Issuu

ISSUE

Phantasmagoria 15,50â‚¬

To animation and beyond www.marimomag.com Co-founder & Creative Director Adeline Marteil adeline@marimomag.com Co-founder Ingrid Mengdehl

Fonts Arazatí family Cavita Rounded family Rogliano family Alacena family by TipoType Cover art CROM

Chief-editor Adeline Marteil

Marimo magazine Issue 002 - Phantasmagoria ISSN 2557-9223 Published in December 2018

Editors JoyNoël Elett Brice Fallon Ko Ricker

Marimo S.A.S 15, rue Vergniaud 92 300 Levallois-Perret France

Assistant editor Laura-Beth Cowley

Translation Yasmeen Kharrat Printed in Czech Republic by PBtisk a.s. on FSC certified papers from the Munken range by Arctic Paper

With kind support of our generous Kickstarter backers: Sophie Arouet Assembly BrightCarbon Carl Samantha Bastien Barbara Carswell Laura-Beth Cowley Edward Culbreath @natallyillustrations Sara & Mickaël Donati Véronique William & JoyNoël Elett Jorge Orozco Fonseca Ronan Guilloux Viviane & Serge Guilloux David Hury L & L Hury Clémentine & Hervé Marteil James Mcfarlane Stephen Monger David Perlmutter

Welcome The Marimo’z are excited to present our spooky second issue. Throughout its short history, Marimo has faced ongoing challenges — whether it’s an economic hurdle or a fast approaching deadline, our growing team has had much to learn from every new experience. We come from a variety of fields, among them animation, academia, and journalism, and we are all determined to make use of our strengths in order to keep the adventure going, step by step. By continuing to refine the magazine’s format and content, we Marimo’z have set a high bar for the future. Just like with animation itself, it takes time and sweat to make the magic of Marimo happen, and we couldn’t have done it without the support of our wonderful Kickstarter backers. To everyone who contributed to our campaign: we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for helping make the production of our sophomore issue possible! Sorcery is at the core of the following pages. The art and industry of animation have always given rise to an extremely powerful form of storytelling, especially so when a work’s inspiration is founded in our deepest dreams and nightmares. Animation’s suitability as a medium of ghostly and necromantic tales is proven by the vast repertoire of phantasmagoric animated works. When it comes to dark matters such as death, demons, and other monsters that haunt our imagination, animation has the ability to embody grim storylines for both young and old, whether it means exposing small children to difficult subjects, or allowing mature viewers to face their most visceral feelings. Whoever the audience, the animators profiled in this issue have found the dreamscape to be a deep well of inspiration, and we doubt they will ever exhaust its potential. Who is behind these macabre creations? Who are the storytellers of “the other side”? Who envisions this other reality? Why have so many of them chosen this apparently “childish” medium to tell their most tremendous tales, and how do they go about it? Like you, we at Marimo are enchanted by the witchcraft of animation, and we’d love to explore some of the answers to these questions together. We hope you enjoy sinking your teeth into this haunted reading!

Adeline

Contributors

Zay Balami Writer @zazouzay zbalami.weebly.com

Cole Delaney Writer coledelaney.me

Guy Carnegie Poet @gcdesigndevelopment guycarnegie.co.uk

JoyNoël Elett Writer @thejoyfulnerd

Robbie Cathro Illustrator @robbiecathro robbiecathro.com Alessia Cecchet Writer @alessiacecchet alessiacecchet.com Lorenzo Cervantes Writer @LBCowley laura-bethcowley.co.uk Laura-Beth Cowley Writer @lorenzo.cvts @lolovantes CROM Illustrator @crom_cristianortiz Tom Deason Illustrator @_tom_deason

Ian Moore Illustrator @iam.ian.m

Any-Mation

Ian Failes Writer @vfxblog Brice Fallon Writer Ben Lewis Giles Illustrator benlewisgiles.format.com David Hury Writer davidhury.com Vanessa Lovegrove Illustrator vanessalovegrove.co.uk @vloveg

Timothy David Orme Writer timothydavidorme.com Ruth Richards Writer Ko Ricker Writer ko-ricker.com Eric Rittatore Writer @EricRittatore Sam Shaw Illustrator @samshawdraws Marta Zubieta Illustratorr @onirical_zubieta

Ben Mitchell Writer @benlmitchell ben-mitchell.co.uk Sophie Monks Kaufman Writer @sophiemonkskaufman @sopharsogood

Special thanks to: Clémentine & Hervé Marteil, Ronan Guilloux, the ace Alix Abanda, Axel Luzayadio (Le Blog de Cheeky), Les Éditions Issekinicho, and the wonderful editors who helped bring this issue into your hands.

