; on Grave of the Fireflies, they were almost naturalistic. Both palettes made their way into Kiki’s Delivery Service, Only Yesterday, Porco Rosso and other films ahead.
Again, Ghibli’s colors were different. “If other studios end up being influenced and our colors become standard practice,” argued Miyazaki in the ‘80s, “that might transform the industry.”
Long before Ghibli opened, and long before she became a color designer, Yasuda was a veteran in the animation business. She’d joined the Tokyo studio Toei Doga out of high school in 1958. “[I]t was a time when I didn’t know much about animation,” she admitted later. She was simply looking for work.10
But she found a welcoming environment in Toei’s ink-and-paint division, where artists traced and colored the animators’ drawings onto cels. After Takahata and Miyazaki joined the studio as young recruits in 1959 and 1963, she became friends with them as well. Around the time Takahata served as vice-chairman of Toei Doga’s union, with Miyazaki as its general secretary, Yasuda was the secretary.
They discussed art, politics, life. Yasuda was a nonconformist and smart; Takahata and Miyazaki enjoyed talking to her. And she was inspired by their creative drive. “There were all kinds of people at Toei Doga, but I was always amazed at Miyazaki’s drawings and approach on the one hand, and Takahata’s talents as a director on the other,” Yasuda said. “They seemed incredibly unique.”
When Takahata directed Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968) at Toei, Yasuda worked on many of its major scenes as a tracer. In 1972, Takahata and Miyazaki made Panda! Go, Panda! at a different company, and Yasuda once again joined the tracing crew. Then she followed them to Heidi: Girl of the Alps (1974) at another studio.
Although Yasuda was in her mid-30s by then, with some 15 years of experience, she still wasn’t a color designer. It wasn’t a dream of hers, either: the job didn’t really exist as a distinct position. But she stumbled into it during her time at Nippon Animation, the Heidi company.
A breakthrough for her was the studio’s 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother (1976), on whose colors she collaborated with Miyazaki. In his words:
Because basically I did not like this piece (laughs), I decided to make experimental color combinations and screen compositions. At the time, a series like Sazae-san would serve up fish with pink paint slapped on them, and that kind of thing was acceptable back then, but I couldn’t stand it (laughs). How we could make food look delicious and how to express the sparkling of a glass surface, how we could make the picture stand out by depicting the details of things and designing colors… it was Yacchin [Michiyo Yasuda] with whom I experimented on these things.11
Yasuda began to realize what color-picking could do. She later called this series “the start of my color design career.”
In 3,000 Leagues, color puts across the tactile textures of the world, and the color of a single pond might change dramatically based on angle and time of day. Yasuda and Miyazaki invented whole new terms. “ ‘Underwater color’ is when an object submerged in water is seen from the outside. ... ‘Glass-transparency color’ is when an object is seen through glass,” Miyazaki explained.
Soon, Yasuda jumped to Miyazaki’s directorial debut Future Boy Conan (1978), and to Takahata’s Anne of Green Gables (1979). Her duties expanded: more and more of the color-selection work fell to her, even as she oversaw the painting crew and checked the final cels. Each project, she said, seemed to get harder than the last.
Yasuda often found herself (now around 40) living at the office. Like her peers, she felt the physical toll of Japan’s TV deadlines: her writing arm swelled up during Anne, and she fell to 88 pounds. In her rare off hours, she went out drinking heavily to de-stress.
Despite the conditions, she was achieving things. By Conan, Yasuda was expanding the usual number of paints in TV animation. She noted at the time that the colors of Art Nouveau were her preference, even if she couldn’t always put them on screen. “In the case of cels, it’s hard to get that kind of atmosphere, you know?” she said. Conan’s colors were a cut above nonetheless.
On Anne, Takahata needed realism. Yasuda expressed it in color. Although TV paints tended to be harsh, she managed a subtler and more natural look. Anne’s faded clothes, for one, wowed Takahata. And, already, Yasuda was taking storytelling into account: “I started to think about the characters’ personalities when deciding on the colors of their clothes and accessories,” she said.
For Yasuda, those years were a lot of struggle, and trial and error, and learning from the background supervisors at Nippon Animation. But she gained things while surviving the pressure cooker of Japanese TV.
Along the way, she began to notice color in the world around her, and to use what she saw:
Even when I was walking, if I happened upon a dead leaf that had fallen into a puddle, I’d find myself staring to see how light hit it and which parts shined white. … I started observing things constantly, like how, when the wind blows and the trees sway, there’s a restlessness over here and shadows fall over there; or how, on clothes with a green-and-blue pattern, the pattern looks blurred when seen from a distance and the colors also seem softer.
A few years later, Takahata brought Yasuda aboard Miyazaki’s feature Nausicaä (1984). She outlined its 262 colors in a short time, working with a high-luminosity, low-saturation scheme. “The colors in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind were restrained compared to previous films,” she noted.12 But the look remained more stylized and less natural than she and Takahata would’ve liked.
Yasuda was still learning. With every one of these productions, she learned. Only in the late ‘80s, for example, did she notice that “there is color even in shadows,” and that she could use “deep or vivid colors” inside them rather than a default “black or gray.” And, as she learned, the richness of Ghibli’s images increased.13
By the time of Princess Mononoke, colored partly on cels and partly digitally, Yasuda was the best anywhere at what she did. She had a superhuman memory for color, and she understood how each paint would look when shot on film (working with the camera people was a specialty of hers).
Between 500 and 600 colors went into Mononoke. In the six-hour documentary on the film’s creation, you can see Yasuda wrestle over some of those colors with Miyazaki. They fight like old friends. At one point, he insists on a garish, high-contrast pairing of light and shadow. “This combination looks unthinkable to me,” she protests, and she finds a compromise.
