LITMIR.BIZ

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The actor was in a separate soundproof booth and couldn’t hear what was being said in the control room unless someone pushed and held down a large red button of the kind used to launch a nuclear missile.

      Each line would be played back and discussed. If the director liked the line, it was examined for sound imperfections, volume level, clarity of pronunciation, continuity with previous lines, and its fit with the screen image. It might be accepted or discussed. The best three or four lines were saved, annotated, and logged in, and one of them would eventually be used in the final mix of the film to become part of the film’s soundtrack.

      For the voice actor, all of this translated to a fairly long wait between lines. After each line had been examined and discussed, even the most accomplished of actors would invariably hear the director’s voice saying, “That was great. Really great. Now can we get one more like that, only this time …”

      My first experience in the recording studio was listening to the very famous, talented, and versatile actress Yuko Tanaka perform the role of Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke.

      The control room of a recording studio may have looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, but it also resembled the basement recreation room of a college dormitory. The furniture there had experienced years of use and abuse beyond its natural service life. The hermetically sealed atmosphere reeked of stale cigarette smoke and bad coffee. Overflowing and unemptied ashtrays sat within easy reach of every chair and table in the room. Assorted ceramic and paper cups still held a last quarter inch of coffee and some had become the final resting place for a few dozen stumped-out cigarette butts that the ashtrays couldn’t accommodate. Bags of junk food and the remnants of junk food packaging were scattered about the room.

      The people in the room looked as if they had been in there for months without sleep. Day after day they would sit there listening to the same lines over and over and over again, hundreds and hundreds of times, their goal being to capture and perfectly record every grunt, moan, breath, and spoken word that would become the dialogue track of the completed film.

      Animators at their desks at work appear to be in heaven. They can’t believe that someone is paying them just to draw. They have on headphones and are listening to music. Most of them smoke. All are absorbed totally in the joy of drawing and making their drawings move. They are exactly where they want to be, doing the very thing they want to do.

      An animation director in the recording studio appears to be in hell. His stint in paradise is finished and now he is fallen (usually literally, since drawing requires light and occurs above ground, while recording studios are either underground or might as well be). But he’s a professional and it’s his film, his child, and he is devoted to the process of bringing it into the world. He has his producer to keep him company through the worst of it, and the support of assorted others who show up for various reasons. He makes the best of it. There are brief respites. There are breaks when it’s possible to socialize with the actors. But this is real work.

      Being an observer of the after-recording process feels at once like a kind of privilege and at the same time like being subjected to a kind of torture. You are listening to the same lines of dialogue, or fragments of dialogue, being repeated over and over and over again. There is no end in sight. You are trapped in a basement with no light and everyone smokes (I don’t).

      For the voice actor in the sound booth, the challenge, and the thrill of it, is probably a lot like being a hitter in baseball. You want to hit a home run. You want to score. It’s much, much harder than it looks, and if you nail a line two or three times out of ten times trying, you’re doing really, really well. 70% failure and you’re doing very well. Just like a batter in baseball.

      Yuko Tanaka was in her early forties but looked much younger. In her public appearances she’s perky and lively and projects a kind of girlish charm. But in the recording studio she looked like a different person. She was dressed in jeans and a plaid flannel work shirt, and she looked like she’d spent the day chopping down trees. She looked nothing at all like Lady Eboshi, the strong-willed master of the Tataraba Fortress she was playing in the film. But the voice coming out of her was dense with gravity and authority. So much so that you had to look away to believe that the voice you were hearing belonged to this delicate woman dressed like a lumberjack. After every line she recorded, Hayao Miyazaki muttered to himself about how Yuko Tanaka was teaching him something new about Lady Eboshi, the character he himself had created.

      One thing remains indelibly in my mind from Yuko Tanaka’s recording session. Miyazaki had her say a part of one line almost fifty times. “Kunikuzushi ni fusawashii …” (It’s perfect for bringing down a nation …). For some reason this line wasn’t coming across as he wanted it. I later learned that when a director asks for a line to be done again that many times in the recording studio, it often means that he so respects the actor’s talent that he thinks she can get it not just very good but perfect. Usually if the professional recording technicians don’t think a line can be done any better, they know after the first dozen takes. Or sooner.

      The communication between the director and the actor seemed bafflingly vague. In her fifty attempts to get kunikuzushi ni fusawashii perfect, Ms. Tanaka was hearing directions from Mr. Miyazaki such as “do the first part like you did it four times ago but finish stronger the way you did it the first three times.” Yuko Tanaka seemed to know exactly what Miyazaki was talking about. Although she couldn’t quite do it.

      In addition to attending the voice recording sessions, I sometimes attended Princess Mononoke production meetings. I sat in the back of Ghibli’s large meeting room, which then also doubled as a second screening room and research library, and took notes. During a color meeting we watched a projection onto the front-wall drop-down screen of a line drawing of the tall and powerful lizard-like Didarabotchi hovering over the forest treetops. The discussion during the meeting was about how to color this mostly transparent forest deity. The discussion went like this:

      “Over here I think 237 for the main part with 27, 35, and 412 over here. 613 and 89 for the shadows.”

      “Not 89. 127 or 45 maybe.”

      “No, 613 is right, but I think 127 and 45 to give it a little more visual impact.”

      And so on. Everyone in the room but me knew the colors by their pigment numbers and could visualize them on the screen.

      I attended a meeting on sound effects. The sound effects that went into the film were exquisite in their evocation of nature in all of its moods and guises. The meeting I attended was a kind of catalogue of the different types of rain and of the different Japanese onomatopoeic words to describe them. Should the rain be dara dara or poro poro? Do we want it jyan jyan or jyaan jyaan? Or should it be just peko peko? Everyone knew exactly what they were talking about. I had no idea.

      The final mix, when all of the film’s elements would come together, took place in a sound studio as large as a full-sized movie theater. The mixers work with the same console as in the recording sessions, only larger. It’s the Starship Goliath to the recording sessions’ Starship Enterprise. The process is even more excruciatingly painstaking than in the recording sessions. The mixers listen to each fraction of each line over and over and over and over again as they try to decide where in the theater’s state-of-the-art surround sound system to place each element of each bit of the soundtrack. You admire their skill and their astounding ability to hear minute gradations of tone and volume. You also think that if you have to hear that same little bit of sound just one more time you are going to stand up, scream at the top of your lungs, and kill everyone in the room. Obviously, I’m not a professional.

      But seeing these bits of the film played over and over again you do see things that you might otherwise not have noticed. I once repetitively watched a sequence where the heroine San charges into the Tataraba Fortress, leaps up onto the roof, and speeds across it. Then the hero Ashitaka leaps up and goes after her. What I noticed after seeing this again and again was how the tiles on the rooftop react to being stepped on, first by the light and lithe San, barely registering the weight of her compact body and small feet, and then by the heavier and less graceful Ashitaka. Just by how the rooftop registers the tread of

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