10 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Contents 10

The walk from the gate

Lanterna magica

Robertson's Phantasmagoria

A brief history of macabre in animation

amela Pettler P Breathing new life into the Addams Family mausoleum

hantom Boy P Hovering between life and death

Into the realm of the Forgotten Forest The inspiration that led to creating a new animated series pilot with Cartoon Network

ropes and themes of folklore T in Japanese animation Case study: A Letter to Momo

Rosto Somewhere between waking and sleeping

roken screws and dusty puppet eyes B Mise-en-scĂ¨ne in the Quay Brothers

obert Morgan R An unceasing series of nightmare visions

he little factory of the great thrill T LAIKA Studios

things you need for a good feature 3 A good script, a good script, a good script

Harryhausen and his dinosaurs

ortfolio: Red Nose Studio P Bringing life to illustrations with stop-motion animation

Smoke & mirrors

FX: the ultimate illusion V Matte painter Yvonne Muinde on making the unreal, real

ow did they do that? H VFX pros love being fooled by illusions, too

Deep in the uncanny valley

Watchlist

Playlist

The Glassworker

ringing your ideas to light B A look at the challenges of the animation business and team building

omen who animate W Perceptions, prejudice and the fight for change

omen in animation W 12 personalities

11 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Essay

THE WALK FROM THE GATE

12 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Guy Carnegie

Essay

The walk from the gate is a two-headed beast, By day there is nothing to fear in the least. Beautiful flowers and trees boast their wares, An orchard of apricots, lemons and pears. Gargantuan trees, thick with leaves reaching high, Almost so much that you search for the sky. Squirrels and pigeons, all manner of creatures, Nature euphoric, in all of it’s features. At night when the time comes to put out the bin, One makes out the streetlight that soothes one within. But then coming back in the other direction, Causes a moment of quiet reflection. The walk from the gate is around sixty seconds. The bin is put out and a comfy home beckons. The walk back now technically is just the same, Only now there’s a feeling I’m part of a game. The darkness is palpably clear in these fences, One’s eyes straining, coupled with such heightened senses. Tricks of the moonlight transforming a thicket, The pantomimes started, did I buy a ticket?

The walk from the gate is a two-headed beast, By day there is nothing to fear in the least. But night time has managed to hijack my thoughts, The walk from the gate is a walk of all sorts.

13 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

How can one minute now seem to be five? Why does this garden now seem so alive? I’m sure I just saw a dark figure dash by, But I know in the day I’d not batter an eye.

16 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Phantasmagoria

Robertson's Phantasmagoria The illusion of afterlife Text by Cole Delaney Illustration by Vanessa Lovegrove

magine walking into Pavillon de l’Échequier in Paris one spring evening and sitting with several friends, hoping to experience a new theatrical event. As the candles are extinguished plunging the hall into darkness, the spectral drama unfolds. Smoke creeps across the room and people rush forward to the host asking to see phantoms of the past. Spectres hover above, winking in and out of existence, and people begin to flee the theatre in terror. Whispers or claps of thunder causes others to draw swords, or cry in panic. The host, Étienne-Gaspard Robert, or better known as “Robertson”, through his Fantoscope, conjures image after ghostly image, moving them closer to the petrified audience, keeping his promise and bringing the dead back to life. This is Phantasmagoria.