Even with Ghibli’s shift to all-digital painting after Mononoke, Yasuda stayed at the top of animation color design. She continued to learn. On My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999), that involved the struggle to output proper colors from computers to film stock, a far trickier thing than the old photography process. And, in that movie and the ones ahead, the team overcame the flatness of computer art.14
By her 50s, Yasuda was looking for successors and thinking about retirement. As it happened, though, it wasn’t so simple to emulate what she did. Some younger artists, on films like Porco Rosso, buckled in her role. Yasuda kept coming back.
After all, there was no formula to copy. As Yasuda once explained:
In their artistic quest, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata demand the closest attention to precise color design. Therefore, our work involves developing new colors, trying them out with each shot, each new film. Even Studio Ghibli hasn’t come up with a defined color scheme because it’s always evolving according to the approaches and requirements of each new film.
Yasuda could operate in that place. Behind her decisions wasn’t a formula, but that eye she’d trained, and the endless research she’d done. Her job never became easy: up through Ponyo and The Wind Rises, each film stayed a new problem. But Yasuda always adapted. All the work and thinking she’d done allowed it.
Obviously, color design was just one role. Yasuda didn’t make these movies on her own: in interviews, she often spoke about the group, and about the ideas of the directors. But take a close look at the subtlety of the colors in Fireflies or Mononoke, how the films balance muted tones without going sludgy, and you’ll realize that you’re in a master’s world.
2. Newsbits
The American researcher Jacob Pruitt unearthed a trove of material about an abandoned Disney Frankenstein movie from the ‘90s.
The Art of Cartoon Saloon: 25 Years is a new book about Ireland’s most famous animation studio. See a preview via Animation Magazine.
In America, hundreds of jobs were cut at Pixar. According to The Wrap, one reason is that Hoppers’ revenues left it “slightly shy of break-even.”
Jazza, an Australian YouTuber, put out a fascinating breakdown video on a short stop-motion animation he made.
In Russia, a new round of pitches to the Cinema Fund took place. Included were a number of shady GenAI projects, and propaganda was a theme — see this report, for example.
The American distributor Deaf Crocodile is starting a video store.
Also from Russia: the French scholar Joël Chapron discussed France’s funding ecosystem in incredible depth with ProfiCinema.
In Italy, director Enzo D’Alò (Lucky and Zorba, How the Toys Saved Christmas) had strong words for GenAI, Italian funding for animation and the American production system.
The Chinese film All Wishes Come True is doing well at the box office, with roughly $114 million in revenue since its release earlier this month.
In Japan, Toei is preparing to release restorations of Magic Boy, Journey to the West, Animal Treasure Island and other films on Blu-ray. Given the quality of the company’s past restorations, this is exciting news.
3. Last word
Thanks for reading today’s issue! We’re wrapping up with personal comments from the two of us:
Jules: Hey, everyone! It’s been a very productive few weeks on our end — somehow it feels much longer. Among other goings-on, we discovered a number of new art and history treasure troves, and we’re excited to share what we’ve found. Also, I mentioned in my last afterword that I was looking forward to working on a children’s book idea during the break: I’m happy to report the project has been going very well!
John: For this break, one goal was to watch movies we’ve been meaning to watch. It’s a paradox of writing about animation. To paraphrase Amid Amidi’s post last month: covering the medium actually reduces your time to be a viewer of the medium. So, among others, we finally caught Heroic Times (Hungary) and Art College 1994 (China) — two fascinating films with hyper-specific visions. Neither aims to be for everyone, but we enjoyed both a lot.
Until next time!
This is quoted in Motoko Tamamuro’s All the Anime article “Living Color,” used several times. The line original comes from The Color Artisan of Animation (アニメーションの色職人).
See The Color Artisan of Animation, our main source for today’s article, cited throughout.
From The Art of Kiki’s Delivery Service, another important source.
See The Art of My Neighbor Totoro, used a few times.
Details from the Laputa Roman Album.
This line appears in The Art of Howl’s Moving Castle.
See Ghibli Textbook 3: My Neighbor Totoro.
From Ghibli Textbook 4: Grave of the Fireflies.
See the documentary How Princess Mononoke Was Born (used a few times), this page and the foregoing sources.
Many of these details come from Future Boy Conan: Film 1/24 Special Issue, a valuable source.
This is an expanded version of Tamamuro’s quote in “Living Color,” using material from The Color Artisan of Animation.
Yasuda discussed Nausicaä’s colors in Animage (December 1983) and the foregoing sources.
From Yasuda’s interview in The Colors of Mary Blair (メアリー・ブレア展).
Yasuda discussed the challenge of coloring Yamadas in the My Neighbors the Yamadas Roman Album. Meanwhile, in The Art of Spirited Away, Ghibli’s Atsushi Okui explained the battle with computer colors:
With digital paint you slab on a single color, but with cel animation even one color isn’t really just one color. That’s why digital paint can look bad. It’s especially obvious to any viewer when the digital data is directly converted to the DLP format without any celluloid involved. ... [I]n order to produce softer images, we had a program developed that would add slight noise to them.
Welcome back, you've been missed. Color design is always a fun topic for me, since I have color-vision deficiency. Funny enough that makes me somewhat of an expert at work due to having spent more time learning about how color perception works, and being more aware when "intuitive" color codes in the user interface aren't at all. I'm completely lost when it comes to the aesthetics of color though, so articles like this are a joy to read.
> or how, on clothes with a green-and-blue pattern
Do we have her take on that infamous dress that obsessed the internet for a few weeks? :p
welcome back animation obsessive!