Drawing Movements: Creator Talk with Atsushi WADA and Sarina NIHEI

Today I’ve attended a webinar from The Japan Foundation about Atsushi Wada and Sarina Nihei’s work. Below are their works, the notes I took during the webinar and some of my thoughts.

It was quite interesting to see the work of Japanese animators, who are inspired by the work of artists from other countries. It’s not the typical style of animation that a lot of people think of when they hear ‘Japanese animation’ (at least I don’t). It’s unique to them, and hearing Wada and Nihei talking about their work was super inspiring. I absolutely love the soft but limited colour palettes they use.

They both talked about how they don’t really write scripts, and they tend to start their animations by thinking about a pleasant movement that they want to animate, then work out the rest of the film around the scene. This was rather relieving, because that’s how I tend to work too, and for the longest time I thought that was just ‘wrong’. Nihei also tends to write a lot of ideas down, before working on the storyboards, so there’s a lot of scribbles in her sketchbooks.

I really enjoy these soft, comfortable movements in their work, and it’s something I would definitely like to consider in my future work. I’d also like to be a bit looser in my ideas ‘plot-wise’.