Oshii:
Commercial films cannot be separated from the society. They have themes because of their social backgrounds. They have social backgrounds because they need to appeal to the current audience. Commercial films, Evangelion or whatever, have sociality and contemporariness.
Oshii:
But we didn't have an opportunity to check the difference between art and commercial. There are few animation film festivals like NIAFF. Annie Awards and AIAFF are close to art. JIN-ROH was kind of accepted in Annecy just because it has an auteurist atmosphere.
Oshii:
If JIN-ROH were an action film full of gunshots, it wouldn't have been well-received. Evangelion or Gundam wouldn't be accepted either. Especially European people tend to separate art films from commercial films.
Mamoru Oshii:
Birds always represent something exist in the upper layer. Something we look up to. Something in another world. Maybe they're just such symbols, but I rather feel that the concept precedes everything...
Oshii:
... It is not that the metaphors or symbols of animals exist in the language system. I read in a book that words were invented from animals. "Run like a dog" or "sniff like a dog." Some people say such recognitions of animals made words or adjectives...
Oshii:
... I often talk about such things. It is not that aesthetics are used for categorizing some fundamental entities. Maybe the words are flying in the sky, not birds. I used to consider such things when I made Angel's Egg...
Hayao Miyazaki:
Nobody had tried the layout system in TV shows, so we decided to fully draw layouts in Heidi.
Animage:
What did you do when you developed konte into layouts?
Miyazaki:
In Heidi, we needed to depict the characters' slice-of-life emotion, ...
Miyazaki:
... so I made the angles as natural as possible. When konte artists drew extremely low-angle shots, I changed the camera height to natural eye-levels. I often changed camera positions. Low-angles feel like stageplays rather than cinema.
Miyazaki:
But eye-level shots make it very difficult. When you draw interior in such angles, floors and feet appear in frames. Those elements make it very difficult to draw perspective.
The interesting thing is that Miyazaki said he doesn't want to do key animation check because it makes him want to redraw them.
Miyazaki said that directors shouldn't do such things.
I wonder what the current animator-directors would think about it.
Miyazaki and Oshii talked about layout in the interview.
Good animators are not necessarily good layout artists.
Miyazaki said he wanted a younger version of himself as a layoutman.
Another interesting thing is that Miyazaki said he had never done a normal walking cut in his animator era.
He started to think about design of walking cuts, such as step length, in Heidi, and it was a painful task.
One of Hideaki Anno's biggest talent is that he chooses perfect terms from academic or other pre-existing vocabulary and drops those terms in perfect ways. The audience imagines that some important things are behind them. It's called "hattari" in Japanese.
I'm praising Anno in the thread, but it is not conveyed well to other fans. Hideaki Anno can choose perfect elements without ideological or philosophical background. He can show empty shells and move us with them.
When I say "Anno made those things because he had deep thoughts in his mind," it feels like I'm betraying my own experience. That is not what happened in NGE. Anno fooled me. And I was moved that he fooled me.