See What Princess Mononoke's CG Scenes Looked Like on CRT Monitor

Princess Mononoke is one of the most popular movies by Studio Ghibli, produced in Hayao Miyazaki's signature 2D style. However, it was not all done by hand, there are CG elements incorporated into the film.

It's a little strange to see a CG software on a CRT monitor with that old-school interface, but Studio Ghibli made the best of it.

According to GhibliWiki, Princess Mononoke, released in 1997, has 15 minutes of CG. 10 of them are the scenes that used digital ink and paint only, and the other 5 used CG techniques like texture mapping, 3D rendering, morphing, particles, and digital composition to make the elements "CG which doesn't look like CG".

One use of 3D rendering was the Tatari Gami scene you can see in the video above. Yoshinori Sugano, the head of the computer graphics department, said that CG helped create a sense of depth and speed. Technology has helped expand the possibilities of expression.

You can read more about it in The Art of Ghibli, provided by jimmyjrg on Reddit.

Hayao Miyazaki using CG does not take away from his art, unlike the recent AI trend where everyone was obsessed with generating Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT. Something tells me Miyazaki didn't approve.

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