10 Years of Blogging and 30 Years of Fireflies

I've just realized that I started this blog ten years ago! The very first post appeared April 9, 2008. I have certainly been more productive during the first half of this decade. Nevertheless, colorful animation expressions (despite its overlong name) is still active.

So in order to commemorate the anniversary, here are some reconstructed pan backgrounds from my favorite film by Takahata Isao who sadly passed away on April 5, 2018 at the age of 82. Co-incidentally, HOTARU NO HAKA (GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES) was originally released almost exactly 30 years ago in Japan (April 16, 1988).

I was particularly interested in those backgrounds that are revealed by autonomous camera movements that do not follow the movement of a character on screen (there is one of those as you can see below).

Click to enlarge!

In this one I have recreated a "standard" pan where the camera follows the characters across a background.

All backgrounds reconstructed from screengrabs taken off the GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES blu-ray for study purposes only.