DMW: Digital Music W...

Four years since the release of "Howl's Moving Castle", Oscar Award winner Hayao Miyazaki returns to the big screen this weekend in Japanese theatres with the unspooling of.... wait for it.... "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea" a.k.a. "The Little Mermaid". Yeah, Disney is definitely all over this one.

Here's the trailer as featured on a Japanese morning show (you will have to suffer through their banter as they suggest that characters are moe kawaii and make reference to the 9-year-old girl singing the theme song).

But what makes this release different from "Howl's..." or Academy Award winning animated feature "Spirited Away" is the fact that Miyazaki has shunned digital animation for hand-drawn pencil animations -- returning to good ol' pencil art. The entire project , which took about one and a half years to produce by 70 staff members, was drawn by hand. About 170,000 hand-drawn cells were used to animate characters, objects and background. The film also uses numerous other manually drawn pictures as the background -- with the succession of screens creating a slightly jittery atmosphere to the film.

"All things in the world are moving. I became an animator in order to move everything in the world. It's not only human characters that move," Miyazaki said. "Not only grass vacillates; the ground can move, too. I think delicate fluctuations give life to our production," he said. "The world is a living thing. Small children know it."

The director said he has been working to "create a world that five-year-olds understand."

"Five-year-old kids do not think with reason but rather they understand the true nature of the world instinctively," he said.

In a message posted on the Ghibli website, Miyazaki said the upcoming film "animates the sea not as background but as a main character."

I anticipate this to be as magical as "My Neighbor Totoro" or "Kiki's Delivery Service". It will be kawaii.

Source: Yahoo News