My Experiences at Disney (1991), by Makiko Futaki
A Guest Post to the Riding with the Mouse Net-log by animator Terrell Little
Hello! My name is
Makiko Futaki, and in 1991 I was an animator for Studio Ghibli in Tokyo. I had worked by that point on many anime, most recent at that point on
My Neighbor Totoro and
Kiki’s Delivery Service.
Makiko Futaki (Image source “southernfriedcommonsense.wordpress.com”)
Animation was my childhood dream. I worked on so many films, including Akira, which I understand is quite popular in America. I had worked with Miyazaki-san since
The Castle of Cagliostro. I worked hard and was so excited when Studio Ghibli hired me! The job was very hard, but I love to draw and I am good with the computers, so I did well. And when Miyazaki-san announced the plan to send some animators to California to do animation for Disney, I was so excited!
I had never been to America. Hokkaido seemed far away! California was another planet!! At first it did not seem so strange when I got there, because airports look alike and John Henson and Brenda Chapman were there to greet us. I had already learned some English in school, and we had a “crash course”, but even so John could speak some Japanese.
The roads looked mostly the same as Tokyo, only they drive on the wrong side of the road! But the drive was very scary! They drive fast in Tokyo, but they drive decently. Americans, at least in LA, drive insane! They drive too fast and pass on the wrong side! They drive while talking on phones! They cut each other off all the time! Motorcycles drive between the cars down the [lane marker] lines! They drive cars so old and rusty that I cannot believe that they don’t break down. They get in fights at merges over who goes first, making the merge take longer. It makes it slower for both of them and everyone else! Why? And they honk their horns all the time, even when everyone is in traffic! No one is able to go forward! Why do they honk?
America is loud. People talk loud, they laugh loud, they yell all the time! They argue loudly over pointless opinions like which movie is better or what TV show is better. It is overwhelming! I thought Tokyo was loud! The food portions are ridiculously big and it is no wonder so many Americans are fat. LA is also very dirty! People throw their trash on the ground even when receptacles are just three meters away! They spray paint on walls all of the time, not to make art, but just to put their initials on the wall. Do not ask me about toilets in America! Sunset Strip is the worst of all, and it smells like throw-up and urine. So many people sleep on the streets. Why doesn’t anyone help them?
John and Brenda took us first to an apartment building they rented for us. My room was very big, even though I had to share with only one person. Every building is big in America, probably because there is so much space! The next morning, we went to Disney Studios.
The biggest change from Japan for me was at Disney Animation. I expected what we have in Studio Ghibli: quiet rows of artists, working quickly and quietly, making a movie. But no, it is also loud! The American artists laugh and joke instead of drawing! They throw paper at each other or waste time drawing mean cartoons about their managers! But no one gets fired! I was working hard making drawings for
The Bamboo Princess when ka-blam! My neighbor Ted’s desk exploded! They all laughed! Ted laughed about it! “Don’s alarm clock!” he said. I don’t know how they got anything done, but somehow, they did!
Ted kind of scared me at first. He had long hair and ear rings like a pirate and he had all of these tattoos! I was sure he was a gangster, but no, he said he was a skateboarder. Like all of them he laughed loud and told rude jokes. He called me “Mak”. In time I became less intimidated and I found that he was really friendly and gentle. Brenda Chapman worked in our unit and became my mentor as well as sponsor. She could be just as loud and crazy as the men, which was amazing to me. She worked to help me “loosen up”, which is an important thing for Americans. They took me to the bars and I found it strange that Americans like to get drunk as a goal. In Japan people drink too much, of course. Becoming drunk happens as a side effect of socializing, but in America getting drunk became the objective, not the byproduct!
My big lesson: Americans value their own needs and wants highly. In Aichi Prefecture where I was born, we are taught to think of other’s, particularly our elders’ needs and wants first, and my deciding to not join the family business and instead become an animator made me quite the little rebel! But in America selfishness is seen as a virtue and being older does not mean you automatically get respect. Quite opposite in some ways! You are expected to go your own way and if you just do what your parents or grandparents want you become a “square”.
What was really hard for me was the use of first names with everybody. At Disney everyone called the executives by their first names with no titles! CEO Ron Miller was just “Ron”. Animation Vice President Roy Disney was just “Roy”. Studio head Jim Henson was just “Jim”! It felt disrespectful! When I heard Brenda and Ted calling the executives Ron and Jim behind their back, I was shocked, but not nearly as much when they called them that to their faces! I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Mr. Jim Henson told me to call him “Jim” and said that calling him “Mr. Henson” made him feel old, the implication being that to be old was not a good thing. Still, I found it uncomfortably familiar, so we compromised and I called him “Jim-san”, so it was at least respectful. Roy Disney became “Roy-san”, but Ron Miller accepted “Mr. Miller” since he said “Ron-san” made him sound like a cigarette lighter. I had never heard of Ronson Lighters, which no one makes anymore, so they had to explain the joke to me.
And this part will be strange for Americans: when I was complimented on my work, I got upset, which surprised everyone! I thought that
they were mocking me! Then they would say, “No, really, we mean it as a compliment!” which did not make things better. I liked Jim-San for that reason. He’d nod and grunt, and that was when you knew that he approved.
