And yet Oga’s worlds clearly didn’t come from the hands of a workaday artist. It makes him sound distant from the work. Backgrounds don’t express the artist’s inner world. … backgrounds aren’t solely the creation of the artist who created them. In the documentary Kazuo Oga Exhibition: The One Who Drew Totoro’s Forest (2007), Oga put it in an even blunter way: The role of the background team, Oga said, was to “determine the shape of what is depicted in the storyboards and layouts in concrete terms.” For him, background artists fulfill the film’s vision - not their own. “I think background painters are craftspeople ( shokunin ),” he told Tanaka. Paintings by Oga for Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Pom Poko and Whisper of the HeartĪnd that’s how Oga approached it. Despite the beauty, it was very much a job. This was quick, manic, unpretentious work, done with basic tools. As Tanaka noted, this only gave you “30 minutes to 1 hour.” It was tough, and a painter couldn’t afford any distractions.Īlthough you could refine an image after the paper dried, a bad base coat meant a bad painting. You had to dash off the bulk of the painting in one go. Their method was straightforward: paint the base coat ( ji-nuri ) before the paper dried. This water put Oga, like all Ghibli background painters, on a strict timer. He also had water - for soaking the paper at the start, allowing for more color gradation and natural textures. They were typical for anime: things like heavy-duty, 400-pound TMK poster paper, or Japanese flat brushes and fine-pointed Sakuyo brushes. The secret wasn’t hiding in Oga’s other tools, either. Talking to Naoya Tanaka, Oga compared it to being a cook at a Chinese restaurant who “scoops up salt or soy sauce with a ladle” and tosses it into a dish. He’d simply paid attention long enough to develop a sense of what worked. This mixing was freeform - there was no trick to it. In addition, even with a small number of colors, you can create a wide range of colors through subtle mixing. If the color gradations are combined well, you can get colors that look like transparent watercolor. As he explained:īecause it’s a neat paint, it’s pretty convenient to use as long as you don’t apply a thick coat. If you focused on the little things, you could make it work. The look came from the contrasts, the combinations. What mattered, he said, was how he used these cheap paints, rather than how many he had. He worked with around 21 colors at the time, like bleu celeste and olive green - just a few. Sold in big, cheap tubs, poster colors were designed less for fine art than for school art projects. Studio Ghibli used a brand called Nicker Poster Color, a bit like an opaque watercolor. “Sometimes, people outside the animation industry ask me what kinds of paint I use,” Oga said in the 2000s, “and most people tend to look surprised when I tell them they’re poster colors.” 1įor Japan’s background artists, poster colors were the industry standard back then. The secret doesn’t lie in expensive tools. Paintings by Kazuo Oga for Only Yesterday, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Porco Rosso and My Neighbor Totoro It’s a powerful feeling, and a powerful beauty. What this does is change the landscape from something familiar to something that feels more like déjà vu. Then he augments them to enrich the image. He extracts the essence of important elements of the scene. His sensitivity to subtle details helped to turn films like Only Yesterday and Princess Mononoke into classics.Īs another of Ghibli’s top background supervisors, Naoya Tanaka, has said: He’s one of the most famous background painters of all time. The art director who supervised that forest, Kazuo Oga, is a defining figure for Ghibli. Who’s really looked at the forest in My Neighbor Totoro and come away cold?

Katsuhiro Otomo ( Akira ) once called them more important than character animation: “Without building the foundation, you can’t construct a big building on it.” Great backgrounds can make a film. It’s easy to underrate backgrounds, and hard to overrate them. Holding these worlds together are their backgrounds - the enthralling, evocative paintings that create a space for the characters.

Cool anime wallpapers