Art-Eater ➡️⬇️↘️🐲👊 Profile picture
Your new fav Twitter account ✌️ Animator & #IndieGameDev I post long informative threads on Art & Animation @ZechaTactics @_LostandFoundCo https://t.co/YyxOOOWIxb

Jan 7, 2023, 9 tweets

The Hobbit with Studio Ghibli art style 🤩🌿

Explaining the joke: I keep seeing people share "AI" generated images of Ghibli x Lord of the Rings. But the thing is, this actually already exists. Ghibli was founded by animators from Topcraft, who animated The Hobbit (1977) for Rankin Bass. They did a beautiful job!

It's a beautiful little film! Look at how great the orcs looked!
#TheHobbit #Tolkien #Ghibli

Rankin Bass/Topcraft's adaptation of The Hobbit (1977) was followed up by The Return of the King (1980). So yeah, Ghibli x Lord of the Rings more or less already exists. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Now to be clear, most people associate Ghibli with Hayao Miyazaki, who did NOT work on the Rankin Bass/Tolkien films. And also not every ex Topcraft animator ended up at Ghibli.

However, Topcraft did animate Nausicaa (1984) and following the release of that film, 70% of their staff left along with Hayao Miyazaki to form Studio Ghibli.

Among that 70% was Toru Hara, the founder of Topcraft itself. Hara was also one of the principle animation leads on The Hobbit and The Last Unicorn. He was executive producer on Nausicaa (1984) and other early Ghibli classics. He was a co-founder and producer at Ghibli until 1991 twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

So all in all there is a lot of real overlap in staff between the films of Rankin Bass/Topcraft and the films of Studio Ghibli. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

I mean heck, Nausicaa technically was a Topcraft film! Ghibli didn't exist until after that film was released! But since it's so strongly associated with Hayao Miyazaki it's retroactively become a Ghibli movie.

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