Robert Ito

Anna’s Travel Dress

A fairy-tale character calls for a classic fairy-tale silhouette: A-shaped, with a bell-shaped skirt. Anna’s travel dress draws inspiration from the bunad, a Norwegian folk costume, as well as the now-classic silhouettes of Christian Dior’s “New Look” of the 1940s and 1950s. Sastrawinata-Lemay spent days on the smallest of details, like the decorative embroidery and tiny loops of the cuffs and the delicate buttons running up the back. With the state of computer-generated imagery a few years ago, “we couldn’t do any of this,” she said. “But now we can, so why not go crazy?” There are also tiny crocuses (the official symbol of Arendelle) on the buttons in the front and miniature stalks of wheat along the hem.

Anna’s Travel Cloak

For the sequel’s colder climes, Sastrawinata-Lemay created a travel cloak of rich purple wool, clasped at the collar with a gold chain of interlocking wheat-patterned links. She agonized over the scalloped hem. “The scallops are really squared off,” she said. “Every time we made them rounder, it made her look younger, but by squaring them off, she feels a little bit more mature.” For a more refined, elegant feel, she added a sawtooth edge to the fabric. “It gives line and structure,” Sastrawinata-Lemay said. “But we also just think it’s really cool!” To keep the outfit from going too somber, she made the silk lining a brilliant magenta, “so there’s a pop of color whenever she moves.”

Anna’s Satchel

“Frozen 2” takes the sisters through woods and water, which means that Anna, at least, needs a travel bag, hopefully something durable. Both functional and stylish, Anna’s satchel is based on a traditional Norwegian bag constructed of small, interwoven strips of birch bark. “The pattern on it is the one you see on Kristoff’s sash,” Sastrawinata-Lemay said, referring to the likable ice harvester who shares a kiss with Anna in the first film. A Norwegian satchel in their reference materials caught her eye. Sastrawinata-Lemay said, “I loved the texture. Anna is very textural and very earthy, so it just fits.”

Elsa’s Travel Dress

Elsa is the queen, so her travel dress has to communicate her exalted position. In many ways, it also functions as a uniform, with military-style epaulets. Adorned with snowflakes, the pale blue dress is set off by a flowing cape split in two in the back. “We got a little pushback from the directors, who were skeptical about how it might perform,” said Lee, but her husband, David Suroviec, a character technical director on the film, vouched for it. Onscreen, the halves of the cape look like wings. “We wanted something that would play in the wind, because fall wind was going to be a big element in the movie,” Lee said.

Elsa’s Illusion Neckline

Lee has loved illusion necklines — often a strapless look that involves sheer fabric — ever since she saw actress Mandy Moore sport one on the red carpet at the 2011 Oscars. “It was just stunning,” she recalled. Lee designed one for Elsa in the first movie that went unused; in “Frozen 2,” she finally got her wish. This one is fairly straight and cuts across her clavicle. “It’s a very sheer tulle,” Lee said, “but then layers of sequins and other beaded materials cascade down so it creates this seamless gradient up her body.” To Lee, the look of an illusion neckline is magical, and it seemed perfect for Elsa, a magical figure herself: “She makes her own clothes out of ice, so that was a no-brainer for me.”

Elsa’s Ice Boots

With Elsa’s raised hemline and travels across various terrains, “boots seemed the obvious direction to go,” Lee said. And not just any boots: ice boots with shimmering snowflake patterns from top to toe. She looked at all sorts of inspirations, including a thigh-high, jewel-encrusted pair from Alexander McQueen. “It seemed like almost the entire leg of this model was covered in crystals,” she said. “I thought if anyone deserves to wear something like that, it’s Elsa.” The heel is solid ice (like her snow queen shoes in the first film), but the rest of the boot bends and moves like suede. Lee wanted to give Elsa a look and feeling of strength but added, “The first question we ask whenever we’re designing something is, ‘Would I really want to wear this?’” Lee said. “And yes, I would wear ice boots. Or I would try, at least.”

