Animator comparison

Hayao Miyazaki and Tim Burton have two completely different animation styles and techniques.

Miyazaki is a world famous Japanese animator with a style that is very distinctive, and his drawing style is very much his own, as is clearly seen in the Ghibli films that he has worked on. He is primarily a 2D animator but small parts of his films are done in CGI when 2D would be ridiculously hard to pull off. It is mainly in the newer films where CGI has been brought in, like in Howl’s moving castle where all the different parts of the castle were drawn separately then put into a computer program and put together, by doing this they were able to animate each part separately from the other. The result was a very convincing mechanical castle that hissed, creaked and clunked along the beautifully painted backgrounds of the film that Ghibli are well known for. The backgrounds themselves are breathtaking, usually large open landscapes all hand painted and generally water colour style.

In comparison Tim Burton has to build scale models of the environments for his animations so that his character models to move around in. Burton creates 3D stop motion films using models instead of drawn characters, these models usually have some sort of metal skeleton to make them easier to move and keep their shape. Where Miyazaki’s films have a bright and airy feel to them Burton’s tend to be a lot darker and quite creepy. Examples of his films are A nightmare before Christmas and The corpse’s bride.