The most interesting part of Phantasmagoria is probably the crude indications of early animation. His Fantoscope was on wheels, so it could move forward or back, to create the illusion of the spirits growing larger. Also, the aperture could be adjusted to allow more light through the magic lantern, which made the ghost glow with more intensity as it rapidly approached. Robertson’s adjustment to the magic lantern also allowed him to use multiple slides in a single projector, which could create a crude semblance of movement. A face was given brighter eyes, and then that slide could be removed to create the illusion of life in the phantom. Phantasmagoria is central in the history of imagination. A mixture of dark, smoky, moving imagery as spectres crept in and out of existence around the audience, mixed with the eerie voices projected by a ventriloquist and accompanied by the unsettling tones of a glass harmonica; you can imagine the chilling effect it could still have today. Thankfully, through his Mémoires, he left detailed instructions on how each effect was created. This is close to 80 years before Eadweard Muybridge began his pioneering work on animal locomotion. Robertson’s adaptations on the magic lantern marked an important step toward the idea of successive images being played over each other, creating movement in order to animate, which of course means, to “bring to life”.

17 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

In 1797 France, as Robertson began his Phantasmagoria, there was a heavy interest in the macabre following the Reign of Terror (1792-1794). If executions weren’t enough, the public could now witness what they thought happened after life. Robertson had a similar dark interest since childhood and because he was a scientist, his equal interest in optics led him to early magic lantern shows. Following these, he developed many of his own techniques to make a new type of event: an immersive, horror spectacle. But also to help it stands out from the eventual copycats that emerged as his secrets were revealed.

Phantasmagoria

A brief history of macabre in animation Text by Cole Delaney Illustrations by Vanessa Lovegrove

L'Hôtel Hanté : fantasmagorie épouvantable In 1907 J. Stuart Blackton used stop-motion to show a dinner making itself in “The Haunted Hotel”. The relatively close up shot allowed animators to study the technique while the length of the sequence removed any doubt of previous visual tricks such as wires to move props. The short film was so successful in France, that over the next decade, the French term for animation was le mouvement américain and influenced many filmmakers including Émile Cohl.

American innovators

18 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Walt Disney’s Silly Symphony series began with the short “The Skeleton Dance” (1929), where skeletons dance and make music in a cemetery. A very literal example of the danse macabre. The gothic backdrops would carry a thread throughout Disney’s catalogue, like the landscape and themes of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) and Pinocchio (1940), and the “Sleepy Hollow” section in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949). Conversely, the Fleischer Brothers explored darker tones with Betty Boop shorts, highlights including “Minnie the Moocher” (1932) and Cab Calloway’s rotoscoped performance in Snow-White (1933). Other studios were dabbling in the otherworldly too, like Famous Studio’s The Friendly Ghost (1945) which introduced Casper.

Smaller screens and bigger audiences In 1953, UPA released their gothic short “The Tell Tale Heart” (1953) from Edgar Allen Poe’s catalogue and due to its dark subject matter, earned the first X rating for animation in the UK. As well as UPA, Hanna-Barbera also dominated the small screen and in 1969, released Scooby Doo, Where Are You! followed by The Funky Phantom (1971). They also brought back the Addams Family in Scooby Doo, marrying the macabre styles and granted them their own animated show in 1973. In Britain, Cosgrove-Hall released Count Duckula (1988), rooted in the European Gothic fiction of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with an anatidaedian twist.

Phantasmagoria

Eastern perspectives With the advent of television, Gothic subculture in music, and global economies cross pollinating culture, the gothic influence crept into eastern animation, albeit with their own style. Kuri Yoji explores a surreal, macabre landscape in the darkly compelling “The Midnight Parasites” (1972). Though the biggest influence is in Goth-Loli, which is a cross between the Lolita style with a darker influence, exemplified in Amane Misa from Death Note (2006). Kawamoto Kihachiro’s “IbaraHime matawa Nemuri-Hime” (1990) model animation reimagined the story of Sleeping Beauty, rooted in European Gothic culture.

Don’t stop believing

Goth girls have more fun With the emergence of the Gothic subculture in music, goth identification became individual, rather than just a setting or tone. Married with the resurgence of animated cartoons through the 1990s, these individuals, primarily “Goth Girls” began to populate series. Examples include Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice (1989), Andrea from Daria (1997) and in more recent animation, Mai from Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005), Marceline from Adventure Time (2010) and the Librarian from Hilda (2018). Moving back to re-establishing the gothic as an environmental presence rather than just character, Over the Garden Wall (2014), and the online GIF shorts of OivaviO Motion Stories (2014-18) set themselves apart by grounding in the macabre.