This article originally appeared in

New Looks in 'Frozen 2' for Sisters on an Adventure

For two years, visual development artists Griselda Sastrawinata-Lemay and Brittney Lee designed and refined the costumes for Anna and Elsa, the heroines of Disney’s “Frozen 2,” due Nov. 22. The original “Frozen” outfits have been seen by millions, in movie theaters and on Broadway, in cosplay contests and on Halloween. So there was more than a little pressure to get the new looks right. On something as seemingly simple as Anna’s travel dress and accompanying cloak, the creators went through n...

“Ang basically went, ‘This is fantastic, but this one, don’t ever do that again,’” Smith said. “‘What you did there? I don’t want to see that in my movie.’”

Playing a young Will Smith at 51, the actor said, is a lot tougher than playing an older Will Smith at, say, 16. “You can’t fake innocence,” he said. “You can’t unknow things. When Will Ferrell plays a younger character, he knows how to get around his life experiences and understanding, he knows how to put this nothingness behind his eyes. But that’s a very difficult thing to do.”

Lee chimed in, “It’s not like, OK, act less good.”

Smith and Lee were in a suite at the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco, talking about how the two came together to make “Gemini Man.” Opening Friday, the film is a technological marvel: 4K resolution, shot in 3D, with the much higher frame rate (120 frames per second, versus the usual 24) Lee employed in his 2016 war picture, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” to mixed reviews. (Some critics found the hyper-realistic effect uncinematic.) Smith insisted that Junior was not a “de-aged” version of himself, but a “100% fully digital character” that any actor could “drive.” Albeit perhaps not as well as him? “Well, we hope not,” he laughs.

The two kept the tone light, even when the conversation turned to serious topics, like Lee’s initial experiences as an Asian director in Hollywood (“I figured, hell, if I can direct Emma Thompson with my broken English, I can do anything”) and #OscarsSoWhite. In person, Smith explodes into a room; Ang Lee, well, doesn’t. But after directing actors from Heath Ledger (“Brokeback Mountain”) to Chow Yun-fat (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), Lee knows what he wants out of a film and his cast and crew, and Smith clearly defers to him.

“My father was in the military,” Smith said, “and one thing he would always say to me was ‘If two people are in charge, everybody dies.’ Then he would say, ‘So am I in charge, or are you?’ For me, there’s a certain amount of surrender that you have to give if you really want to be a successful actor.”

The film began at Disney two decades ago, with assorted directors (Tony Scott, Curtis Hanson) and actors (Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Brad Pitt) attached at various points. But the filmmakers had to wait for the technology to catch up to what they wanted to put onscreen. Lee loves all this technological stuff, and believes the film’s high frame rate, and resultant immersive feel, is the wave of the future. “Ang is working with $100,000 cameras and the 3D and trying to get the focal points, and I’m like,” and here, Smith pulls out his cellphone and mimes taking a goofy selfie with Lee. “I felt like a 9-year-old on that set.”

Paradoxically, they’re the opposite off set: Smith is an avid user of Instagram, with more than 38 million followers, and geeks out over advancements like the “three-camera thing” on his recently purchased iPhone 11. Lee “can barely do email on my iPad,” he said.

In addition to compelling Smith to review scenes of his younger self, the film also made him consider his life from the perspective of Henry, an amiable working stiff who just wants to retire after a career of good and faithful murders. Not that Smith is looking to retire, but after years as king of the summer movie (his films have grossed more than $8 billion worldwide), the actor has made peace with the fact that he’s no longer the guaranteed hitmaker he once was. This summer’s “Aladdin,” in which he played the genie, was a billion-dollar smash and “Suicide Squad” in 2016 scored well, but “Concussion,” the year before, couldn’t break $50 million.

“We all get that opportunity, in our 40s or 50s, where you can either make the change, or you doom yourself to a lifetime steeped in your mistakes,” he said. “I’ve definitely felt that over the last five or six years, trying to make that transition from that youthful desire of ‘I want to be the biggest movie star in the world,’ to doing something that has a little bit more value beyond my ego.”

