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for me to do my job unless I learned the full, start-to-finish process of making an animated film. He believed that the only way to really learn about animated filmmaking was by direct experience.

      When I made my first visit to Studio Ghibli, what struck me most was how small the studio was. The main building, then the studio’s only building, was designed by Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki famously enjoyed designing buildings for his films. When Ghibli was established he got his first chance to design one that would actually be built.

      Ghibli’s main building was designed to be both compact and flexible. Every part of the building had to be able to be used for multiple purposes. The downstairs “bar” where the staff ate their bento lunchbox meals also served as a kitchen, a meeting room where the whole company could gather, a place to hold meetings for outsiders, and a screening room where the day’s rushes could be viewed. The compactness and self-contained utility of its design reminded me of a submarine: a submarine with large windows letting in light and a beautiful garden on its roof.

      The area where the animators worked had retractable overhead skylights to let in sunlight when the weather permitted. Watching the animators at work and drawing at their desks, I found it hard to believe that they were drawing the entire film by hand and that the film could be made from start to finish right inside this one relatively small building. During the course of my career I’ve had many opportunities to visit Disney Feature Animation and Pixar Animation studios. It never surprised me that these were the buildings where Aladdin or Lion King or Toy Story was being made. As at Ghibli there was a palpable atmosphere of extreme creativity, but unlike at Ghibli there were a lot more people and equipment, and a whole lot more space. On my first visits to Studio Ghibli I always wondered where the rest of the studio was.

      For a long time at Ghibli, even after the success of Princess Mononoke, anybody could just walk upstairs and stand in front of Hayao Miyazaki and watch him work. Miyazaki is an iconic figure in Japan. His usually smiling visage, capped with a shock of snow-white hair and adorned with a full beard and moustache, also white, large squarish black glasses, a wry grin, and a twinkle in his eye, is a face at once recognizable to anyone in Japan—and a lot of people outside it. At work on a film, Miyazaki would sit in a tiny corner of the animators’ area at an animator’s desk that was identical in every way to any other animator’s desk in the room, though the aura emanating from him identified him at a glance as someone unique and special.

      Miyazaki would sometimes stop what he was doing, stand up, and shake hands and even chat with a visitor (if he was in the mood). During the production of Princess Mononoke I once watched astonished as two local junior high school girls in their school uniforms walked upstairs and interrupted Miyazaki to have their picture taken with him. They made V for victory signs as they posed for the camera. No one objected and they politely left with their mission accomplished.

      Ghibli is set in a mostly residential area on the outer fringes of Tokyo. At the time the studio was built, the area’s small-plot agriculture was slowly being erased by an increase in single-family housing. Ghibli’s was the only commercial building in its neighborhood. The owners of the few vegetable fields immediately surrounding Studio Ghibli were loathe to break with their ancestral link to the land and the over-generous tax benefits of their “farming” status. Most of the local farmers would lovingly nurture their crops to maturity and then pile the produce in a corner and let it rot. It was a quiet, leafy neighborhood, rare in Tokyo. The cicadas sang in the summer. Bats swarmed the streetlights chasing insects in the early evening. Sunsets seen from Ghibli’s roof were spectacular. And on those few rare crystal-clear days, the silhouette of Mt. Fuji was visible in the west.

      There was little or no car traffic near the studio. Most of the people who passed it on foot or on their bicycles seemed completely unaware of Ghibli’s presence and of what might be going on inside the odd-looking building. Most passersby seemed surprisingly incurious. There were no external signs or any obvious indication of what the building was. Sometimes I would stand outside and watch the comings and goings of the people who worked for or had business with Ghibli. For the most part these people in no way looked like anyone who should have any business in the neighborhood, and I often wondered what exactly the neighbors imagined was going on.

      Much later I was asked to give tours of Studio Ghibli to visiting foreign guests. It had become my job to explain Ghibli to people, including the heads of all of America’s major animation studios, who had much the same reaction that I did on their first visit. Where, they wanted to know, was the rest of the studio?

      John Lasseter, the creative head of Pixar (now Disney/Pixar), once sent us a visitor who provided me with the perfect analogy to explain Ghibli to foreign guests. Several of Pixar’s board members happened to be visiting Japan and wanted a tour of Studio Ghibli. Over coffee in Ghibli’s multi-purpose meeting room, one of the directors, who had formerly been with NASA, told us about a trip he had taken to the Soviet Union to have a look at the Russian space program. He had asked one of his tour guides about astronaut transport vehicles. He explained that in America, in order to deliver the astronauts from their waiting area to the rocket on the launch pad, NASA had developed a special vehicle that cost $24 million. He wondered what the Soviets used for this purpose. His guide responded, “Oh, for that we have used Buick station wagon. Cost us about $7,500.”

      When I retold the story to visitors, Pixar and Disney Feature Animation would be NASA in the story and Studio Ghibli would be the Russian space program. Ghibli had grown up out of a culture of making do. From wartime Japan, through the Occupation, and through the postwar reconstruction periods, Japanese people had learned how to deal with scarcity. In the animation industry it informed the way they made their art. For Ghibli’s animators, having a single brand-new building where everyone could work together was already an unimaginable luxury.

      In my quest to learn how animated feature films were made I had the opportunity to study the animators at work drawing, the background artists preparing the sumptuous watercolor backgrounds, the cinematographers turning the drawings into cels, and the color specialists choosing the colors and painting the cels. The first post-production process I got to see was voice recording. Unlike most animation studios, Ghibli would complete the animation first and add the voices later. This is called after-recording, as opposed to pre-recording. Hayao Miyazaki and many of the senior animators at Ghibli whom he trained had an amazing sense of timing. They could imagine a line of dialogue and then capture not only the exact mouth movements it would take to deliver that line, but the timing of each mouth position on screen.

      This made things more difficult for the voice actor. He/she would have to strike exactly the right tone and create the right mood or attitude in speaking each line of dialogue while also exactly matching the mouth movements of his/her character as they would appear on a large-format screen in a movie theater. They would also have to say their lines clearly and precisely enough to satisfy the most sophisticated audiophile viewing the film using the most sophisticated state-of-the art audio equipment.

      The recording was done one line at a time. After recording each line or each part of the line between ten and fifty times, the voice actor then had to maintain the emotion of the entire speech or scene and match the volume and tone of the lines he/she had said thirty-seven times a half hour earlier. All while exactly matching the lip movements up on the screen.

      There was also a fairly long wait between each of the repetitions. After the actor says a line, he/she has to wait while the recording technicians examine every quarter second of the recorded line on a graphic display. The process has been speeded up over the years by the use of computers, but when Princess Mononoke was recorded the recording process was still largely manual.

      The recording technicians were in a soundproof control room, seated before an enormous crescent-shaped console. The console contained hundreds of dials, lights, toggles, and switches and was identical in every way to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. The director would sit in Captain Kirk’s (or Captain Picard’s) chair, and his sound designers would sit a half-level below working the dials and buttons. The producer(s) and anyone else involved in the day’s recording session would sit in chairs along the back wall. A large viewing screen at the front of the room displayed the part of the film that was being recorded. Monitors displayed

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