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2008-07-24

Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea - The Full Trailer



This just looks magnificent. It's going to be a fantastic movie, and no doubt it's all gangbusters in Japan, where Ponyo has finally arrived.

I know this will be a common refrain from animation fans the world over, but Ponyo is entirely hand-drawn. There isn't a single frame of CGI in the entire movie, and nothing has been xeroxed or photoshopped. 180,000 drawing. And when you consider the shockingly short production times for the Studio Ghibli movies, the mind boggles. Do these artists ever sleep?


Ponyo is going to be fantastic.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks like Japan is liking the movie.

As per Wikipedia

"The film was released by Toho on July 19, 2008 in theatres across Japan on 481 screens — a record for a domestic film. The first day box office earnings by 3:00 PM reached 83% of the Japanese record-holder Spirited Away's 30.4 billion yen. The box office earnings for the first three days reached 96.2% of Spirited Away, and the number of people watching the film reached 101.4%. Toho analyses this as due to the cheap price of child tickets, and also due to children pushing parents to take them."

It's all sourced, so I'm inclined to believe it is true. If it is, that is quite the impressive opening.

Anonymous said...

Hey Daniel,
This is a little bit off topic from this post, but I recently (and very luckily) picked up a Japanese copy of Gedo Senki in San Francisco, and it happened to have an English dub on it. Is this the official Japanese version or did I accidentally pick up a bootleg? It looked pretty legitimate and was placed next to all the official American disney releases of Ghibli movies.

Anonymous said...

Seems like those full-colour storyboards really paid off, eh?
It looks gorgeous.

As a traditional animator myself it makes me happy to hear there are some studios still around with such dedication to hand-drawn animation. Having said that though, I would hope that Miyazaki's decision not use any CGI or After Effects, Photoshop etc wasn't just to make a point, or some sort of act of defiance.

I'm firmly of the opinion that it's the end result that count more than anything, and whatever means explored to achieve the desired visuals is absolutely fine.

J.R.D.S. said...

One can't tell whether it's a bootleg or not just from what you said. The ways to tell are to compare it with images of the official DVDs – see http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/video/earthsea and http://www.yesasia.com/global/miyazaki-goro/0-aid1429569-0-bpt.47-en/list.html for these – and to check what the region code is. The Japanese version is region 2, those from Hong Kong and South Korea are region 3 (and in this case, don't have the English dub) while bootlegs tend to be all regions.

Anonymous said...

You can see the whole movie on youku.com: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzcxNzI3ODA=.html
I think I have a new favorite Miyazaki, btw.

Frisenette said...

Doesn't seem as revolutionary to me as it has been made out to be, the style that is. Also the music seems a bit bland and lazy.
But, I'm sure I'm going to be positively surprised.

J.R.D.S. said...

The different style doesn't show through at all in a YouTube movie such as this. It's much more apparent if you look at the stills from the Japanese Web site.

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