Even if he is feeling his years, in person, the “old” Will Smith doesn’t look all that different from Junior. “I knew there was going to be a photo shoot, so I sauced it up a little bit,” he admitted. But the sorts of stunts he used to do without blinking in “Bad Boys” and “Independence Day” now give him pause. “Definitely on this movie, I was so happy that Junior was CGI,” he said. “My back and knees don’t feel like the young Will Smith, I’ll tell you that much.”

Lately, many of Smith’s decisions have come with an eye toward his family. When asked about his boycott of the 2016 Academy Awards amid the #OscarsSoWhite backlash, he said, “Well, my wife took the stand first. And as a good husband, I supported her decision, which turned out to be correct, and the Oscars responded well and aggressively over the next couple of years.”

And his decision to play Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena, in the forthcoming biopic “King Richard”? “I have a 19-year-old daughter who is trying to make her way in the world, so I feel like my life has totally prepared me for this role,” he said.

The project represents the first time the actor has worked with a black director (Reinaldo Marcus Green) and, counting this film with Lee, the second time in two years he’s worked with a director of color. He said he was drawn to the story because of the tennis coach’s unshakable confidence. While he may not have raised his own kids with the level of confidence that Williams did — “he never doubted that he was creating the No. 1 and No. 2 tennis players of all time,” Smith said — he takes pride in the effort he and Jada have put in. “There was a lot of work that went into orchestrating their childhood,” he said.

Talk turned to another sports-related biopic, the 2001 “Ali,” which Smith said was one of his favorite films, as well as “the most difficult performance I’ve ever given.” There was the obvious physical requirement of learning not just how to box, but how to box like Ali, all while playing one of the most recognizable humans who ever lived (a task not so different from what the special-effects folks on “Gemini Man” had to contend with in creating a young Will Smith).

Smith connected to Ali’s swagger, although perhaps not for the reasons one might expect. “I felt like I could relate to when Ali would say, ‘I am the greatest,’ that he was saying it because he really felt like he wasn’t. That you have to keep saying it to yourself because you’re trying to prove it to yourself.”

As for Lee, he has a soft spot for “Six Degrees of Separation,” the 1993 adaptation of the play that Smith, then 25, starred in alongside Stockard Channing, Donald Sutherland and Ian McKellen. Though Smith was criticized for avoiding a kiss his gay character delivers in the stage version, Lee took a wider view.

“He didn’t have that persona yet, of Will Smith being Will Smith, carrying big movies,” Lee said. “But there’s something quite precious about how he is in that movie. It’s a dramatic piece, with many great actors around him, and he shines.”

After their interview, the two rushed across the street to the Moscone Center to make a midday appearance at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. There, among the tech bros and assorted dreamers, Smith and Lee chatted up their movie, with Lee extolling the virtues of his vision of cinema while simultaneously asking for patience with it. (“Give us some time,” he said, “we’ll get there.”) Smith served as the sole judge when four wannabe tech titans were given 40 seconds each to explain why their startup idea was the best. Smith was in his element, joking with the nervous contenders and charming attendees at the standing-room-only event, most of whom flooded out of the hall once Lee and Smith left.

After “Gemini Man,” Smith will play a suave supersleuth (who turns into a pigeon) in the animated “Spies in Disguise,” due in December, then reunite with Martin Lawrence in “Bad Boys for Life” and star as New York City crime boss Nicky Barnes in the biopic “The Council.” But despite having about a half dozen films in various stages of production, he insisted that he’d been trying to take it easy, or at least easier.

“Definitely, at this point in my life and career, I’m trying to do less,” he said. “I’m trying to cultivate a taste for stillness.”

“It’s not going well,” he admitted. “Not by any stretch of the imagination.”

SAN FRANCISCO — In “Gemini Man,” Will Smith plays Henry Brogan, a supernaturally gifted assassin, as well as his clone, Junior, who besides looking exactly like a young Will Smith, circa “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” is out to murder him. Before filming began, director Ang Lee curated a collection of clips from the early years of Smith’s three-decades-long filmography, including scenes from “Six Degrees of Separation” and “Men in Black,” and reviewed them with the actor, like a football coac...

