Books: The Man Who Leapt Through Film
By Andrew Osmond.
When you get aposh coffee-table art book in English on anime, it’s almost always about Miyazaki or Ghibli. So it’s great to report that The Man Who Leapt Through Film: The Art of Mamoru Hosoda, published by Abrams, is a really lovely coffee-table book. It’s big – 274 pages, 25 by 30 centimetres. There’s a Kindle version, but the book’s physicality is much of its appeal.
Its focus is Hosoda’s six signature films: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, Wolf Children, The Boy and the Beast, Mirai and Belle. Madhouse made the first two, and Studio Chizu, Hosoda’s own studio, made the others, but that plainly hasn’t caused any rights complications. Each film is covered in its own chapter; the ones for Girl Who Leapt and Wolf Children are a bit shorter than the others, but they hardly feel short-changed.
The book’s absolutely packed with images. That doesn’t just mean film stills, although they’re some of the highlights. There are stupendous double-page spreads: a winged Natsuki facing down the Love Machine monster in Summer Wars, and the metropolis-cum-motherboard of Belle’s cyber-city. There are also two pages given to the fairy-tale guest art of Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon (Wolfwalkers), from the Belle sequence when the heroine seeks the castle.
But the book guides you through all the animation stages. There are copious multi-frame extracts from Hosoda’s storyboards, his blueprints for each film. Then there are layouts, model sheets, animation drawings and CG renderings, The book excels at showing you a film’s journey through the pipeline. You may remember Natsuki’s coquettish expression at the start of Summer Wars, just before the title, when she invites the boys to the country. The book shows you the image as Hosoda drew it in his storyboard; below that there’s Natsuki painted up and set against a layout; and then there’s the shot in the film.
The book also has far more elaborate juxtapositions, like X-rays that trace the final animation back to its first stages. Serious sakuga fans, the ones who study anime’s production in detail, may be disappointed that most of the art is uncredited, barring Hosoda’s storyboards. The exceptions are in the final, Belle, chapter, which has many more artist names. For example, many fans love Belle’s scene in the station where two of Suzu’s friends almost die of embarrassment when their feelings are exposed. That gets its own double-page breakdown, showing the drawings of the teens by Takayuki Hamada.
Staying with Belle, there are four pages of lovely development drawings of the title character by Disney-veteran artist Jin Kim. The accompanying text reveals that Kim was heavily inspired by a South Korean soprano singer, Sumi Jo (video). The book also includes some early sketches by Eric Wong of U’s world, though a few of them are too cramped on the page.
The book is inevitably led by its visuals, but the text is well worth reading. It’s by the veteran animation pundit Charles Solomon, who’s written a ton of animation books, especially on Disney, but he’s also followed anime for decades. I’d take issue with a few of his views on anime, but it would be mean to bring up something from 35 years ago… Joking aside, Solomon is inspirational.
This is a plainly “authorised” book, which presumably blocked Solomon from bringing up some issues, criticisms and comparisons – here’s an interesting article he wrote elsewhere, comparing Belle to other anime heroines. On the upside, Solomon enjoyed tremendous access to the films’ creators, quoted first-hand.
The book starts with ten pages on Hosoda’s career before Girl Who Leapt. Admittedly, fans of Hosoda’s Digimon and One Piece films will be disappointed, as they’re mentioned only briefly. Yes, the book acknowledges how Summer Wars owes heavy debts to Hosoda’s 2000 featurette Our War Game, though Solomon describes that earlier film as only a “preliminary sketch” for its sophisticated successor. Some fans will fume at that, and the reduction of Hosoda’s One Piece film (2005’s Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island) to a brief paragraph.
However, there’s still great stuff in this chapter, including official confirmations of the early work Hosoda did pseudonymously. He made storyboards for a 1995 series by the Shaft studio, Twelve Warrior Explosive Eto Rangers, and later worked on the video series Rurouni Kenshin: Trust & Betrayal (1999). As for Hosoda’s storyboard stint on Utena, the toil was so stressful that his hair started falling out. Hosoda began identifying with the troubled character of Juri, even insisting on rewriting one of her main episodes (29).
Hosoda also worked on a version of the venerable magic girl series Akko-chan’s Secret (the 1998 version). It was then he realised it could be fun to depict an “unintelligent,” accident-prone girl – a lesson he’d take for his later depiction of Makoto in Girl Who Leapt. It’s also clarified that Hosoda storyboarded and directed the start of part one of Samurai Champloo, introducing the main characters in a flurry of flashbacks and flashforwards.
One thing covered very briefly is Hosoda’s ill-fated stint as director on Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle and no, there are no drawings or descriptions of what his version would have been like. (A few seemingly genuine images are online.) However, Hosoda does describe Girl Who Leapt as a “revenge match,” One wonders if the revenge was directed primarily at Ghibli, Miyazaki or maybe Toshio Suzuki.
However, Hosoda stresses how enormously his schoolboy self was inspired by Miyazaki’s work. He saw Castle of Cagliostro in 1979, and read the coverage of it in Animage magazine. That prompted Hosoda to write a sixth-grade essay on wanting to be an animation director. By high school, he was studying the smoke that wreathes the God Warrior in Nausicaa, animated by Hideaki Anno. Hosoda remembers the first time he applied to work at Ghibli, long before the Howl debacle, and how he got a rejection from Miyazaki himself. In retrospect, the letter was on the money. “Your talents would be wasted if we were to accept you,” Miyazaki wrote.
