Jiji’s animated with simple elegance, and his (or her) keenly observed movements typify Studio Ghibli’s attention to detail. According to the film’s lore, witches are reared from birth with their familiars, and Kiki and Jiji enjoy a close kinship through much of the film. Miyazaki’s 1989 film is all about the difficult move from child to young adult, and this transition is beautifully summed up in the protagonist’s changing friendship with her cat, Jiji.
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And like all the seemingly incidental characters in Studio Ghibli’s movies, they’re full of life, and light up the screen whenever they appear. But in among the exquisitely detailed sea creatures are the strange yet captivating goldfish seen above – like Ponyo, they have human faces and bodies that shimmer in the water like a red dress. There’s a fascinating interplay between the simplicity of its central character’s design – the young mermaid, Ponyo – and the extremely technical depiction of aquatic life. Ponyo features a subtle change in style, too. Although computers had been used sporadically in other recent works – most notably in Howl’s Moving Castle, with the building of the title brought to life using a mixture of traditional techniques and CGI – Ponyo saw Miyazaki revert back to purely hand-drawn animation. Goldfish – PonyoĢ008’s Ponyo saw Hayao Miyazaki take a back-to-basics approach to animation.
Unless an eagle-eyed reader can prove us wrong, we’re fairly sure a fox-squirrel has never appeared in another Ghibli film – though we must say, its distinctive appearance does appear to have inspired the design of the Pokémon, Eevee, a character which looks very similar to the one Miyazaki created over three decades ago. Towards the end of the film, we see dozens of fox squirrels scurrying around in the flying island’s lush gardens. Miyazaki was fond enough of his creations to give them a cameo in his next film, Laputa: Castle In The Sky. Teto and fox-squirrels in general pop up far more regularly in the manga than its anime adaptation, though this is unsurprising, given that the manga spans thousands of pages. Although considered to be impossible to tame, the story’s titular heroine has one as a pet, called Teto.
Pick any Ghibli movie you like, and you’ll find that it’s populated with incidental yet adorable supporting characters.ĭotted around Nausicaä’s epic, post-apocalyptic landscapeare the fox-squirrels – furry yellow creatures with distinctive long ears and striped tails. The ability to create such memorable characters, and introduce them in such surprising ways, is a conjuring trick that lies at the heart of Studio Ghibli’s best films. This character, called Turnip-Head, becomes a recurring character through the rest of the film, remaining loyal to Sophie and bouncing around with the same fixed, enthusiastic grin. Hoping to use it as a walking stick, Sophie pulls the wood out of the greenery, only to learn that it’s actually the lower portion of a grinning, sentient scarecrow that has somehow gotten stuck in the undergrowth. In it, the protagonist – Sophie, a young girl by now transformed into an old woman by a wicked witch – is struggling up a windswept hillside when she spots a length of wood sticking out of a clump of shrubbery. There’s a brief moment in Howl’s Moving Castle that, for me, sums up everything remarkable about the animated film’s creators.