Having worked on many releases of American animated movies internationally (for DreamWorks & LAIKA primarily), an interesting extension of this is the reaction of Japanese audiences to American animation. Historically, much highly successful US animation has struggled commercially in Japan (while others have been hugely successful there too) and there’s been much work done (a small amount of it by me!) to understand the issues better.
As an aside, LAIKA’s “KUBO & The Two Strings” is an interesting combination of animation cultures. Different technique as it’s stop motion animation, but Travis Knight, the director, is a great student of Japanese as well as American animation. Working on getting that movie released in Japan was a fascinating experience. Going in, we weren’t sure how the Japanese would react to it but, while no blockbuster, it was picked up by one of the major local distributors and ultimately proved modestly successful and well respected there.
Really enjoyed reading this, it gave me more incentive to revisit Ghibli- that sense of pantheism that permeates the films and restores humans to a more natural order of things is fascinating.
Having worked on many releases of American animated movies internationally (for DreamWorks & LAIKA primarily), an interesting extension of this is the reaction of Japanese audiences to American animation. Historically, much highly successful US animation has struggled commercially in Japan (while others have been hugely successful there too) and there’s been much work done (a small amount of it by me!) to understand the issues better.
As an aside, LAIKA’s “KUBO & The Two Strings” is an interesting combination of animation cultures. Different technique as it’s stop motion animation, but Travis Knight, the director, is a great student of Japanese as well as American animation. Working on getting that movie released in Japan was a fascinating experience. Going in, we weren’t sure how the Japanese would react to it but, while no blockbuster, it was picked up by one of the major local distributors and ultimately proved modestly successful and well respected there.
Really enjoyed reading this, it gave me more incentive to revisit Ghibli- that sense of pantheism that permeates the films and restores humans to a more natural order of things is fascinating.