19 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Animating the macabre seems to go hand in hand with stop-motion. Even with the greatest care, movements still feel uncanny. In Prague, Jan Švankmayer’s output militantly stuck to the surreal, culminating in Alice (1988), known for its dark and uncompromising design. His work deeply influenced the gothic animation of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Burton carried this style consistently through his stop-motion projects. Paul Berry’s “The Sandman” (1991) is an important short that continued the macabre style, similar to the work of the Brothers Quay. Henry Sellick directed Nightmare, and then adapted James and the Giant Peach (1996) before joining Laika Studios and settling their style in Coraline (2009). They carried this forward through Paranorman (2012), The Boxtrolls (2014), and Kubo and The Two Strings (2016).

Essay

Broken screws and dusty puppet eyes Mise-en-scène in the Quay Brothers Text by Timothy David Orme

hen one sees a Wes Anderson composition or a sweeping Goddard sequence of jump cuts, they are expecting a certain style. This feeling goes beyond directorship and into authorship when we experience something from the Quay Brothers. This largely happens because the Quay Brothers are able to grow the mise-enscène of the film into something that simultaneously is itself and something larger than itself. They are able to expand the frame beyond its edges, and expand its sensations beyond that of sight and sound. To put it simply, when one sees and hears a Quay Brothers film, they know it because they feel as though they can taste, touch, and even smell it.

36 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

The Quay Brothers are, perhaps to an extreme few other animators parallel, austere auteurs. The images in their films aren’t traditionally beautiful. They are desaturated and drenched in dust. They stink of mothballs. And let’s be honest, even if we can taste the images in these frames, they’re not delicious. Beauty here lies in imperfection, and everything in the films points the viewers towards that understanding of beauty. The clean and colourful stop-motion set is replaced with a precise barrenness: aged metallic tools are covered in dust to such a degree that while animating “Streets of Crocodiles” (1986), the animators had to animate the movement and then pause for the dust to settle before capturing the image. A Quay Brothers image is not only seen but also inhaled. Characters in these films are often unfinished and move with imperfect, jerky movements, which is all their bodies are capable of. These asymmetrical bodies remind viewers of their own aching knees and sloping shoulders. A character moving across the screen is a dusty, visceral pain for the viewer. A grinding of textures like a grinding of bone.

Some of the characters themselves are not human, but instead the detritus of the film’s environment. It seems any object on the screen might be a discarded portion of a deceased character, might at any point either move as a character itself, or might morph into a portion of another character. Existence in these films is precarious and ever-evolving.

Watching the film, we come to realize anything could shift below us or around us at any point. We see space, but feel time. Camera movements themselves are almost too fast — re-enacting the struggle to comprehend space and the objects in the space as living or not. Sometimes the movement is so fast a viewer may realize they’ve moved, but not what land they traveled over in the moving. As in “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, or “This Unnamable Little Broom” (1985), some sets themselves aren’t finished. The horizon line is the abyss itself. Perhaps the characters are stranded. Perhaps this is their entire world. Either way, the unknown is hidden, but its view is in plain sight. A viewer could touch it if they could just find its edge. This unsettled sense of feeling that one cannot feel (or touch) is what exhilarates the viewer of these short, enigmatic films.

Essay

37 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Studio

Text by David Hury

40 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

At LAIKA Studios, visuals are at the service of the story. LAIKA’s technicians and artists have mastered stop-motion and CGI integration, the sole mantra remaining: “The look is the rule.”

