Arts & Entertainment

Miyazaki honors stop-motion in Ghibli’s first CG animation film

By Maria Roldan and Yoko Kaneko

Tokyo, Apr 28 (EFE).- With its latest film, Earwig and the Witch, Studio Ghibli is charting a new course as the Japanese animation power house releases its first production using 3D computer-generated images that pays tribute to the time honored “stop-motion” technique, says director Goro Miyazaki.

“I wanted a new challenge and I thought it would be nice to do something new,” Miyazaki tells Efe via video conferencing from Ghibli’s headquarters in Koganei, western Tokyo.

After directing the CGI television series Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter in 2014, produced by Ghibli and Polygon Pictures, Miyazaki wanted to repeat the experience which he saw as “a new possibility for animation.”

Ghibli has used CGI in several productions before, but Earwig and the Witch was the first movie to be made entirely with animated computer images.

The 54-year-old son of legendary animated film director Hayao Miyazaki said that more than 160 people who took part in this project had encountered difficulties because of their unfamiliarity with the technique, overcoming them “through trial and error.”

Miyazaki says he took his inspiration mostly from stop-motion animation studios such US Laika and UK Aardman.

Earwig and the Witch is an adaptation of late British novelist Diana Wynne Jones’ novel of the same name.

It tells the story of a 10-year-old orphan, whose world turns upside down after she gets adopted by two witches.

Miyazaki grabbed the attention of the press for deciding to use 3D and CGI, techniques of which his father has been skeptical.

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