The man who painted Totoro's forest

February 25, 2018 4:33 AM

Kazuo Oga is mainly know as the background artist of Studio Ghibli animated films. Here's a demonstration of him working. Using poster paints. (A shorter version)

He's directed one short film 'The Night of Taneyamagahara' (trailer)
Kazuo Oga – The Man Who Drew Totoro’s Forest
Old interview in Japanese
At a exhibition (commentary in Russian)
Pages from an art book (text in Japanese)
Another painting demo (sadly poor quality video)

posted by fearfulsymmetry (10 comments total)

I want to watch him paint clouds and sky forever.
posted by jfwlucy at 4:36 AM on February 25, 2018

I enjoyed watching him work in that first link! The beautiful background art in the Studio Ghibli films is a big part of my enjoyment of them-the rendering of forests and fields and flowers is as engrossing as the characters and dialogue for me. Thank you for this post.
posted by little mouth at 5:22 AM on February 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

Wonderful, thanks for posting this!
posted by carter at 6:15 AM on February 25, 2018

Might be useful to add that it's standard for non-digital background artists in anime to use poster paints as they are cheap (though Oga uses a relatively expansive Korean brand) and are bright and thus photograph well
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:28 AM on February 25, 2018

This is wonderful! Though now I feel I'm wasting my life.
posted by mumimor at 8:01 AM on February 25, 2018

Japanese (such as Nicker Colour, the ones used at Ghibli) and Korean (like Shinhan) poster paints are way ahead of those dismal, hard discs of colour¹ you maybe had as a kid. They are searingly bright colours, loaded with pigment, and dry (fast! work quickly!) matte and opaque. They are fairly cheap: you can get 12 large pots of Shinhan (which some people might not like for its stickiness, btw) for under $40. Just add talent and 40 years of practice, and you could be just like Kazuo!
posted by scruss at 8:11 AM on February 25, 2018 [7 favorites]

This was lovely to drink my morning coffee to, so thank you for posting!

I do notice that whatever Kazuo was drinking, it was out of a Heineken pint glass -- a trade secret revealed?!
posted by wires at 8:41 AM on February 25, 2018

Completely random PSA: There is now a Chrome extension that returns the "View Image" functionality in Google Images.
posted by gwint at 11:24 AM on February 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

That was brilliant, every touch is so considered.

Clicking through related videos I found this documentary about Nicker paints (in Japanese, but the auto-translated subtitles sort of give you the gist). There's a bit where they show one 15 litre container of white paint that's three kilograms heavier than the 15 litres of purple next to it, from the sheer amount of pigment.
posted by lucidium at 12:41 PM on February 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

Japanese (such as Nicker Colour, the ones used at Ghibli) and Korean (like Shinhan) poster paints are way ahead of those dismal, hard discs of colour¹ you maybe had as a kid.

I only have a couple tubes of artist's quality gouache and haven't spent time bonding with them, but James Gurney uses it and discusses it quite a bit. See also: gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2015/06/some-of-my-favorite-gouache-masters.html.
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:33 PM on February 26, 2018