41 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Studio

42 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

s black as the night sky. As dark as the bottom of the ocean. As thunderous as the rumbling of a Hells Angels horde. The wave in the opening scene of Kubo and the Two Strings is insuperable and unsparing. As he drifts in the middle of the night in a canoe, with his mother as his sole guardian angel, Kubo has a brush with death and drowning. The viewer is then directed from the danger of this tidal wave that is ready to swallow up these two characters to another danger – one even more terrible. The story takes a turn in a split second to Kubo's face. We meet Kubo as a baby with a missing eye and the narrator tell us that his own grandfather, the Moon King, has already stolen one eye and would like to snatch the other. It’s right there in the chilling category. The spectacular scene is short and impactful. One that called for a treasure trove of imagination from several technical teams working in parallel to introduce Kubo, a character conceived by Shannon Tindle. Travis Knight, LAIKA's CEO, asked Shannon to develop the protagonist in the genre of “epic fantasy drawing on Japanese culture”. For each of their films, LAIKA Studios commit to use, or even invent, new processes and to respect the story’s culture of origin. In this case, these are medieval Japan, the samurai Bushido, and the indispensable ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblocks, for the scenery. The opening scene of Kubo finds its visual roots in one of the most famous Japanese works: the famous The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by the painter Katsushika Hokusai (1830). LAIKA’s technicians transposed it to night-time using glass debris, paper, and fabrics to create the glistening water effect. The animators, led by Ollie Jones, worked long to find the right formula for the water’s movement, shape, and texture. Artistic director Alice Bird explains the process, which consists

of a mix of different animation techniques, both traditional and digital. “Ollie made a machine with ripped paper pieces that moved in a wave formation and showed off the shifting pattern of the torn edges, mimicking how water behaves but with real tactile material. That was an early inspiration. The final product, spearheaded by production designer Nelson Lowry, was created by embedding some of the woodblock textures that had come from the concept art into a digital model, with a huge amount of back and forth between the design team and CG water team to get it tuned to perfection. It’s definitely an example of how successful the blend of practical and digital art can be.” It is precisely this “blend” that LAIKA obsessively pursues. When leaving the screening, journalists made the common mistake of noting that Kubo was made entirely using CGI. This was not the case. Every second of the film in fact consists of 24 actual photographs. In an article in The Verge, Dan Pascall, Kubo's production manager, wondered why go through all this trouble, while expressing amusement at his own masochism: “God knows, there are easier ways to make movies, but we challenge ourselves to take ultra-detailed, time-intensive routes instead.” And oh, how long the route traveled since Coraline, LAIKA’s first feature film in 2009.

MASTERS OF HYBRID IMAGERY COMBINING STOP-MOTION AND CGI The impetus comes from the top. LAIKA’s chief insists on freedom for his artists so that they express themselves as much as possible. The CEO, Travis Knight, always repeats this in his interviews, as he did in 2016 in his interview with The Verge at the time of Kubo’s release. "The ethos of this whole place is that we are artists first and foremost.

Studio

˜ With the rapid prototyping, people are so interested in the technology, and sure, it’s really is. But, what is also really interesting is how we have adapted it to make it work for us creatively.˝

This passion for novelty and freedom begins, of course, with 3D printing, as ParaNorman director Chris Butler explains: “I think technical innovations (like 3D printing) have enabled the quality of what we put on screen to increase exponentially from movie to movie. I’m of the opinion that the final frame I see in the movie should be the best version of that frame, and I’ll use everything at my disposal to make it that way.” Whereas Coraline was the first feature film to industrialize the use of 3D printers, ParaNorman pushed it further. For the latter, LAIKA’s technical team conducted many tests, sometimes crossing their fingers not knowing what their programming results would look like for sure. But the results lived up to expectations. It was “like we were building the plane as we are flying it”, recalls the co-producer Arianne Sutner, quoted in an article in Animation World Network. “Part of stop-motion is the perfection in its beauty as well as the imperfections too”, Arianne explains, “so not everything in this movie is absolutely perfect in terms of the use of technology. But, that’s what I love about it.” Critics note that there is really a pre- and a post-ParaNorman when it comes to the use of technology. Alongside the 3D printer running at full capacity, more than 300 artists worked on details that are barely perceptible on the screen, but that are at the heart of the richness of ParaNorman. Yet, production costs did not