As I mentioned earlier, our group was working on
The Bamboo Princess. It was a joint production between Disney and Ghibli, with Takahata-san developing the story and art direction with Ron Clements and John Musker. Roy-san had wanted to do a new Disney Princess movie for a while. There had been princesses in
Aladdin and
Mort, but neither had been the main character. Jim-san suggested they do the legend of Kaguyahime, as they’d played with it on
Big Bird in Japan three years earlier. Since Takahata-san was also a fan of the legend, he convinced Jim-san to do it together. I believe that he wanted to make sure that Disney didn’t mess things up!
The Bamboo Princess was to be a “hybrid animated feature,” like
Mort or
A Small World where hand drawn and painted cels were mixed with computer animated framing and backgrounds. Since I had experience with the Disney Imagination Stations, albeit Japanese ones that used hiragana and katakana, I worked in framing and compositing as well as providing original concept sketches. In Japan you are judged by the number of drawings you make, but at Disney you are judged by how much film ends up in the “can”. It is a more practical approach since some drawings are more complex than others. There is also a very good workflow between the inbetweeners and storyboards and artists and ink & paint. Despite all of the chaos and joking, the process flowed well, and we got a lot done. I vowed to take these ideas back to Ghibli with me.
The “hand animation” team was starting work on
The Little Mermaid. The Disney Digital Division, or “3D”, was also working on another digitally inked and painted film like
Aladdin called
Shrek. It was based on a children’s book. Steven Spielberg had bought the rights from William Stieg the year before, and thus it was produced with Amblin. With my computer experience, John Lasseter asked if I wanted to come over to
Shrek, but Brenda told me I should stay on
The Bamboo Princess and not work with John Lasseter. She didn’t say why and I didn’t have the nerve to ask. I assume because the humor was so crude and juvenile at times that perhaps she thought I would be shocked and offended. Please, I have an older brother!
Sort of this…
Instead, I will talk about
The Bamboo Princess, which was beautiful. We deliberately blended the styles of Disney and Ghibli with a few scenes done in a traditional ukiyo-e style. We followed the legend fairly closely, with the Bamboo Cutter chopping down a large bamboo and finding the baby Kaguyahime, he and his wife raising her, her growing and maturing quickly to an adult in three months, the powerful princes (reduced to only three for time) wooing her but failing in the quests she sends them on, the Emperor himself wooing her, and her eventual return to the moon where she was from. There was much debate on whether to stick with the original bittersweet ending where she sadly leaves earth to return to the moon, or whether to have her stay on earth with her adopted parents, which would be more in keeping with the Disney “happy ending” tradition. They eventually chose a more ambiguous ending where Kaguyahime is looking down from the moon and her parents are looking up, and this changes to a scene where they all joyously dance together in the moonlight. Children mostly interpreted it as they were together again, but adults saw it as a dream, wish, or symbolic.
There were different voice actors for the Japanese and English versions. Since this netlog is mostly for US Disney fans I will speak to the English-speaking actors. Takahata-san wanted Nisei and Sansei voice actors, not white Americans. Janice Kawaye voiced Kaguyahime as a child and as an adult. Pat Morita voiced the old Bamboo Cutter and Takayo Fischer voiced his wife. Rodney Kageyama, Brian Tochi, and George Takei voiced the three princes. Clyde Kusatsu voiced the Emperor. And James Shigeta voiced Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto, the Emperor of the Moon. The songs were written by Yoko Ono in both English and Japanese. This upsets a lot of people, but I don’t get why. The Beatles broke up because John and Paul argued too much, not because of Yoko Ono, but even if you blame her, it doesn’t make the songs less poignant. They were beautiful songs. Alan Menken did the music for them. Why do people complain?
Paku-san also insisted that the animation match the language in both English and Japanese, so I was in part recruited to make sure that the mouth movements of the animation matched the phonetics and timing with both the English and Japanese dubs. You didn’t want Kaguya’s mouth moving when she was not speaking in either language! Sometimes this was easy, such as having the woodcutter say “aye” instead of “yes” so that it matched the Japanese “hai”. Other times it was a challenge, particularly in long sentences. Finding different ways to say the same thing so that the two versions matched was difficult. People today love the lyrical, flowing language in the film. In part it was to make sure that the mouth motions matched!
I am quite proud of what we did with
The Bamboo Princess and I feel that it works well as a movie both in Japan and the US. But with the end of the film came the end of my time in America. I had worked hard and not seen much of America; there is just so much to see! It is a very big country. But I saw much of California and some of Arizona and saw the giant Sequoias and Grand Canyon, which were spectacular, and Lake Tahoe, which was serene. Returning to Japan was for me bittersweet, much like it was for Kaguyahime when she returned to the moon. I have returned to America at times since, but back in Japan I took much of what I learned from Brenda-chan and Ted-chan and Roy-san and Jim-san and combined it with what I learned from Miyazaki-san.
I was able to share those lessons with Ghibli, but more importantly I took those lessons with me when I and my friends in 2012 founded our own anime studio in Japan! Studio Ai (合), we called it, for it harmoniously brings many people and many spirits together, and because it sounds like Ai (愛) or love. We did this because we wanted to…for us! To be true, the Americans are right in that sometimes doing something for yourself is important. After all, didn’t Miyazaki-san and Takahata-san come to the same conclusion when they decided to found Studio Ghibli?
We just did the same!
