Collection will include pieces of art never shown to the public before.

When an anime is being produced, the animators don’t just sit down at their desks and start drawing based on their own mental image of what the on-screen action should be. Instead, there’s a storyboard, sort of like a rough comic book with additional annotations about movement, sounds, and visual effects, which acts as a guide for the animators to follow.

Among the many things Hayao Miyazaki is renowned for is having produced some of the most thorough and evocative storyboards of any anime director, but even before the Studio Ghibli co-founder puts together an official storyboard, he’s dreaming and drawing to help solidify the sort of story, characters, and world he wants to create. These early pre-production illustrations, which serve as both a seedbed for more concrete ideas for the project and also a way to convey its core concepts and aesthetics to other members of the production team, are called “image boards,” and Japanese publisher Iwanami Shoten is gathering them for a new book line, the Hayao Miyazaki Image Board Series.

▼ Cover for the first volume of Hayao Miyazaki Image Board Series

For the series, Iwanami Shoten says it is including every single piece of image board artwork and storyboard which exists at Studio Ghibli, including a number of pieces which have never been publicly displayed prior to this publishing. In order to present the illustrations at or close to their original sizes, the books’ pages measure 35 by 27.7 centimeters (12.8 by 10.1 inches).

▼ Miyazaki’s handwritten, crossed-out notes in the lower-right illustration show that the floating island of Laputa was at one point going to be called Babel instead.

Each volume in the series will also include an interview with Ghibli’s veteran producer Toshio Suzuki, the studio’s chattiest representative.

Iwanami Shoten appears to be publishing the series’ entries in order of their related anime movies’ release, starting with the 108-page book for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and 136-page volume Laputa: Castle in the Sky going on sale December 5, priced at 4,200 yen (US$30) and 4,800 yen, respectively. The My Neighbor Totoro book is coming next, slated for March of next year, and Iwanami’s plan is to release Hayao Miyazaki Image Board Series volumes for every Ghibli film he’s directed (including The Boy and the Heron), as well as “Studio Ghibli movies Hayao Miyazaki was involved in the production of” (Whisper of the Heart, Tales from Earthsea, Arrietty, From Up on Poppy Hill, and “short films and early works” (such as anime shorts produced for the Ghibli Museum and music video On Your Mark).

Source, images: PR Times
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