What's going on around the globe In a world of slick blockbusters based on computer technology and digitalised animation, there's something wonderfully stubborn and unhinged about Tokyo's Studio Ghibli. The production house co-founded by Hayao Miyazaki still uses hand-crafted analogue techniques, a laborious commitment to old-style filmmaking that has helped earn Miyazaki the title 'the god of animators'. Every gorgeous frame of Miyazaki's masterpieces My Neighbour Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997) and Spirited Away (2001) was drawn by hand. Compare the flat computer-generated swamp inhabited by DreamWorks' Shrek to the lush, richly detailed forests of Totoro. It's like comparing a pulp comic book with a Picasso. Kazuo Oga painted that forest. He's one of the small team who work with Miyazaki and recently agreed to exhibit his work. Like his boss, Oga is modesty personified. He told the Yomiuri newspaper recently that he found it 'embarrassing' that animation fans would now be able to gawk and linger over his pictures in the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art instead of in darkened cinemas. 'Those pictures were originally painted to be shown on the screen for only a few seconds,' he says. But Oga also says he was 'glad' that Ghibli's millions of fans would be given a glimpse behind the studio's curtains into what he disarmingly calls his 'back-ground illustration works', which hardly does justice to the 800 pieces on display. The exhibition confirms that there's something brilliant, albeit obsessive, about Oga, Miyazaki and the rest of Ghibli's creative engine. In the making of movies such as Totoro, the men argued regularly about such questions as the correct hue of the sky in late September and the colour of the soil in the Kanto region of Japan (a deep red, in case you're wondering). Flowers and trees are researched to perfection and drawn only if they're native to the region in which the story is set. Seeing Oga's work on display helps you appreciate the staggering labour of love involved. Oga says that he finds much of modern culture 'thin and shallow and fake', and that philosophy permeates the studio's drive for authenticity and its determination not to betray the audience. Not that these men are shrinking wallflowers who can't fight their corner. When Harvey Weinstein handled the US release of Princess Mononoke, he bombarded Oga and Miyazaki with demands for changes. The Ghibli team replied by sending him a samurai sword with a note attached that read: 'No cuts.' Kazuo Oga: The Man Who Drew Totoro's Forest, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Ends Sept 30
