Gedo Senki (Tales from Earthsea)

6th March 2006

Number 47 - A reality surpassing realism

In the venerable animated films "Horus[1], Prince of the Sun" and "Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind", that I raised as examples before, every piece of the background art was painted as a picture. But now the general drift is realistic rather than painterly, aiming, it seems, to produce pictures like computer graphics.

But for the movie "Tales from Earthsea", literal reality is not the final goal.
If you get too carried away with realism, you lose the very freedom of representation that art gives you. "Pictures and photographs are two different things, so we will represent the richness of pictures".
That is the goal of "Tales from Earthsea".

If you give priority to realism,
A crescent moon appears in the dark of night, and you know the darkness is about so, so the colour is fixed.
But considering it from the point of view of painting, depending on how you want to represent the scene and what kind of meaning you put into it you can make it a purple night or make it a red night.

In "Horus Prince of the Sun", there is a scene where the hero, Horus, driven from the village, is thrown into the Endless Forest.
This forest is drawn in purple.
Or course in reality no such thing as a purple forest exists.
But in the film, the purple forest does not seem the slightest bit out of place.
On the contrary, for the audience, standing in the position of Horus as they watch the scene, the purple forest seems even more real than a real forest.

Translator's Notes

[1]: Looking at the info and links on Nausicaa.net, it seems this name may actually be intended to be romanized as "Hols". I don't know which version is standard.