Tokyo, 21 October, /AJMEDIA/
Hayao Miyazaki is celebrated as one of the best animators in the history of the medium, but it’s easy to forget that he’s an incredibly talented illustrator as well. For example, “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind,” the first anime film for the team that would go on to form Studio Ghibli, began as a Miyazaki-drawn manga that debuted a full two years before the movie came out in 1984.
As Studio Ghibli’s stature has grown, though, there hasn’t been much room in Miyazaki’s famously busy schedule to draw a serialized manga. But there is a sort of a Miyazaki manga equivalent in the form of the director’s annotated storyboards for Ghibli’s anime. Called e konte in industry parlance, anime annotated storyboards are filled with notes on not just dialogue, but sound effects, camera work, and instructions and advice on how to properly portray the emotions the characters are feeling in each scene.
To further illustrate how detailed the illustrations are, for “The Boy and the Heron,” Ghibli’s newest anime, Miyazaki’s drew 603 pages of storyboards for the movie, which took the place of any traditional text script during production, and now they’re all being collected in book form.