Animation Spotlight: THE CAT RETURNS | Capturing Sunlight in Animation

 

We’ve dealt with some very heavy topics in my last two blog posts.

So I think it’s time to return to something more fun… and it doesn’t get more fun than The Cat Returns, the least Ghibli-like Studio Ghibli movie ever!

This movie about believing in and standing up for yourself may be Studio Ghibli’s simplest film. It’s just an hour and 15 minutes long, while most Ghibli movies approach (or exceed) two hours. It also has a very straightforward and satisfying story that, on the surface, really doesn’t seem to have much depth.

This relative simplicity doesn’t extend to its presentation, however. Like most Studio Ghibli productions, The Cat Returns is a masterpiece of animation, music, and sound design. It warrants a full review, and I’ll write one later. But for today, I just wanted to focus on three specific frames.

Not three scenes. Not even three shots. Three frames.

Ready? Here they are:

DID YOU SEE THAT!? WHAT THEY DID WITH THE LIGHTING?

No? Okay, here it is again.

In the first frame, before Haru (that’s the girl) enters the house, the walls in the foreground are well-lit from the “lights” in front of them.

When Haru opens the door, the “light” reflected on the walls is suddenly overpowered by the “sunlight” pouring in through the open door. The “light” on the foreground walls fades, as the walls take on darker and darker tones while the door opens. (This is especially apparent at the top of the image, where the “sunlight” coming through the door is most intense.)

As Haru closes the door, the walls fade back to their original lighter colors, where they began.

You have to look closely to see it, but once you’re looking for it, it’s easy to see how the lighting effects change over the course of the three images. When you’re actually watching the animation, the effect is stunning and lifelike—it looks exactly like it was filmed with a physical camera!

Let that sink in.

By the way, did you wonder why I wrote “light” and “sunlight” in quotes as I was describing the images?

It’s because—get this—that wasn’t real light. Despite how lifelike it appears, every frame of animation in this two-second shot was hand-painted, using colors that the artists picked to realistically represent how filmed surfaces look when the lighting around them changes.

Of course, you knew that already. Everyone knows that—after all, it’s an animated movie. But did you ever stop to think about it before?

I’m not sure that I have.

When I saw this moment happen on-screen, I was suddenly entranced. The Cat Returns is full of gorgeous scenes with thrillingly realistic sunlight effects (you simply must see the scene where the sun’s setting in front of the Cat Bureau—it was so beautiful it literally made me cry, and I’d already seen it before!). But something about this simple moment—so discrete, yet so enchanting—made me want to write about it.

What do you think?

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