exceed the planned budget (60 million USD, just like Coraline three years earlier and The Boxtrolls two years later). Arianne remembers ParaNorman's creation process, and the team learning to use the new machines. “With the rapid prototyping, people are so interested in the technology, and sure, it’s really interesting. But, what is also really interesting is how we have adapted it to make it work for us creatively.” This need for technical skill in all departments and at each production stage rises to the challenges of animations “Made in LAIKA”. The impossible never stopped LAIKA. That said, there is no point in claiming victory too early. Each film brings new challenges. Kubo and the Two Strings, which was in production between 2013 and 2016, seemed particularly complicated to make into a film, especially for the transition from 2D to 3D. “The biggest challenge is translating the look of two-dimensional artwork into three-dimensional reality”, says Alice Bird, Kubo’s artistic director. “Because there’s so much interpretation involved, the art director has to get inside the designer and director’s heads, really develop an instinct for what they are imagining when they discuss a given set or scene. Sometimes the vision can be ambiguous even to the director, which can be a fun opportunity for the art director to input their own interpretation and show the way forward.” This “three-dimensional reality”, which is visually impressive in Kubo, marks the convergence of traditional stop-motion, frame-by-frame techniques, and computer-generated imagery. An often-tortuous convergence, as Alice explains. “We’ve actually developed a really good system for sharing the look across practical and digital assets. The art department will often build physical samples for the VFX team to keep and reference when they are texturing an asset. Even things like water

43 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

When we started LAIKA ten years ago, we could see the writing on the wall. Stop-motion animation was basically taking its last, dying breath. We had to come up with a way, if we wanted to continue to make a living in this medium that we loved, to bring it into a new era, to invigorate it." In the 13 years since its creation, LAIKA has always tried to push the boundaries of its own mode of expression, stop-motion, without ever renouncing it.

Work In Progress

The Glassworker Text by Ko Ricker

82 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Usman Riaz, founder of the Karachi-based Mano Animation Studios, is currently in the process of producing Pakistanâ€™s first hand-drawn animated feature, the highly anticipated The Glassworker.

83 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Work In Progress

The Glassworker ÂŠMano Animation Studio

84 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Work In Progress

Work In Progress Riaz will be the first to tell you that his primary inspiration for the project is the work of Japanese animation greats. As a child, Riaz stumbled across his first-ever anime series, Yamazaki Koji and Kanda Takeyuki’s 1978 adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, by complete accident. “When I was four or five years old, I rented this old video tape. It was a Disney film, but then when the video ended, this animation started playing, and it was the Japanese animated series [The Adventures of] the Little Prince”, Riaz explains. “For some reason, the storytelling and the way it was drawn just clicked with me. I just remember being like, ‘I want to watch more things that are animated like this.’” As Riaz got older, he began to familiarise himself with more masters — Miyazaki Hayao, Takahata Isao, Otomo Katsuhiro. He fell in love with the works of Studio Ghibli in particular, and films like Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, and Only Yesterday inspired him to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. In 2010, Riaz enrolled at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, where he studied illustration for two years. But it wasn’t until he saw Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises that Riaz seriously thought he might be able to follow in the footsteps of his heroes. “[The Wind Rises] is what made me realize, ‘We can do this in Pakistan.’ I could see Jiro Horikoshi’s journey, how he would take English magazines about aeronautical engineering and he would sit with a dictionary and translate it into Japanese and just look at the pictures”, says Riaz. “I remember seeing myself in that. I have all of the Ghibli storyboard books and they’re all in Japanese. I’m just looking at all the pictures and looking at how [Miyazaki] is making everything.”

“ And to see how intimate the space was, to see

In 2013, Riaz was selected to become a TED Senior Fellow — the youngest ever at 22 — because of his exceptional musical skill. As a result, he then studied for a few years at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Riaz characterizes this time as a slightly ridiculous, if happy, detour from his true goal of becoming an animator. Still, he’s grateful; after all, if it weren’t for his experiences with TED, Riaz says he never would have been able to start Pakistan’s first hand-drawn animation studio. It was because of a TED connection, in fact, that Riaz was able to visit Studio Ghibli and the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo in 2015. “It was a dream come true, that whole trip”, says Riaz. “And to see how intimate the space was, to see Ghibli and just see the craftsman mentality there, that was the inspiring part. We’re so used to seeing the Pixar and Disney documentaries where they have these gigantic, stadium-sized studios with thousands of computers and people working.”

85 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Ghibli and just see the craftsman mentality there, that was the inspiring part. We’re so used to seeing the Pixar and Disney documentaries where they have these gigantic, stadium-sized studios with thousands of computers and people working.”