Will Smith vs. Will Smith vs. Ang Lee

LOS ANGELES — Last February, Jill and Faith Soloway were filming the final episode of “Transparent” here at Paramount Pictures, in the studio’s cavernous Stage 14. It was the last day of a 20-day shoot, and Judith Light, as the nettlesome matriarch Shelly Pfefferman, was tearing through “Your Boundary Is My Trigger,” a show tune-slash-primal scream about how thankless it is to be a mother, and how Shelly gives and gives and gives, and for what?

“If I could, I’d shove you back inside me,” Light sang, using her hands to show just what such a procedure might look like.

After a series of energetic takes surrounded by a chorus line of women in bras and girdles and men in long johns and bunny slippers, Light, all smiles, came over to the monitors to see how everything looked, and to hug people and call them “sweetie pie.” Despite the lively dance number, there was a palpable sense that things were coming to a close, as longtime colleagues, some in costume, some in street clothes, said their goodbyes.

Welcome to “Transparent,” the musical, which will air on Amazon Prime Video on Sept. 27 and mark the end of the show’s groundbreaking run. Entitled “Transparent: Musicale Finale,” the 100-minute movie opens with a narratively expedient and also deeply symbolic move: the death of Jeffrey Tambor’s protagonist, Maura Pfefferman, who set the series in motion by coming out as transgender, an arc based on Soloway’s own family history. (The death happens off-screen — Tambor doesn’t appear in the film.)

Then, the concept goes, Shelly writes a musical about the family as a means of coping with the tragedy, much to the chagrin of her three grown children, played by Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass and Gaby Hoffmann.

“The kids go through the stages of grief and Shelly goes through, well, creative rebirth,” said the show creator Jill Soloway, who directed the episode and was one of the writers. (Faith Soloway, Jill’s sister, was the other.)

The series-ending movie is also a kind of final rebirth for the show itself, after its star Tambor, who won two Emmys and plenty of acclaim for his memorable portrayal of Maura, was fired after two “Transparent” colleagues accused him of sexual misconduct. At the time, “Transparent” had already been picked up for a fifth season, and the situation put its future in limbo.

“It’s difficult to describe, going through that journey of my parent coming out, creating the TV show, having that rise in the culture and then the pain and trauma of what happened with Jeffrey,” Jill said. “And then that place where we were all like, is the show going to be OK?”

With music and lyrics by Faith Soloway, the finale offered a joyful way to bounce back from the Tambor situation. It also served as a suitably inspired goodbye from an innovative show to the creatively fertile TV landscape it helped to shape.

“We realized that Faith and her music could create a new language for the show, where we could process feelings that probably couldn’t have been processed through traditional episodes,” Jill said.

When “Transparent” premiered in 2014, there was little like it on television. There had been trans characters before, in shows ranging from comedies (“Glee”) to soaps (“All My Children”) to dramedies (“Orange Is the New Black”). But most of them were in secondary roles or in single episode appearances.

Emmys soon followed, eight prizes out of 28 nominations, along with a string of three straight GLAAD Media Awards for best comedy series.

The finale arrives in a TV world far different from the one in which “Transparent” debuted. This year’s Emmy nominations were dominated by idiosyncratic streaming dramedies by women like Phoebe Waller-Bridge (“Fleabag”) and Natasha Lyonne (“Russian Doll”), while trans performers are tackling ever larger roles in series like “Pose” and “Orange Is the New Black,” which also just ended. “Transparent” and Jill, who identifies as nonbinary, deserve a lot of credit for leading the way.

“Prior to ‘Transparent,’ there was never a TV show that centered a transgender narrative as the central focus of the show,” said Nick Adams, GLAAD’s director of transgender representation. “Other shows have featured transgender characters, but they weren’t built around exploring a transgender person’s identity and their relationship with their family.”

And then, in November 2017, Tambor was accused by a cast member, Trace Lysette, and his former assistant, Van Barnes, of sexual harassment. He was fired a few months later. (Tambor has repeatedly denied the allegations.)

“Jeffrey’s behavior on set was really shocking to me,” said Alexandra Billings, who played Davina in the series and in the upcoming finale. “And difficult, which is why we took a year off. All of us just needed to get away.”

