Gedo Senki (Tales from Earthsea)

7th March 2006

Number 48 - Overwhelming Background Art

I recently took a look at all the cuts whose images were completed.
Those picture-like backgrounds, just looking at the volume of them all together, assaulted me with overwhelming sense of their presence.

I firmly believe that this background art is, without a doubt, one of the highlights of the movie "Tales from Earthsea".

Animated films are made up of "pictures".
That's why, when you use them to do something that can only pictures can do, you start to take advantage of their true value.

This is a fundamentally different posture from saying "I'd like to do it with live action, but it's difficult to represent properly, so I'll use CG."

That's why, when creating background art, we didn't go the route of trying to make it as real as possible, like a photograph, by drawing in lots of fine detail. Instead, we tried to aim for pictures that depict richly the time, space and place of the scene, and even the psychology of the characters appearing in it.

But as the process advanced, I actually began to wonder whether the way we had chosen was not in fact more difficult than the realistic approach.

In order to create pictures that possess richness without relying of depiction of detail, a strength of composition is necessary that goes beyond the basics of just "beautiful art" to compress the meaning of the entire movie into the picture.
Accordingly, the painters are absolutely required to have the ability and disposition of artists.

So, having cleared these high hurdles,
The staff of the art department, under the art director Mr Takashige, have brought out the worldview of Earthsea magnificently in their artwork.