PONYO Comic Con 2009 Panel

Director Hayao Miyazaki made an appearance during the Disney Animation panel at Comic Con 2009 to promote his new movie, PONYO.

Here are a few highlights from the panel:

On how he develops his stories

“My process is thinking, thinking and thinking about my stories for a very long time, if you have a better way, please let me know.”

On his storyboards

“I think working on a storyboard alone is a custom that we have in Japan in terms of animation, it’s not just I that works that way. But since I’m slow it seems that I’m working on the storyboard all the time.”

On his inspiration for “Ponyo”

“The first idea I had for Ponyo was that the little boy picks up a frog, but I couldn’t work out a good character for a frog so I turned it into a goldfish.”

On why “Ponyo” is so colorful

“I wanted to make it a simple story and to show simplicity through the colors and also since the main character is red, I didn’t want her colors to overwhelm the others.”

On how early his composer, Joe Hisaishi, usually come in

“Fairly early on, to discuss what kind of film I’m going to make. I give him some notes regarding for example that Ponyo is a goldfish. What kind of world she lives in and what kind of motifs I want to see in the movie and then he composes the music, and then he does an image album of the music. We don’t put it all in the film, but it’s the music he thinks will fit best for the movie.

And then as the story develops, we discuss more specific uses of his music.

We do disagree sometimes. There is some music that I left out of “My Neighbor Totoro” and he is still telling me that I should have used that, but I insist that it was good that I didn’t use it.”

Ponyo comes out to theaters on August 14 2009. In the meantime, check out more pictures from the Ponyo Comic Con 2009 panel below.