Depicting the Depth of Everyday Life: Sunao Katabuchi's Expressive Techniques

Building Stories as a Screenwriter

Essential to any discussion of Sunao Katabuchi's expressive techniques is the fact that he is an accomplished screenwriter as well as a director. He wrote for Hayao Miyazaki's television anime Sherlock Hound while still a student and has often continued to write the scripts for his own projects. Taking on both roles allows him to reflect a consistent artistic identity from the conception of the story through its visual expression.

Katabuchi's screenplays are characterized by carefully accumulating human drama within everyday details rather than emphasizing dramatic narrative peaks and valleys. In This Corner of the World centers on ordinary life continuing even under the exceptional conditions of war, gently portraying how the broader flow of history changes it. This inherits the style Isao Takahata demonstrated in television animation such as Heidi, Girl of the Alps, but Katabuchi develops it further, using meticulous, historically grounded everyday portrayals to create an immersion that might be called a false memory.

His screenplays also frequently portray protagonists' inner growth through small discoveries and changes in daily life rather than dramatic events. Princess Arete centers on the independence and growth of a princess confined to a tower, while Mai Mai Miracle focuses on the development of children's imagination and understanding of reality. Both are written quietly, avoiding excessive expression. This restrained screenwriting is the source of the distinctive depth and resonance of his work.

Living Landscapes Created Through Thorough Research

Particularly noteworthy in Sunao Katabuchi's expressive techniques is worldbuilding based on exhaustive research and historical investigation. When making In This Corner of the World, he collected and analyzed vast primary sources, including maps, photographs, diaries, and statistics from 1940s Kure, recreating its streets and people's lives as accurately as possible. His commitment to historical fidelity extends to details such as the positions of air-raid shelters, the distribution of bombs dropped in raids, and the contents of rationed supplies.

The same rigor appears in Mai Mai Miracle. Beyond recreating Hofu's landscape in the Showa 30s, from 1955 to 1964, he accurately depicts the town a thousand years earlier in the Heian period as imagined by Shinko, determining building arrangements from archaeological excavation records. This attention to details often omitted in ordinary animation gives his works their persuasiveness as living landscapes.

Discussing his commitment to research, Katabuchi emphasizes the importance of depicting life fully, an attitude he says he learned from Miyazaki and Takahata. His thoroughness sometimes surpasses even his mentors. His realism is distinctive because it aims not simply for precise background art but for a comprehensive recreation of an era's atmosphere, including the ways of thinking and values of those who lived within it.

Emotional Expression Through Physicality and Gesture

A characteristic of Sunao Katabuchi's animation is his attention to characters' physicality and gestures. He considers animation's great appeal to be making viewers feel that a human body is present even though they are looking at a drawing, and pays particular attention to characters' actions and movements.

In In This Corner of the World, for example, he pursues realistic motion in every detail to give each of Suzu's everyday movements a sense of reality, from cooking and washing clothes to moving a brush while drawing. This portrayal of the body serves not simply realism but also the important purpose of expressing characters' inner lives and feelings. Suzu's awkward yet positive approach to housework after losing her right hand and her continuing daily life while grieving the death of her sister-in-law Harumi convey inner emotion through physicality rather than direct emotional display, bringing deeper empathy and feeling to audiences.

This focus on bodily expression connects with what Katabuchi calls pantomimic expression. Techniques that make viewers believe something absent is really present, such as suggesting a wall in empty space or giving a figure on screen a sense of weight and texture, successfully give two-dimensional drawings a three-dimensional presence.

Bringing an Era to Life Through Sound and Color

The creation of a sense of period through sound and color is another significant feature of Katabuchi's expressive techniques. His works do more than visually recreate an era: they carefully research and reproduce its sound environment to create a fuller atmosphere. In This Corner of the World effectively uses radio programs actually broadcast at the time, military songs, and the sounds of busy streets, making them important elements in transporting viewers to 1940s Kure.

His use of color also shows distinctive ingenuity. While In This Corner of the World portrays the dark wartime era, colors suggesting hope and vitality appear throughout, including Suzu's drawings and the natural colors of changing seasons. This shows that human activity and a sense of beauty did not disappear even in wartime, while also expressing Suzu's positive personality.

In Mai Mai Miracle, the rural landscapes and children's everyday lives of the Showa 30s are rendered in bright, warm tones, while the thousand-year-old world Shinko imagines uses fantastical, mysterious colors. Deliberate changes in tone between eras and scenes deepen the story. Such integrated use of sound and color is an important factor in giving audiences an experience as though they were living in that time.