English writing about Ghibli reaches for Japanese terms constantly and defines them rarely. Some of that is precision — there is no clean English equivalent for sakuga. Some of it is atmosphere. Here they are, with the atmosphere removed.
Production terms
- E-konte
- Storyboard. At Ghibli this functions as the film's script: every shot drawn small, with timing, dialogue and camera notes. Miyazaki draws his own, during production.
- Genga
- Key animation — the drawings that define the extremes of a movement. The authored part of the animation. A genga artist is a key animator.
- Douga
- In-betweens and clean-up: the drawings that carry the movement from one key to the next, brought to a consistent line. Traditionally the entry-level role, and the one Ghibli chose to train in-house.
- Sakuga
- Literally "the drawing." In fan usage, animation considered as craft — a "sakuga cut" is a passage of unusually accomplished movement, discussed in terms of who animated it. It is the vocabulary of people who watch animation the way others watch cinematography.
- Sakuga kantoku
- Animation director. Not the film's director: the person responsible for keeping character drawing consistent across everyone's work. Yoshifumi Kondō held this role on several major Ghibli features.
- Layout
- Each shot worked up full-size before animation: camera position, staging, what the background must contain. The stage at which Ghibli's schedules most often bottleneck, because Miyazaki checks them personally.
- Cel
- Short for celluloid — the clear acetate sheet a drawing was traced and painted onto, photographed over a painted background. Ghibli moved to digital ink and paint around the turn of the millennium; the term survives the material.
- Multiplane
- A camera setup that separates artwork onto physically distinct panes at different distances and moves them at different rates to create parallax depth. Now done digitally, but the layered thinking is unchanged.
- On ones / twos / threes
- How many film frames each drawing is held for. Film runs at 24 frames a second, so "on twos" is twelve drawings per second — the theatrical standard. Ghibli drops to ones for movement that must feel continuous.
- Image album
- Music written from the storyboards, before the film is finished, released as a standalone record and fed back into production. Standard practice at Ghibli since Nausicaä.
Critical and cultural terms
- Mono no aware
- Roughly, a sensitivity to the transience of things — the particular feeling attached to something precisely because it will not last. Central to Takahata's work especially. Not the same as sadness, and not the same as nostalgia.
- Ma
- Interval, gap, the space between. In Ghibli films it describes the deliberate stretches with no dialogue, no music and no plot advancement. Miyazaki has discussed it directly as a structural principle rather than a stylistic tic.
- Satoyama
- The managed landscape between mountain and farmland — coppiced woods, terraced paddies, irrigation channels — maintained by human use over centuries. It is the actual setting of My Neighbor Totoro and the thing Pom Poko is about losing.
- Kami
- The spirits or deities of Shinto — of a river, a mountain, a rock, an old tree. Not gods in the monotheistic sense and not benevolent by default. The bathhouse in Spirited Away is a spa for exhausted kami.
- Yōkai
- Supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore, ranging from the frightening to the absurd. Distinct from kami. The tanuki of Pom Poko and much of Spirited Away's populace come from this tradition.
- Tanuki
- The Japanese raccoon dog — a real animal, and a folklore trickster credited with shape-shifting. Regularly mistranslated as "raccoon" or "badger," which loses the folklore entirely.
- Shōjo
- A girl, and by extension a category of manga and animation aimed at girls. Relevant because Ghibli's protagonists are so often girls in films that are not marketed to any one demographic at all.
- Onsen
- A hot spring, and the bathhouse built on it. Bathing is communal, washing happens before entering the water, and the social conventions are worth reading up on before you go.
- Seiyū
- Voice actor. In Japan a distinct and prestigious profession. Ghibli has often cast live-action film actors instead, which gives the performances their characteristic flatness — deliberately, against industry convention.
A word of caution about mono no aware in particular. It gets deployed in English film writing as a sort of all-purpose stamp of Japanese profundity, usually by people who encountered it in another piece of film writing. It is a real term from a real critical tradition, associated with the eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga and rooted in readings of Heian literature. If you are going to use it, it is worth reading about it properly first — a caution I am directing at myself as much as anyone.
Definitions here are working ones aimed at English-speaking readers, not scholarly ones. If a definition is misleading, tell me: contact.