The Most Epic ‘Princess Mononoke’ Scene Took Almost 2 Years to Draw By Hand

 

The scene in question is when the Tatarigami (Demons) first made appearance and infects the main hero, Ashitaka, with a curse, according to SoraNews24. Many people immediately presumed that the animation was all done with CGI considering that “Princess Mononoke” was the first Studio Ghibli movie that legendary director Hayao Miyazaki used CG animations.

However, Twitter user @hitasuraeiga wrote on the social media platform that this presumption was actually false, and that the scene was all drawn by hands by the dedicated animation team in Studio Ghibli.

“The leading scene in Princess Mononoke where Tatarigami appears isn’t CG; it’s drawn by hand. The part where the snakes move sluggishly was so difficult that–even though the scene is only a couple of minutes long–it took one year and seven months to finish! It apparently took a total of 5,300 drawings. One of the artists explained, ‘It gradually got so confusing to draw that it ended up bogging us down,” the user wrote in Japanese, as translated by SoraNews24.

While that may be the case, the entire scene is not exactly free of any CG animations. The Twitter user continued to note in another tweet that Studio Ghibli mixed both CGI and hand drawn element into the scene.

“Princess Mononoke is the first movie that used CG (in terms of a Hayao Miyazaki-directed movie), so the staff went through a lot of trial and error. This is actually a mix of hand-drawn scenes and CG-animated scenes. In the scene where Tatarigami first appears, there are bits of CG animation like the snakes that slither around on Ashitaka’s arm, but it’s largely hand-drawn,” the user explained in the tweet.

There are also other instances in the movies where Miyazaki used subtle CG effects that the Twitter user pointed out including one where San, the main heroine, spits out blood from her mouth, and the other one where Studio Ghibli used CG to prevent the character’s form from moving when turning.

Fans can now add this amazing fact into the long list of achievements that “Princess Mononoke” broke like how it became the fourth-highest grossing Japanese film of all time as well as being applauded by many people for having great soundtrack, animation, and a storyline, SoraNews24 reported.

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