Spirited Away stands apart from other
animated movies because it is hand-drawn—not computer-generated—a
method of animation that is nearly extinct in the United States.
In early filmmaking, all animation was hand-drawn and was almost
as simple as the flip books from which animation evolved. Because
moving pictures were in their infancy, animated films of this time
often looked jerky. The characters bobbed along awkwardly, and backgrounds
were jumpy or nonexistent. As film and filming techniques became
more sophisticated, so did animation. However, the basic technique
of drawing animation has remained the same. Artists draw and paint single
pictures, called frames, which are then filmed in order. The work
is tedious, time consuming, and tends to be expensive because of
its high labor costs. Just as with other labor-intensive industries, technology
seemed an answer to the rising costs of production.
In the early 1980s, filmmakers
began to use computer animation to fill in backgrounds and add special
effects. One of the first animated features to effectively combine
a roughly equal measure of computer generated images (CGI) and hand-drawn
animation was Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, released
in 1991. Then, in 1995, Toy Story became
the first movie created wholly on computer. CGI now dominates American
animation. In fact, in early 2004 Disney
closed its hand-drawn animation studio, signaling a complete shift
from hand-drawn animation to CGI. While most recent CGI films have done
well at the box-office, other films, featuring either hand-drawn animation
or a combination of CGI and hand-drawn animation, have fared poorly.
Two films relying on hand-drawn animation, Atlantis: The
Lost Empire and Spirit: Stallion of Cimarron,
were box-office flops; Disney reasoned the failure was due to the
fact that young American audiences, who have grown up on video games, have
no interest in non-CGI films.
While CGI can be impressive because the image it produces
is three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional, its look is very
different from hand-drawn animation. In fact, the two are actually
different mediums. The difference between them is comparable to
the difference between hand-drawn illustrations and Clip Art, or between
oil paintings and photographs. Japanese animation studios have begun
using some CGI technology, but hand-drawn animation remains the
primary medium of anime.
