Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1276583
F E AT U R E © 1988 Studio Ghibli 34 KEYFRAME VISUAL TROPES OR A COMPLIMENT? Depending on who you ask, characterizing a show as being "anime- influenced" is either the highest of praise or an insult. Many assume you're talking about the style's visual tropes— the big eyes and hyper-violence—rather than the deeper themes or multi- layered characters. Tom Riffel, whose most recent work was as a retakes director on Paradise P.D., often finds himself feeling pessimistic about the very perception of something being labeled "anime-influenced." "So if someone says to me, 'Oh, this is anime-influenced,' the first thing I think of is, 'Okay, you just want it to look like anime,' going back to just the visual aspect of the show," says Riffel. "I think that now that anime's a little more popular and more mainstream, those kind of negative [characterizations] are going away a little bit because people are seeing more anime that doesn't have that stuff." Another popular term within the industry is "anime-adjacent," according to storyboard artist Alan Wan. Wan grew up in Hong Kong where he watched a lot of anime during the '80s and '90s. He singles out the series Fooly Cooly (FLCL) as a show that has particular resonance during his time on Teen Titans and also on the Disney co-production Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! "Back when I was working on Teen Titans, that was actually one of the rare times where we embraced anime a lot," says Wan. "FLCL has everything. Initially, when you watch it, you watch it for the wacky, really crazy action scenes, but once you dive deeper into it, there's a lot of excellent filmmaking that we don't really do in the U.S." BRAVERY IN STORYTELLING Followers of anime say that drawing a distinction between Disney and the animation of Japan is reductive. Many American artists who have worked for Disney or DreamWorks say they have drawn inspiration from Japan. On the features side, 2008's Wall-E, a film with environmental themes that has no dialog for much of its duration, is the kind of movie that could have come out of Japan. And although it was inspired by a Marvel comic, 2014's Big Hero 6 is an homage to Asian culture with its relationship between a boy and his protective robot that is set in the hybridized city of San Fransokyo. Miyazaki's influence in U.S. animation is far-reaching. In creating the flying sequences for 2002's Lilo & Stitch, Director Dean DeBlois recalls drawing on influences of films like My Neighbor Totoro and Porco Rosso. The influence continued several years later as DeBlois and co-director Chris Sanders considered a key element of Toothless, the hero at the heart of How to Train Your Dragon. "When we were starting out, we realized that there had been several movies with a human and a dragon and how were we going to differentiate this from others?" says DeBlois. "It was