Cinema
Colour in the films of Studio Ghibli: why the right green is worth a screenplay
You can recognise a Ghibli film from a single frame, with no characters in it. The reason is a chromatic grammar so coherent it became a language. Film frames are protected works: the images here are Japanese landscapes close to the palettes discussed.
You can recognise a Studio Ghibli film from a single frame, with no characters in it. A meadow, a sky, the wall of a house is enough. The reason is not the drawing style, which changes a great deal from Miyazaki to Takahata, but the colour: a chromatic grammar so coherent that over the years it became a language. This piece tries to tell who built it, how it works and why, in a studio obsessed with movement, colour was treated as a narrative responsibility and never as a finish.
A woman and a box of colours
The name few people know is Michiyo Yasuda (1939–2016). She started at Toei in the fifties, where she met Miyazaki and Takahata, and from 1985 she was the colour designer of practically every Ghibli film up to The Wind Rises, for which she came out of retirement. Her craft, colour design, means deciding every tint of every character and object in every lighting condition: the red of Kiki’s dress in the sun, in shade, at dusk, under rain. In traditional cel animation this meant choosing among hundreds of ready-made industrial paints and, when new tints were needed, having them mixed on purpose. Yasuda was known for preferring the “right” colours to the “beautiful” ones: the colour that tells the hour, the temperature, the state of mind. Miyazaki called her an irreplaceable collaborator more than once.
Beside her, the people who painted the backgrounds. Kazuo Oga, art director of My Neighbour Totoro and Princess Mononoke, worked in poster paint on paper, with a density of brushstroke that on screen reads as the humidity of the air. His 2007 show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo was among the most visited of the year, and it made the public understand that behind the apparent simplicity of Ghibli landscapes there was painting, not decoration.
Totoro’s green: a colour that tells the time
In Totoro there is a whole family of greens. The wet greens of morning, the yellow ones of a summer noon, the nearly blue greens of the dusk in which the spirits appear. The countryside of 1950s Tokorozawa is told above all like this: through the variation of a range, more than through dialogue. The result is that the viewer feels the hours passing before anyone says so. It is the principle that holds the whole studio together: colour as clock and as thermometer.
Chihiro’s red: colour as threshold
Spirited Away opens in a real world of greys, dull greens, plastic: a car, a road, a tunnel. When Chihiro crosses over, the palette changes register. The spirits’ bathhouse is vermilion, gold, black lacquer, emerald green: the colours of temples and ryokan, brought to saturation. Red signals that we are in the other world exactly like the lanterns lighting up. And the film’s most famous scene, the train on the water, works by subtraction: after so much saturation, a milky blue sky and a flat sea, and colour becomes silence.
Mononoke: deep green and the red of the curse
In Princess Mononoke the forest is painted in a range of greens so dark it looks almost black in the interiors, where moss and ferns are the true protagonist. Against that ground, every human intrusion — iron, fire, blood — has a hot, violent colour. The curse advancing up Ashitaka’s arm is a black-violet foreign to every other part of the palette: the colour of the intruder. Yasuda and Oga build the film’s conflict before the story tells it.
Ponyo and Kaguya: when colour returns to childhood and paper
With Ponyo, Miyazaki explicitly asked to remove: simple shadows, flat, pasty colours, as if drawn with wax crayons. The film’s sea is a child’s sea, and for that reason it is truer. In the opposite direction, Takahata with The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (backgrounds by Osamu Tanabe and Kazuo Oga) leaves the white paper in view: light watercolour, lines that break off, colour fading into nothing. It is the Ghibli film where colour takes the greatest risk, that of leaving space. And it works because the viewer completes it alone.
The sky, always
Then there is the Ghibli sky, which deserves a chapter of its own: enormous white cumuli on a blue that leans cerulean and never cobalt, with a lighter band toward the horizon. It is the sky of Laputa, of Kiki, of Porco Rosso, of Howl’s Moving Castle. Its function is simple and powerful: to promise space. In films that are almost always about freedom and flight, the colour of the sky is the theme in the form of a tint.
Why it matters beyond cinema
The Ghibli lesson goes beyond animation. It is a model of how a coherent colour system becomes identity even before the logo: a few principles (colour tells the time, colour marks thresholds, colour holds the conflict), applied with near-artisanal discipline for forty years. Anyone working on brands, interfaces or spaces finds a manual here: choose the right colours, more than the beautiful ones, and then stay faithful to them.
Photo credits: all images under the Unsplash License. Authors: Aaron Katz (cover), katsuma tanaka, Anne Laure P, Weichao Deng, Sora Sagano (two photos), Lucas Calloch, Clay Banks.