The text on the main films has fewer surprises, but many cool bits along the way. Solomon notes that some of Makoto’s frantic jumps in Girl Who Leapt are set to humorously apt music – Bach’s Goldberg Variations, containing umpteen variants of an aria to reflect Makoto’s endlessly-adjusted life. The hairy Kumatetsu in Boy and the Beast was heavily inspired by Toshiro Mifune’s loose cannon fighter in Seven Samurai. And here’s Hosoda on the same film’s finale: “The whale is a symbol of human desire, so it’s highly symbolic for a whale to swim through (the Tokyo commercial district) Shibuya, a human city steeped in desire.”
Many direct quotes come from Hosoda’s longstanding colleagues, such as Hiroyuki Aoyama (animation director on Girl Who Leapt, Summer Wars, Mirai and Belle) and Shigeru Nishiyama (who’s edited tons of anime, including all Hosoda’s signature films). Thanks to Solomon’s industry connections, he drops in comments from Hollywood animation pros. What they say isn’t earthshattering, but it’s still something to read Disney legend Glen Keane raving over “the exploration of the wonder of a baby’s fingers” in Mirai, when Kun inspects his infant sister.
Keane animated the Beast in Disney’s 1991 Beauty and the Beast, which was lovingly homaged in Belle. He says, “I see Hosoda as standing on the shoulders of what we did in Beauty… He’s taken it to another level and used the symbol of the beast as a way of expressing someone’s soul.” To me, that sounds like the self-deprecation common among animators. I don’t see any of Hosoda’s “beast” characters as coming close to surpassing what Keane did, but it’s good to hear that he liked it.
By Belle, the beast character was being animated in CG, and we get a very interesting comment on that point. When Hosoda works with hand-drawn images, he simply draws on top of an artist’s work to adjust it (we see such corrections in the book). But with CG animation, the director is limited to watching a sequence and supplying verbal comments. It’s a vivid distinction, suggesting that Hosoda, like Miyazaki, may not be fully comfortable with CG, for all that it can do.
Indeed, the book might have focused more on Hosoda’s old-school aesthetic. One thing that’s not discussed is something which makes his films stand out from nearly all anime – his avoidance of “shadow” shading on the characters’ faces. It’s worth reading Hosoda’s comments in this 2018 interview, where he describes the approach as a deliberate throwback to vintage Toei and Disney. (This song scene from Disney’s 1950 Cinderella is a prime example).
Another omission: the book says very little on Satoko Okudera, who has script credits on Girl Who Leapt, Summer Wars and Wolf Children, but not thereafter. There are fans who claim that Hosoda’s stories have declined without her input, paralleling arguments about Mamoru Oshii’s partnership with Kazunori Ito. I myself would say that Hosoda’s stories have grown more unruly, which doesn’t necessarily mean worse, but the writing process isn’t explored as such.
However, there are illuminating comments on Hosoda’s freedom, and its possible limits, in the Mirai chapter. One of the producers, Nozomu Takahashi says of the film, “I told the Studio Chizu people to make what Hosoda wants. Whether it succeeds or fails, he’ll take something away and apply it in the future.” This sounds very like the extreme creative freedom which Miyazaki enjoys at Ghibli. In the case of Mirai, it was a critical smash, and the first non-Ghibli feature anime to be nominated for an Oscar, as the book duly points out.
However, Solomon also quotes another Mirai producer, Yuichiro Saito, whose angle is rather different. “Hosoda is a director who cares about commercial success… He understands that commercial success is the ticket to the next film. On Mirai, I’d almost made the numbers match whatever Hosoda wanted to do – which was tricky. It allowed him a little more freedom in his choices. People accused me of spoiling him.”
What Solomon doesn’t say – possibly because he couldn’t in an authorised book – is that Mirai underperformed in Japanese cinemas; its takings were about half of those of Wolf Children or Boy and the Beast. That dip was reversed by Belle, which surpassed those two films, but not bymuch. As of writing, Hosoda still hasn’t had a stratospheric blockbuster in Japan like Spirited Away, Your Name or Demon Slayer: Mugen Train.
The book celebrates Hosoda’s deserved victories, like his 14-minute ovation at Belle’s premiere in Cannes. His editor Nishiyama claims that, with Belle, Hosoda “went from being a challenger to a champion.” But it’s possible that Hosoda still sees himself as an underdog, like most of the heroes that he creates.
Hosoda doesn’t say anything specific about what he’ll do next, but late in the book, Solomon quotes him on the dark child abuse subplot in Belle. “That reality needs to be reflected in the projects we make,” Hosoda says. “We could simply make a genre film that follows a template and provides some entertainment – and that’s OK. But I feel creators, in whatever medium, have almost an obligation to bring these messages to people’s attention. We can’t ignore what’s going on. Maybe the theme is a little shocking, but is it shocking to depict reality in an animated film?”
These comments suggest that Hosoda will bring us interesting and audacious films in the future… and those films that might make Yuichiro Saito sweat a bit, and eye those commercial numbers.
Andrew Osmond is the author of 100 Animated Feature Films. The Man Who Leapt Through Film: The Art of Mamoru Hosoda, by Charles Solomon, is published by Abrams.