Profile of "Topcraft" in "Animage"
In 1983 the manga serial Nausicaa had been running for
a year and a half in Animage, a Japanese monthly magazine devoted to animated movie features and tv programs in
Japan. The publishers decided that Nausicaa was popular enough to make an animated feature based on the story
in the manga with itscreator, Hayao Miyazaki, as the director. They hired the studio Topcraft to do the animation.
While Topcraft had done several high quality animated features before this, (most notably The Hobbit), all
of them had been for Rankin-Bass Productions and released only in the US market. Their work was unknown in Japan
itself. Animage wanted to show their readers that Topcraft was capable of doing a good job on the film
version of Nausicaa, so in the September 1983 issue they ran a multi-page profile of the studio and showed off their
previous project, The Last Unicorn. Ironically, The Last Unicorn has never to this day been released in Japan.
My friend, Ryoko, found this article and was kind enough to scan in several of the images and pages as well as provide me
with a translation of key parts of the article.
Kazuyuki KOBAYASHI, a key animator in the production of "The Last Unicorn", was asked to choose 3 scenes that he would
recommend to the readers of "Animage". Here are his comments about each scene. (Since Japanese sentences often lack a
subject, I used "we" as the subject, although it might mean "I".)
--Ryoko
1. Opening with beautiful background.
We tried to give the film a picturesque beauty.
Especially, in this opening scene of the ever-spring forest where the Unicorn lives is a world with beautiful backgrounds.
However, we had to make this film by making pictures to the sounds and dialogs that had been already recorded in the US.
So, if we wanted to show the pictures enough, or depict the characters' feeling well like in this scene, the director has
to try hard to find a way to do so. This lack of freedom of making images is a problem we have when we make animation with
foreign companies. (In most Japanese animation the dialog is recorded *after* the animation is done while in the US,
the dialog is done first and the pictures are animated to fit the voices. A trait of a good voice actor in Japan is that
they can make their lines fit the predrawn movements of the animated character's mouth. --MH)
2. The Red Bull
This is
the first scene we animated. We spent nearly two months just for this scene. It was difficult to express the massiveness
of the bull. When we made a test film of the scene we found that, although it moved well, it lacked the force of the charging
bull. So we talked to the photographer, and decided to shake the screen by moving the backgrounds.
It was hard since we had to draw a lot. It wasn't even 2's, but 1's. The running Unicorn was also animated in 1's.
The Princess Almathea is neither an animal nor a human. To get that feeling, we studied an actor's movements, such as
scratching his (her?) body as animals often do. But I'm not sure if we could convey our intentions well...(What does
he mean "animated in 1's"? Film runs at 24 frames per second, so if you draw a new image for each frame of film, that is
referred to as "animating in 1's". However, this obviously requires more work, more time, and more money. In general
only some feature animated films are done this way. (Only Disney has the money to do *all* their feature films "on the 1's".)
The rest of the feature animated films (and most tv animation) are done "on the 2's" meaning that each drawing is photgraphed
for *two* frames of film. The means the characters are moving at 12 steps per second, which give them a more "jerky"
motion compared to a character moving at 24 steps. "The Last Unicorn" was animated "on the 2's" except for a few scenes
like this one where it was changed to "on the 1's". By the way, really cheap tv animationis sometimes done on the 3's and
even on the 4's.--MH)
3. The last scene with numerous unicorns.
This scene took a lot of time. First, in the scene where Red Bull gradually retreats into the sea, we tried to make the waves
as realistic as possible. So we drew the waves that were absorbed by the sand, as well as waves going back to the sea. It was
still not realistic enough, though...<
p>Then we did the scene where unicorns appear from the waves. I never counted, but there should be 50-some unicorns per
drawing. And we tried to make each drawing presentable even as a still picture, so it was really hard to draw. In each
section [of the studio], in-between, tracing, painting, not to mention key animation, we could only finish a few cels per day.
However, as a whole, we couldn't express very well such things as the depth and rolling of the waves. In the last scene of the
collapse of the King Haggard's castle, we tried to make the scene show the massiveness and lingering effects by making the flow
of falling stone unbalanced, or having a stone fall after several intervals.
Here are some more images from the article. 
Back to The Last Unicorn website.
We tried to give the film a picturesque beauty.
Especially, in this opening scene of the ever-spring forest where the Unicorn lives is a world with beautiful backgrounds.
However, we had to make this film by making pictures to the sounds and dialogs that had been already recorded in the US.
So, if we wanted to show the pictures enough, or depict the characters' feeling well like in this scene, the director has
to try hard to find a way to do so. This lack of freedom of making images is a problem we have when we make animation with
foreign companies. (In most Japanese animation the dialog is recorded *after* the animation is done while in the US,
the dialog is done first and the pictures are animated to fit the voices. A trait of a good voice actor in Japan is that
they can make their lines fit the predrawn movements of the animated character's mouth. --MH)
