Filmmaking isn’t just about telling a great story, it’s also about depicting a feeling. Be it the grueling day-to-day of going through life or fighting off an army of alien invaders, there is a lot of nuance inherent in the medium, even when we don’t think about it. In terms of animation, the job is that much harder, since everything is made completely from scratch.

As such, animators really have to go the extra mile to make everything work. It’d be easy to have a character hold a baby, but to actually give it a real heft and realism — that’s something else altogether. In the new anime film Mirai, one of the big challenges they faced — as the main characters were children — was accurately depicting them, as director Mamoru Hosoda explains in a new featurette:

“I wanted to faithfully depict childlike movement, mannerisms, and facial expressions. Things like the softness of the skin. Those were very important details to me. The characters in the film were based on my own children, so I brought my kids to the studio, where they were surrounded by animators, who proceeded to sketch pages of characters designs and not only draw, but hold the baby, for example, to get a sense of her weight, touch the baby’s face to check the softness of her skin, or determine how much thinner baby hair is than adult hair.”

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I haven’t seen the film for myself yet, but based on what we’ve seen in the trailers thus far, it’s clear that there was a whole lot of care that went into that very aspect. Additionally, if you’ve had an opportunity to check out Hosoda’s other works, like Wolf Children, you’ll know it’s a task he managed to accomplish on some level back then as well.

Do you think it paid off? Let us know your thoughts down below!

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SOURCE: GKids