THE ISLAND OF LOST TOYS

© 2009 FUJI TELEVISION NETWORK / Production I.G / DENTSU / PONY CANYON

THE ISLAND OF LOST TOYS by Andrew Osmond

In a great many ways, Production I.G’s Oblivion Island tells the same story as Ghibli’s Spirited Away. A modern Japanese girl grows up listless, something plainly lacking in her spirit. Chance, or perhaps fate, draws the girl through a portal into a fantastic world, a shadow Japan inhabited by industrious creatures. Here, the girl learns that the waste and neglect of her world has profound effects on the fantasy location. There are lost, damaged souls, which it is her duty to heal. But the world has a fearsome ruler who wants to enslave the girl, stealing her memories, her identity, even her name. Can the plucky heroine save the world and herself? In Spirited Away, Japanese people have forgotten who they were, marginalising their myths and gods. Oblivion Island has a different focus. Its angle is much more personal; that every person, as he or she grows up, starts to neglect what he or she once knew was priceless, the objects and memories of love. It is these objects which collect in Oblivion Island.

The film was directed by Shinsuke Sato, who’s known in recent years for directing live-action films of manga, including Gantz, Bleach, Library Wars and Inuyashiki. He also directed Death Note: Light Up The New World, an original live-

action sequel to the hit series. However, there’s also a familiar anime name on Oblivion Island’s credits – Naoyoshi Shiotani, who served as animation director and one of the storyboard artists. You may know Shiotani as the director who’s stayed with PSYCHO-PASS through the whole franchise, as well as bringing us anime’s cutest donkey in Tokyo Marble Chocolate. Talking about Oblivion Island on Production I.G’s website, Shiotani said, “As the (Japanese) title, Hottarake no Shima suggests, this movie revolves around the concept of hottarake. In English you may translate it in different ways, from ‘neglect’ to ‘abandon’ to ‘forget,’ not because of malice but because of unintentional carelessness. We abandon even our memories without realizing it. This movie tells that we should care more about feelings. We should never forget what is really important for us and the people around us, and it is something you can’t see or grab with your hands.”Oblivion Island starts when 16-year-old Haruka realises she has mislaid a hand-mirror left her by her mother, who died when she was a child. “I used to have this old mirror my mother gave to me,” she says early, looking mournfully out of a window. It echoes the opening of Spirited Away, where a listless Chihiro stuck her tongue out of her car window. “I treasured it, but now it’s gone…”Haruka spends the film looking for the mirror, which has sunflowers carved on its back. Shiotani notes: “In the language of flowers, sunflower stands for ‘I’m always with you,’ which is obviously connected with the role of Haruka’s mother.” The mirror itself in an obvious symbol. After all, what’s a mirror for except to show you your face, and by extension the person you are?

Haruka’s hunt takes her to Oblivion Island, a land made of millions of discarded human objects, bodged together in a fantastic multicoloured theme park bricolage. Shiotani: “I wanted people of any generation to feel nostalgic about what they saw on the island, so we used many objects from very different periods. As a first step, we asked the staff to gather all kind of old toys, electric appliances, cars, cans, bottles, flyers, books and magazines. “Then we selected those we thought could work to build the island landscape,” Shiotani continues. “There are so many objects in any background, that one may just spend weeks trying to locate all of them! I imagined the island inhabitants used objects conceived in the human world to build things according to their sensitivities, in a quite original interpretation.” In particular, look at the scenes in the home of Teo, who’s Haruka’s little-boy ally on Oblivion Island. Teo makes good use of everything he finds – for example, his “mask” is a common or garden bike saddle. He recycles like a good Womble though Teo looks more like Rupert the Bear. He’s actually a fox, a traditionally magic character in Japanese folklore. The film was inspired by a Japanese legend: if you lose something precious to you, you can pray to the foxes to bring it back in the night. The tale is beautifully illustrated at the film’s start, with hand drawings more like Russian animation than anime.

Another theme of the film is its concern with uniting generations. Haruka slowly realises she doesn’t understand her father; moreover, that it’s her responsibility to fix that. In Shiotani’s view, “Many Japanese families don’t have enough time for proper communications between parents and children, because we all are apparently too busy doing something else. I’d be happy if, after watching the film, people would stop for a while and think about their parents, then go home and start to communicate over dinner or any other occasion.” The film also features a cute but dignified button-eyed sheep, called Cotton. He was created to make Oblivion Island truly universal – not just because he’s a cute sheep (though that helps!), but because of what he represents. “Cotton is the stuffed animal everybody has had when he/she was a kid,” says Shiotani. “I wanted everyone in the audience to relate with and overlap his/her own personal childhood memories… Cotton is a neglected childhood treasure who has the

chance to meet up again with his owner, the very person that left him lying around and eventually forgot him.” Who, you might guess, is Haruka herself. Oblivion Island came out in 2009, six years before Pixar’s Inside Out, with its comparable character of Bing Bong. Shiotani brought up Pixar when he was asked about the decision to make Island in CG. A friend of his had visited the American studio, Shiotani said. “He explained [to the Pixar staff] that in Japan we still draw with pencil and paper. The Pixar people were quite surprised to hear that. I feel that somehow that handcrafted animation fits with the Japanese character. Designing characters with black outlines is something in the cultural visual tradition of Japan, in a way inherited by anime.

“At the same time,” Shiotani adds, “I feel the limits of what can be done with traditional 2D animation. When I made Oblivion Island, I tried to transfer the 2D know-how into 3D. There were things I thought were successfully transferred, and other things that made me think about how this system works… In the end, people want to relate to the characters. It’s not about how they move, it’s about the design and story. The audience itself is not really aware of how these things are made. The techniques are on the production side – if you have good characters and a good story, then it will work.

“At the same time,” concludes Shiotani, “I feel there are fewer skilled 2D animators. I’m not sure whether that’s because we produce more material these days, so we need more animators and don’t find them. Or whether the number of animators is really decreasing because people are keener on working with tablets than with pencils.”

To make Oblivion Island, Production I.G – an anime powerhouse, with a track-record in ambitious CGI effects going back decades – had to pool its talents with several other outfits. The collaborators included Toei Animation, Sunrise and Polygon Pictures, “For Japanese productions, we cannot work with multimillion-dollar budgets,” Shiotani said in another

interview. “We have to work on limited budgets, compared to the US. So, what we bring into the movie is our creativity and our way of making computer animation with limited resources, but bringing our personality into it at the same time. “We use a lot of 2D animation in Japan, so we try to develop 3D animation that was blended with our 2D visuals. We did not have motion capture, but the animators have this skill of calculating movements and that’s how we worked.”

For example, Haruka’s hair was kept simple; it’s effectively an outline of the kind you’d find in hand-drawn anime. Look out for the parts of Oblivion Island that seem to be hybrids of 2D and 3D. Perhaps the most obvious is a short early sequence, when Haruka follows a strange creature through woods near a shrine at twilight. The CGI Haruka is set against backgrounds which may be simple paintings, though it’s pretty impossible to tell where the 2D ends and the CG begins.

It may look strange if you’re used to Pixar or DreamWorks; but then Japan is one of the few countries where those studios don’t dominate movie animation. Far from showing that anime is moving closer to computer-dominated Hollywood animation, Oblivion Island shows anime’s underlying principles and aesthetics – shaped, as always in animation, by economic and practical necessity – are still very different. And Shiotani, like Pixar’s John Lasseter and a host of Hollywood artists, says that CGI is only a tool anyway. “What’s really important in this job is to have a clear image of what you want to do, and have your staff understand it. This is true regardless of the animation technique, 2D or 3D.”