“But none of us, not Trace Lysette or Van Barnes or Zackary Drucker or Our Lady J,” she continued, “none of the trans people who worked on the show, allowed it to infiltrate our artistic spirit.”

Even so, a series about a trans parent’s journey could hardly continue without the trans parent, the creators and producers concluded. But how to close out such a pioneering series?

Faith always thought the series had the makings of a fine musical. It had outsized leads, a timely premise and ambitious themes. Over the years, the Pfeffermans had talked about everything from sex addiction to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Why not sing about it?

Faith actually had already written songs about the Pfeffermans over the years, catchy tunes with titles like “I Was the Lesbian First” and “Your Boundary Is My Trigger,” Shelly’s theme from the finale.

“This is what I do — I write music,” Faith said. “I walk around, and the world is a song.”

Even before the upheaval at the show, Faith had staged some of her Pfefferman tunes at Joe’s Pub in June 2017, in a revue she called “Faith Soloway and Friends: Should Transparent Become a Musical?” As Jill contemplated the end, the answer to that question suddenly became clear.

“We’ve been sort of contemplating, one day, Broadway,” Jill said. “But instead of contemplating, we just took all those songs and went, let’s make a movie.”

Back on the Paramount set, Faith was having her fake beard touched up. In addition to writing the show’s songs, she has a small role in the film as Shmuley, Shelly’s silent Uber driver and “former temple organist.” In one of the film’s many meta moments, Faith is writing the music for Shelly’s musical (and, today, playing piano in a dream sequence).

“I always fantasized about having a beard,” Faith said. “I love how it looks. But I hate how it feels! It’s super itchy.”

Why the beard? And why doesn’t Shmuley speak? “I think we wanted to leave it up to the imagination of the viewer what my voice would sound like, and what my gender might be,” Faith said. “Is Shmuley a trans man? A man? A woman playing a man?”

Shmuley is also the personification of Faith’s long-standing belief in the dictum that music takes over when words fail. “I think Shmuley is a little bit of a spirit,” she said.

Faith staged a second performance of her musical at Joe’s Pub on April 2, 2018, two months after Tambor was fired. This time, she called the show “Songs from a Hopeful Musical”; the transgender actor and activist Shakina Nayfack played Maura. “It felt like the first really celebratory night for the family after the show had gone through the trauma,” Jill said. “It was like, you know what? There’s something alive here. I was crying watching the songs.”

“My mom was there, and Judith was there,” she continued.

“And I was there,” Faith chimed in.

“And you were there, and you were there!” Jill exclaimed, pointing to various cast and crew members on the soundstage. “Everybody was there.”

One of the initial ideas for the finale was to have the singers who played the Pfefferman kids in the Joe’s Pub performances — Lesli Margherita, Erik Liberman and Jo Lampert, aka “the fake Pfeffs” — do the singing in a kind of musical within a musical.

“And then our actors were like, ‘We want to sing and dance, too,’” Jill said. “Everybody wanted a song, everybody wanted their moment.”

And nearly everyone got one. The finale opens with Landecker’s rendition of “Sepulveda Blvd,” an ode to one of LA’s less-celebrated streets, and ends with “Joyocaust,” a “turn that frown upside down” musical take on the Final Solution.

“Jews don’t have a drinking song, like Irish people do,” Faith said. “So it feels like a Jewish drinking song. It’s a combination of borscht belt humor, gallows humor and a drinking song for Jews.”

In addition to Pfeffermans real and fake, the show brought back many of the show’s most popular characters, including Rabbi Raquel Fein (Kathryn Hahn), Len Novak (Rob Huebel) and Shea (Lysette).

Nayfack, who starred as Maura in the Joe’s Pub shows, was on set, too, in her first ever appearance on “Transparent.” In the finale she plays Ava, a congenial weed dealer, and is also one of the show’s producers, alongside Billings. If the series would have started in 2019, it never would have cast a cisgender man in the lead, Jill said, and the show has consistently pushed to include trans people within its cast and crew.

“At some point, somebody told me we were the second largest employer of trans people, after the military,” Jill said.

