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lsandersonWhere the Wild Things Are: The Miyazaki Menagerie
By A. O. SCOTT
"NOWADAYS, when we think of feature-length animation, our thoughts turn immediately to "Shrek" and Pixar (or less fondly, to "Robots" and "Madagascar"). The animated world, we've learned, is round - created in three dimensions by teams of computer wizards and enlivened by noisy, knowing references to American pop culture, past and present. It may seem somewhat paradoxical, then, that the world's greatest living animated-filmmaker - a designation that his fans at Disney and Pixar would be unlikely to challenge - is Hayao Miyazaki, a Japanese writer and director whose world is flat, handmade and often surpassingly quiet. Not that Mr. Miyazaki, 64, is entirely indifferent to technological advances. Starting with his 1997 epic, "Princess Mononoke," he has used computer-generated imagery in his movies, though he recently instituted a rule that CGI should account for no more than 10 percent of the images in any of his pictures.
"In an interview last week, on the morning before his latest movie, "Howl's Moving Castle," had its New York premiere, he spoke about the new technology with a mixture of resignation and resistance. 'I've told the people on my CGI staff' - at Studio Ghibli, the company he founded with Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki in 1985 - 'not to be accurate, not to be true. We're making a mystery here, so make it mysterious.'"
By A. O. SCOTT
"NOWADAYS, when we think of feature-length animation, our thoughts turn immediately to "Shrek" and Pixar (or less fondly, to "Robots" and "Madagascar"). The animated world, we've learned, is round - created in three dimensions by teams of computer wizards and enlivened by noisy, knowing references to American pop culture, past and present. It may seem somewhat paradoxical, then, that the world's greatest living animated-filmmaker - a designation that his fans at Disney and Pixar would be unlikely to challenge - is Hayao Miyazaki, a Japanese writer and director whose world is flat, handmade and often surpassingly quiet. Not that Mr. Miyazaki, 64, is entirely indifferent to technological advances. Starting with his 1997 epic, "Princess Mononoke," he has used computer-generated imagery in his movies, though he recently instituted a rule that CGI should account for no more than 10 percent of the images in any of his pictures.
"In an interview last week, on the morning before his latest movie, "Howl's Moving Castle," had its New York premiere, he spoke about the new technology with a mixture of resignation and resistance. 'I've told the people on my CGI staff' - at Studio Ghibli, the company he founded with Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki in 1985 - 'not to be accurate, not to be true. We're making a mystery here, so make it mysterious.'"
