Scene Development and Coloring
Once storyboards are reviewed and approved, scenes are distributed among the staff. At Studio Ghibli, films have always been known to draw their scenes frame-by-frame. This is known as cel animation, where a series of images are drawn in succession and projected at a fast enough pace to give the illusion of movement.
There are over 100 animators who have different purposes at Studio Ghibli. There are inbetweeners who fill in the cel-by-cel details, such as the movements of characters; gengamen who are in charge of drawing the key images and scenes; and animators who focus solely on backgrounds. Directors keep a close eye on the work of their animators, supervising the pace and quality of their drawings. Walls of the studio are also filled with story and drawing references, as well as character layouts with memos and details in order to help animators in their process.
Above are clips of refiners and animators at work for the animation of Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke 1997). You can see how each are solely focused on their task with their own set of scenes to work on. It takes a lot of artisan skills and patience to color/draw each scene so well.
When the final versions of scenes are drawn to the utmost quality, they are sent to the copying department. There the drawings are tucked between a cel sheet and a carbon sheet. They are sent through a tracing machine and out comes a carbon copy of the drawing on the cel sheet. These copies are sent to the Refining Room to be colored in with detailed specifications. Later scenes will be digitized to give it the drawings a more enriched look. But the foundation of Studio Ghibli's animation is hand-drawn and colored.
Please view from 0:00 - 7:12
Please view from 1:51 - 2:33
back