I am not an animator. What follows is assembled from published interviews, from the museum's own exhibit on the subject, and from staring at frames for longer than is healthy. Corrections are welcome — seriously.
The order of operations
| Stage | Japanese term | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Image boards | imeeji bōdo | Loose paintings that fix the mood before any story exists. |
| Storyboard | e-konte | Every shot, its duration, its dialogue and its camera move. At Ghibli this often is the script. |
| Layout | reiauto | The single most important stage: the exact composition, perspective and character placement of each shot. |
| Key animation | genga | The extreme poses that define a movement. |
| In-betweens | dōga | The drawings that connect the keys, plus clean-up of the line. |
| Colour and paint | shiage | Every drawing filled with an assigned colour from a controlled palette. |
| Backgrounds | bijutsu | Painted separately, usually in poster colour or watercolour on board. |
| Composite and shoot | satsuei | Layers combined, camera moves executed, light effects added. |
Layout is where the film is won
Miyazaki has drawn or corrected an enormous share of the layouts on his own films, which is why they feel authored at the level of individual shots. A layout decides where the horizon sits, how far the camera is from a face, whether a room is entered from the left. Get it wrong and no amount of beautiful in-betweening rescues the scene.
There is a museum exhibit built around exactly this, and a travelling exhibition of Ghibli layouts has toured for years. If it ever comes near you, go. Seeing four hundred pencil layouts in sequence teaches you more about film than most film books.
Cels, and the year they stopped
Until the mid-nineties, a finished drawing was traced or photocopied onto a sheet of clear acetate — a cel — and painted from behind with opaque paint, then stacked over a painted background and photographed one frame at a time. The peg holes at the top of every cel exist so that the layers stay in register. That motif is used all over this site for exactly that reason.
Princess Mononoke (1997) was the last Ghibli feature to use physical cels, and it already used digital compositing and some CG for a handful of shots. From Kiki's era onward the paint moved to computer, meaning drawings were scanned and filled digitally. The drawings themselves stayed on paper. They still are.
Backgrounds
Ghibli backgrounds are paintings, made by a separate art department, and they are the reason a still frame from these films works as a picture on a wall. Kazuo Oga's work on Totoro established the house style: saturated greens, visible brushwork, weather you can feel the temperature of. Nizo Yamamoto's work on Castle in the Sky and others leans cooler and more architectural.
The department's discipline is that the background must not out-act the character. A busy painting behind a subtle performance destroys it. Watch how often the background goes soft, flat or nearly white the moment something emotionally precise happens in the foreground.
Ma: the pause
Miyazaki has described, in interviews with Western critics, a concept he calls ma — emptiness, or interval. His demonstration is famous: he claps, then explains that the tension of the film lives in the space between claps. If a film is nothing but claps, the audience stops feeling any of them.
In practice this is why characters stand still and look at things. American animation, trained on gag rhythm, tends to cut those beats out. Watching Ghibli films back to back with contemporary American features, the difference in average shot length is the single most measurable stylistic gap.
What animators mean by sakuga
Fans use sakuga loosely to mean “the good animation bit”. Within the industry it just means the animation work itself, and individual animators are recognisable by hand: how they time a stumble, whether they favour rounded or angular smears, how much drag they put on hair and cloth.
Ghibli's distinctive habit is weight. Objects have mass; characters transfer that mass before they move; landings compress. Compare the way a character stands up from sitting in a Ghibli film with almost any television anime and you will see where the money went.
The exception that proves it: Kaguya
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya threw out the house pipeline. Instead of clean line plus flat fill, the finished frames keep the rough drawing visible — charcoal, brush, and colour that stops before the outline does. Achieving this meant that the drawing that would normally be an intermediate stage had to be the final image, so nothing could be fixed downstream. It is the most expensive way imaginable to make something look effortless.