Impulse 5 – The Boy and the Heron – Institute of Design & Communication

Given my somewhat recent breakthrough of deciding on the anime style / genre for my master’s thesis’ practical project, I thought my recent trip to the cinema constituted well as an impulse. Being a huge fan of Hayao Miyazaki’s work I had to see it anyway.

Storytelling

Of course, this is not supposed to be a review of the movie, but I do want to share some thoughts and criticism about the movie as a work of art before diving into possibly relevant technicalities. The story kicks off quickly, establishing the main characters and their motivations right from the start. The world becomes quite crazy equally quickly and has our main character Mahito enter a quirky, weird and fantastical world, a staple for Miyazaki’s films. Here, Mahito immediately adapts to the new dimension / world immediately and does not question a single odd thing that happens from that point forward. This was the moment where the film lost me as a viewer, disconnecting me from its characters and world completely.

I’m making this point because I love mystery and strange worlds in storytelling and want to incorporate it into my piece as well and want to avoid losing my audience at all costs. In ‘Spirited Away’ (2001), another classic by Miyazaki, the main Character also gets transported into a strange and eerie world, but is constantly questioning what is happening around her since it’s obviously out of the ordinary and never stops wanting to leave the place by any means possible. I think this is a big reason why I found that movie more engaging.

Production

Moving on from my creative criticism on the storytelling, I also noticed myself taking mental notes on the film’s production. After all, seeing the movie on January 3rd (which, according to google was a day before its release in Austria?) this was as state-of-the-art as an anime movie gets.

One of the first sequences features very complex fire animations with lots of smears and distortions are further drowned in blurs and other 2D effects, which is a first for Miyazaki as far as I know and good news for me, allowing me to go a little crazier on post processing to hide some potentially rough edges.

Next, the Movie featured a lot of 3D mapping, using hand-painted textures on 3D geometry. Since their its first appearance in ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ (2005), this has become a staple technique for Miyazaki. In that movie, the textures were also used alongside normal and displacement maps, making for exceptionally detailed geometry. In ‘The Boy and the Heron’, the textures were mostly flat and were mainly used during indoor sequences, keeping geometry extremely simply. This could be another plus for me if I wanted to emulate that style since I would not have to leave After Effects for simple 3D mapping. Staying on the topic of 3D, the film also used 3D animated grass for some shots, which I personally did not care for very much, but it’s good to know.

Let’s talk about the animation itself, which I seldom mention in my research posts. I think part of the reason is because that’s the part I have the biggest concerns about. I feel like a the technology isn’t quite there for moving AI generated images, but I have yet to try out pika labs and with many other prompt-to-video and image-to-video AI around the corner I will see what works best. Anyway, my key takeaway from the movie is that keyframes are of vital importance. I know, big shocker, very advanced theory there. But I’m concerned that simple prompts won’t be good enough for animations that need to convey so much emotion and expressions. My theory here is that by generating the keyframes and having the AI do the in-betweens I will retain much more control over the overall flow and feel of the animation, as well as increase accuracy in what I want the result to be exactly. This still leaves the problem of consistent character design and getting the AI to produce the Keyframes the exact way I want them to be, but I’m sure I will find solutions to that as well.