Nearly all of the cast were here on the final day of shooting, whether they were needed or not. Chants of “Judith Light, Judith Light” went up following her final take, and scores of actors and crew members assembled for a group shot soon after. “All we’ve been doing is crying,” Jill said.

But according to several of the people in attendance, this isn’t the end of “Transparent,” not really. “The show isn’t ending, it’s transitioning,” Jill said.

“It feels weirdly like a bridge to something,” Billings said. “There was a lot of forgiveness on the set. If feels like the beginning of something else.”

Like maybe a theatrical version? That’s still a goal, the Soloways said. “I always wanted to do a stage version first,” Faith said. “And then we had, you know, the struggles we had last year.”

“If I were to get egotistical about it, there are certain plays like ‘Angels in America’ and ‘Rent’ that sort of named queerness and named AIDS,” she continued. “That’s what I would hope ‘Transparent,’ as a television show or as a musical, could help to do. To help people understand some of the things that we’re going through, as a culture, right now.”

After Times of Turmoil, 'Transparent' Goes Out Singing

(Fall Preview)

<h1>What happens when the creative heart and soul of a studio retires? If it’s Hayao Miyazaki, the studio shutters with him.</h1>

Not long after the legendary anime director, now 78, announced in 2013 that he was calling it quits (not his first time), his movie home, Studio Ghibli, halted production, ending its three-decade run with two Oscar-nominated films, “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” and “When Marnie Was There.” The news left animation fans across the globe wondering if the makers of such beloved films as “Princess Mononoke” and “Spirited Away” would ever release another feature.

The decision also raised other questions. Could Miyazaki — one of the world’s most ambitious and tireless directors — actually stay retired? And what would all those other creative minds at the studio do?

For Ghibli producer Yoshiaki Nishimura (“Princess Kaguya”) the answer was simple, at least in theory. He would create his own studio, pulling some of the top talent from Ghibli’s deep stable of feature film animators.

The result is Studio Ponoc, which began life in 2015 in Kichijoji, a neighborhood in western Tokyo that’s home to the Ghibli Museum and a major center for Japanese animation. Despite a tough start — low budgets and a reported staff of “two to three” — Ponoc quickly expanded its workforce to more than 400.

The studio’s first feature, “Mary and the Witch’s Flower,” was a hit, becoming one of Japan’s biggest box-office draws in 2017. Its second, “Modest Heroes,” was released in the United States on Thursday.

The transition looked pretty seamless until Miyazaki announced in 2017 that — surprise! — he was coming out of retirement to direct one more feature. Theories abounded: he wanted to create one more film for his grandson (the Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki’s explanation). The master was lured back by the sweet promises of computer animation (as revealed in the 2016 documentary “Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki”). He got tired of hearing up-and-coming animators dubbed the “new Miyazaki.”

“Honestly, I think Miyazaki isn’t Miyazaki unless he’s creating something,” Susan Napier, author of “Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke” and “Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art,” said. She added: “That’s where he is alive. He loves to create and imagine.”

What looked like an ending became something else — the continuing tale of two studios, one rising and going unexpected places, one resurrected and returning to its focus on a revered filmmaker, all set against the backdrop of a Japanese animation industry thriving as never before. (The 2016 box-office smash “Your Name” brought in $350 million to become the highest-grossing anime feature of all time.)

If Ponoc’s first movie, “Mary and the Witch’s Flower,” had elements in common with a previous Ghibli classic, 1989’s “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (the young female witch protagonist, the black cat familiar, the broom-borne aerobatics), its second, “Modest Heroes,” is something else entirely. First, it’s not a feature at all, but a collection of shorts, a format that Ghibli would never release in commercial theaters. If you want to see, say, “Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess” or “Water Spider Monmon,” there’s only one theater in the world where you can see them.

“Studio Ghibli does create short films for exhibition at the Ghibli Museum,” Nishimura said. “But these are all designed and planned by director Hayao Miyazaki. Other creators are not able to realize their plans.”

With “Modest Heroes,” some of those same artists are making shorts meant to be seen outside of a museum setting, and directing their own works for the first time.

