Miyazaki film nominated for Oscar

Miyazaki's "final" movie? Did he die?

(Ya, I know he says it's the last, but he has been saying that almost every movie he makes for decades. Why does the media/ anybody believe it or repeat it any more?)

I really hope it wins. One of my students is actually working on developing a new technology for coloring single-frame animation much more quickly and easily, and therefor making it much cheaper. Hopefully that will make it possible for these beautiful pieces of cinema artwork to be made for years to come. Good luck, Miyazaki!

Meh. The argument about "traditional" animation is all smoke and mirrors. Animation is animation and the methods used to do so have changed many more times than just "hand-drawn" or "computer-generated". It's like those old-timers who wistfully reminisce about "the good-old days" - conveniently forgetting about the tuberculosis, polio, and smallpox epidemics felling thousands with each epidemic. Yeah, the "good-old days". :-/ Just because something was done in a certain manner fifty years ago does not automatically make it better than what's done today.

Of course. There has not been a single great CG animated film.

Ratatouille (sp?) was pretty good.

@DaveAllTogether--I'd disagree: how about Pixar's three Toy Story movies, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E and Up?

But I think the Japanese prefer an animated movie with a more "traditional 2-D look such as the Studio Ghibli films, Summer Wars, Wolf Children and One Piece: Strong World*....

At least Miyazaki he uses traditional animation, for that alone I hope he wins.

Of course. There has not been a single great CG animated film.

Though The Wind Rises is Hayao Miyazaki's farewell party, Frozen will most likely win the Oscar (recently it won the Golden Globe) since it's already setting records in America - both critically acclaimed (89% at RottenTomatoes) and blockbuster success (it recently became Disney Animation Studio's 2nd best grossing film behind only The Lion King all that long ago). Nobody, not even Disney, expected it to do that well. It was a surprise to everybody. And it most likely win the Best Music (Original Song) for "Let It Go" too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEKLFS-aKcw

To clarify, what I'm talking about is that the composite work to combine 2-D animation elements is now done by computer, not by layering multiple animation cels and taking each picture of each frame. That's why when Disney produced Sleeping Beauty in the 1950's it nearly broke the company, because they had to use unusually large hand-drawn animation cells and turned into a long, laborious and expensive process.

That's why I'm very impressed with Studio Ghibli animators with what they did Castle in the Sky and Kiki's Delivery Service--it needed a large number of animators to produce all by hand the spectacular background animation of these two films. Today, when animation elements are combined into the final film, it's all done by computer workstations, a process more or less pioneered by Disney at the theatrical level with their Computer Aided Production System (CAPS) first used in the movie Beauty and the Beast. I'm not even sure how many studios are around that still use hand drawn cels to composite multiple layers of artwork into a single animation frame for theatrical movie in the Western world.

I did not like the movie. It is a soft war porn cigarette commercial.

I'm sure he'll get it, and it's well deserved.

Raymond, not only did you respond to combinibento's comment incorrectly, but I think you're not understanding the nature of hand-drawn animation. And if you do, you're really not expressing it very well. Yes, cellophane sheets are out. Yes, no one paints the individual cells by hand. But Miyazaki films are drawn frame by frame. That more than qualifies as traditional in the modern sense, and in the context he was talking about. Its not the same as other animations where they have "parts" they can have move automatically (kind of like a robot, or stop motion animation with a puppet but a digital version of that) or straight out computer animation.

You are right that Miyazaki's animations are not traditional in the sense that they used computers. You could argue the same for Lion King or the later Disney films. Still doesnt mean they aren't hand-drawn and "traditional" in that sense.

Alas, Studio Ghibli does use computers, primarily for final coloring of the animation. I wouldn't call recent Ghibli films "completely hand animated," especially when Fujifilm in 1998 stopped producing the clear cellophane sheets used in hand-drawn animation.

At least Miyazaki he uses traditional animation, for that alone I hope he wins. Most of the other nominees (except the French-Belgian one) use computer animation... I wish there was another category altogether for illustrated celluloid animation, since it doesn't seem right to throw this type of film in along with movies the likes of Frozen, etc.