Daily Archives: April 9, 2022

The Garden of Words was created using a combination of hand drawn animation , rotoscoping and CGI, with the latter facilitating the realistic appearance of the film’s rain sequences. The director of the film, Shinkai made half of the film’s backgrounds by using his photographs as a base and then drawing over the top with Adobe Photoshop, while the other half were fictional settings created with traditional animation and computer graphics. For the rainy scenes at the park, the color palette was toned down, and pale green shading was used to match the gloomy, rainy weather, thereby increasing the detail and defining the characters. Matching the tones to the background and lighting helped highlight the characters’ faces. A novel coloring method was chosen from other coloring methods following careful testing. The method involved integrating the coloring for each character with the background, a “new innovation of sorts” that mimics the refraction of light on the skin as seen in nature. This was accomplished by coloring the outline of the character, including the lines drawn for the separation of lit and shadowed surfaces, and then incorporating the background color onto the surface.

Trnka made his last animated short an indictment of totalitarism, which is what caused him trouble in his native Czechoslovakia. The elements are few and the symbolisms to be simple, and his trademark ornaments are almost absent here, allowing the viewer to concentrate on the fable. A man in his room dedicates to pottery and to take care of his only plant. But suddenly a huge hand enters the room and orders him to make a statue of itself. The man refuses and he’s persecuted by the ominous gloved hand. In these days, where the impression of reality factor seems to be erased from most animations that try to replace the real world. The Russian government were doing the same actions towards the people as the “hand” did. Going against the law would mean execution of those people.