hinterlander@yoltartar
the essence of the Ghibli magic is animism, to draw that way you need a strong empathy for the living world, and using ai will not give you that
there's an NHK documentary about the making of Spirited Away, which focuses on a scene where Chihiro feeds a medicine ball to Haku in the form of a dragon, Miyazaki meets with his animators to explain how it should look: the dragon should writhe desperately like an eel being killed, he should gag and bare his teeth like a dog being force-fed a pill
the young animators haven't seen either of these things, so they go to a local vet clinic to videotape themselves putting their hands in the mouth of a dog, trying to understand the dog's movements so they can draw them, and it becomes apparent that Miyazaki is giving his proteges a masterclass in the perception of the living world
as a result, this brief little scene is intensely alive, you can viscerally feel how much the dragon does NOT want to swallow the medicine, it embodies the spirit of an eel and a dog, but there's a deeper magic here in the way Miyazaki was teaching his way of seeing the world to the animators, who in turn helped him convey it to the audience
when we watch a Miyazaki film, it's not just a product, we're seeing the result of a process and a way of seeing and that's where the magic is, if the style is divorced from that context it can only remind us of the real thing, without the foundation of the Ghibli films imprinted in our hearts to lean on, it wouldn't hit the same
as another example, if you watch the two Fantasia films, the first one feels incredibly alive in a way the second doesn't, and i think it's because the animators in 1940 grew up outdoors and on farms and the ones in 1999 did not, they were deeply familiar with the forms of plants, the movements of animals, and the behavior of physical objects
what's sad to me is that a lot of future media will look amazing but will lack this spirit, and most of the audience won't even notice bc their ways of perceiving are based largely on media and not the real living world, perfectly congruent with ai which has nothing but media to learn from
i urge you to not take the easy way on everything, a big part of the point of art is that it forces the artist to change and grow, to look closer, to empathize more deeply, to confront the blocked parts of their soul, to absorb the spirits of the living world into their own psyche, to not just animate but to become animists
