A Japanese Twitter user recently revealed yet another jaw-dropping fact in the critically-acclaimed Studio Ghibli movie “Princess Mononoke” where the animation team allegedly took years to hand draw one specific scene in the film even though it’s only a few minutes long.
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.
