pH Balance

For a brief (too brief, in my opinion) time period, the Museum of the Motion Picture in Los Angeles had a Hayao Miyazaki retrospective—the first of its kind outside of Japan. It was a fantastic exhibit. Much of the material was never-before-seen archival stuff, staged with quotes and other cool structures and paraphernalia. The museum also detailed interviews with Miyazaki and other creatives at Studio Ghibli about his prolific career, the Studio’s oeuvre, and Miyazaki’s creative process.

I could write a whole essay on what I learned from Miyazaki’s creative process (I briefly allude to it here). What made me think of this exhibit recently was the amazing concept art from Studio Ghibli. Photography of any kind was, of course, prohibited—but I’ll do my best to embed images from the NPR article linked above so you can see the amazing artwork I’m talking about.

Concept art is like fanfiction—but in reverse. It allows you to see the origin stories of your favorite characters. Sometimes you see them in alternate media, or in never-before-seen forms. Sometimes you see who they could have been, for better or worse, and compare them to how they were actually drawn, written, and animated.

The concept art shown in the Miyazaki retrospective was so beautiful that it’s hard to believe these aren’t finished products and that they were, moreover, boxed away in archives after their respective projects wrapped up. These works, from rough sketches to full-on paintings, were the most beautiful byproducts of brainstorming I had ever seen. While most of us draw inelegant chicken scratches or, at best, some sort of flow diagrams, animators create incredible visual thought experiments.

A lot of what’s created at this stage doesn’t even make it into the final product. At least not in a way that’s obvious to someone who wasn’t involved in the project. If it wasn’t for this exhibit, nobody outside Studio Ghibli would see these works. From the seascapes of Ponyō to the ornate architecture of Spirited Away, Ghibli’s archives are a treasure trove. Concept art allows you to see the mind of the creator at work.

One example in particular from these archives has stuck with me almost three years after visiting this exhibit. While creating My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki spent time sketching the Professor’s daughter in various poses, settings, and moods. And in that process—you can literally see it happening through the drawings—he realized the character he had in mind wasn’t just a little girl: she was two little girls. And that, in addition to some eventual plot decisions led him to decide to make two daughters in the story instead of just one.

Creating intermediate art pieces isn’t unique to animation, of course. This process has a long history in the art world. An intricate work like the Sistine Chapel, for example, involved many “studies,” or preparatory sketches. While “studies” were often used to plan and troubleshoot creating a larger great of work, concept art is primarily used in the brainstorming stage, to convey an idea for use in a final project.

concept art & beyond

Though the ideas behind “study” and “concept art” are fundamentally different, the idea of many iterations of creating before a final product is an important part of the creative process. The path to great art is not linear. It’s not certain or planned. Every creator embarks on a path of very rough drafts, terrible outputs, and disastrous byproducts of their own design. They’ll have to kill their darlings and begin anew. But with every failure comes an increase in knowledge that they are closer to creating something wonderful because they have found a new way that didn’t work. That they found the words, color, or sound that didn’t say what they meant.

The goal of creating something is to share what can only be felt. Creatives spend their lives putting the human condition into words or paintings or films.

Sometimes nobody gets it. But it’s still worth it. Because creating necessitates feeling and making the time to reflect on those feelings. It requires tapping into modes of expression that we—not society, not our employer, not our friends or family—deem to be important for our own understanding of self.

As someone who tries—and struggles madly—to create, Miyazaki’s exhibit was a great reminder as to what it means to create. Finding analogs in his process of concept art was one thing that inspired me to keep going. I wrote and rewrote characters until they were unrecognizable from their original forms. I drafted entire scenes and settings that would never make it past my handwritten notes. I twisted and turned through this labyrinth until I emerged out the other end, with a story I was happy with. Or at least, one that I was satisfied with. These rough drafts are not as elegant as Ghibli concept art by any means—more like hasty notes jotted on the back of a meat sauce-stained napkin.

And like the Professor’s daughters who spontaneously underwent mitosis, I discovered who my characters were by creating them. It’s not unlike the way our identities are forged: we explore, and then we become. It’s the same with characters: As I write, I discover who they are. It’s fun to see what you can dredge up from your subconscious—or from that magical space where ideas come from (I’ve been told it’s the same place where missing socks go).

Other writers have chronicled this phenomenon. Take Nobel Prize-winner Faulkner, for instance:

“It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”

Attributed to William Faulkner, but I can’t find a real source for the quote

Sometimes you have an idea for a concept or a character or a relationship—and they’re just little wisps that cross your path like a dandelion puff in the wind. Sometimes they come in daydreams, or as echoes of stories you’ve heard in years past….

• A sophomore working the graveyeard shift at the college radio station. As he listens to archival tapes, he stumbles upon an unsolved mystery, shrouded in campus lore, secret societies, and a little bit of magic.
• A little girl meets a physicist at one of her parents’ dinner parties. They steal away on an adventure together—and arrive just in time for dessert.
• A clique of seven girls—insufferable, inseparable, and impossibly rich. You’re no stranger to stories about their kind: but this time, have the Roman Numerals I-VII tattooed on the inside of the right index fingers. They represent the seven deadly sins—maybe they all die that way.

Even humans who don’t identify as artists do their fair share of creating. The brain is an organ designed to create. We brainstorm solutions to our problems, rebuttals to arguments, the right words to say to the right person at the right time. Sometimes they arrive too late, but when we’re lucky, they arrive in the nick of time. We create our narratives, dreaming about past lives and future realities as an escape from the present moment.

These are studies in the human condition.

This Week’s Top Three

• “Baddy on the Floor“🕺🏾
• Enter the Dragon 🐲 🥋- Bruce Lee choreographed the fight scenes in this one. Don’t think too hard about the women in this movie…
• Big Fish 🐟 – part johnny appleseed/paul bunyan Americana myth, part Tuesdays With Morrie… and the rest is what you, dear reader, bring to the table