In “Kanini &amp; Kanino,” Academy Award-nominated director Hiromasa Yonebayashi (“The Secret World of Arrietty”) tells the story of two crab brothers who encounter menacing minnows and stampeding raccoons (the crab boys are very, very small) on a quest to save their dad. In “Life Ain’t Gonna Lose,” animator and first-time director Yoshiyuki Momose (“Spirited Away”) finds high drama in a young boy’s life-threatening food allergy (fried eggs and squeeze-bottle mayo have never looked so fearsome).

And in “Invisible,” Akihiko Yamashita (“Mary and the Witch’s Flower”) tells the story of a guy who becomes the unlikeliest of animated action heroes. “'Invisible,’ with its motif of an invisible man, took on the considerable challenge of using hand-drawn animation to draw what is essentially undrawable,” Nishimura said.

The Ponoc films are a major departure from two of Ghibli’s most recent works: “The Wind Rises” ended with the hero losing his young wife to tuberculosis; “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” with the heroine leaving her earthborn parents to return to her home on the moon.

“Many of the stories we created at Studio Ghibli as the studio was winding down were about separation,” Yonebayashi, the director, said. “But as we started production anew at our new studio, we turned away from stories of separation to stories about coexistence and encounters.”

“Modest Heroes” was initially envisioned as four films, with director and Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata contributing a seven-minute segment based on a story from the Japanese epic “Heike Monogatari.” But that project was canceled when Takahata died in 2018 at 82. Nishimura worked with the director during the last 10 years of his life, and said he was inspired to join Ghibli after seeing Takahata’s critically acclaimed “Grave of the Fireflies” as a young boy. “When Isao Takahata died, I cried like I have never cried before, and I felt like a part of me had been chipped off from the shock,” he said. “Modest Heroes” ends with a dedication to him.

Studio Ponoc is in the midst of planning another short film and several feature-length ones; Studio Ghibli’s next film, “How Do You Live?,” based on a 1937 fantasy novel by Genzaburo Yoshino, is slated to open in 2020 or 2021.

The current boom in Japanese animation has led to a shortage of capable animators, a major issue in an industry notorious for its often breakneck work schedules. “Some people I met who had worked with Miyazaki on ‘Princess Mononoke’ are still traumatized by it,” Napier said. “Miyazaki himself acknowledged it. He used the term ‘boro boro,’ which means ‘crumbling.’ They really rode people to the limit there.”

Ponoc felt the pressure early on. “There was always a group of talented staff members on ‘standby’ from the beginning of production of director Hayao Miyazaki’s films at Studio Ghibli,” Yonebayashi said. “With ‘Mary,’ we had to start from scratch, with no one.”

In addition to releasing both of Ponoc’s films in the United States, the distributor GKids also holds the North American theatrical rights to Studio Ghibli’s classics (rights acquired from Disney in 2011). If the stars align, GKids could release a Ponoc film and Miyazaki’s latest “last” film at the same time. “Of course we would love to get” the Miyazaki film, the GKids president, Dave Jesteadt, said. “That would be a huge honor. But separate from the business side, I’m just very excited to see it, just like any other fan.”

And the prospect of Ghibli and Ponoc making films at the same time? “It was unexpected,” Jesteadt said. “Although maybe not so much in hindsight? There have been multiple times that Miyazaki has retired and unretired. But I think that while there’s great fellowship and a lot of shared animators and talent between those studios, it’s also great for both companies to have a little artistic competition. There’s always room for more great films.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="092277c2-66f0-44b4-8dca-a90b85fe2756" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/movies/studio-ghibli-ponoc-anime.html">The New York Times</a>.

A Tale of Two Studios Worthy of a Dramatic Anime Tale

The decision also raised other questions. Could Miyazaki — one of the world’s most ambitious and tireless directors — actually stay retired? And what would all those other creative minds at the studio do?

A tale of two studios worthy of a dramatic anime tale

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Robert Ito

Articles written by the author

New Looks in 'Frozen 2' for Sisters on an Adventure

Will Smith vs. Will Smith vs. Ang Lee

After Times of Turmoil, 'Transparent' Goes Out Singing

A tale of two studios worthy of a dramatic anime tale