Michiyo Yasuda

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Michiyo Yasuda spent five decades making colours think. Her work appears in some of the most beloved animated films ever made, from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Spirited Away, the film that won an Academy Award and introduced Studio Ghibli to audiences around the world. Yasuda was the woman behind every hue in those frames. Not the director, not the animator drawing characters, but the person who decided that a dress should be a particular shade of red, that a sky should carry the weight of grief, that a forest demon should feel ancient without being explained.

  She joined the animation industry in April 1958 with no clear idea what the job involved. She stayed for more than half a century. Along the way she worked with three of the most significant directors in Japanese animation: Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki, and Mamoru Oshii. She helped build Studio Ghibli from its first production and ran its colour department until she retired.

  How does colour become a storytelling tool? How did a woman who applied for a job she knew nothing about become an irreplaceable part of animation history? And what does it mean to choose a colour not just for how it looks, but for what a character is feeling?

• 2. Growing Up in Tokyo

  ›

  Yasuda was born in Nakano ward, one of Tokyo's densely settled inner districts. She spent her childhood and most of her adolescence in Higashi-fushimi, a neighbourhood that would later become part of Nishitōkyō city when that municipality was established in 2001. Her father held a position as a university professor, and she grew up in a household of six children: one older brother, one older sister, and three younger brothers.

  She later described her youth as very pleasant, full of freedom, with active encouragement to excel in whatever direction she chose. The family home and her schooling both provided an education in culture and the arts. That combination of openness and artistic exposure would matter later.

  When Yasuda was 14 years old, her parents divorced. In November 1954 her father fell seriously ill. Despite the divorce, her mother nursed him through his illness until he died in March 1955. The following month, April 1955, Yasuda enrolled in what would become her final phase of formal education. Without the means to continue into higher education after that, she began searching for work that could support herself financially.

• 3. The Ink and Paint Years

  ›

  Yasuda joined Toei Doga in April 1958, the month she graduated from high school. She has said openly that she applied without knowing what the work involved. What drew her was not a passion for animation, but a desire to avoid the jobs most commonly available to women at the time: positions like bank teller or store clerk. A creative field felt like the better path.

  She was placed in the finishing department, in the ink and paint section, working as a tracer. In traditional animation, a tracer transfers cleaned line drawings onto transparent cels, the physical sheets that animators paint and photograph frame by frame. It is painstaking, methodical work, and it put Yasuda at the centre of how animated images are physically made.

  Through her work and through union activities at Toei, she encountered two colleagues whose careers were also just beginning: Isao Takahata, who joined in 1959, and Hayao Miyazaki, who joined in 1963. She worked as a tracer on Hols: Prince of the Sun, a film directed by Takahata, for which Miyazaki served as one of the key animators and Yasuo Otsuka was animation director. The working relationships she built on that production endured for more than 40 years.

• 4. Colour in Charge

  ›

  After leaving Toei, Yasuda moved through A Production and then Nippon Animation, where she continued in finishing department roles on productions including 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother. The shift to full creative responsibility came on Future Boy Conan, an animated television series aired in Japan in 1978. On that production, Yasuda held charge of colour selection for an entire project for the first time. The role required her to choose colours for every object and character visible in motion across the whole series.

  In 1983 she took charge of colour design at Top Craft for the film adaptation of Miyazaki's manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. That film reached Japanese theaters on the 11th of March, 1984. The collaboration between Yasuda, Miyazaki, and their colleagues reached its next stage in June 1985 when Studio Ghibli was founded.

  From Ghibli's very first production, Castle in the Sky, Yasuda ran the studio's colour department. She also worked with Mamoru Oshii on his 1985 OVA Angel's Egg, released in December of that year. The list of films she coloured at Ghibli spans nearly the full catalogue, from My Neighbor Totoro in 1988 through Howl's Moving Castle in 2004, through Princess Mononoke in 1997 and Spirited Away in 2001, the film for which she provided colour designs on Miyazaki's Academy Award-winning work.

• 5. Colour as Language

  ›

  At Studio Ghibli, Yasuda's method was specific. She decided colours in direct consultation with Miyazaki, but she let the objects depicted guide her choices. The historical availability of materials and dyes in a film's time period shaped what colours were plausible. A scene set in the past had to feel like the past not through design gimmicks but through the palette itself.

  Mood and character psychology mattered just as much as period accuracy. The colour scheme for a film was built around the emotional texture of each scene and the personality of each individual character. Yasuda was constructing a visual grammar that a viewer would absorb without consciously recognising it.

  In the Los Angeles Times, writer Cristy Lytal captured Yasuda's own words on the subject. Yasuda said: "What I like best is when I am building up the colors in my head, thinking of how to get the tone worked out." She also said: "Color has a meaning, and it makes the film more easily understood. Colors and pictures can enhance what the situation is on screen." Lytal's own observation was direct: for Yasuda, colour is a storytelling tool every bit as powerful as words. Brian Camp and Julie Davis, writing in their book Anime Classics Zettai!, named Yasuda a mainstay of Studio Ghibli's extraordinary design and production team. She also worked with digital tools including Toonz software as the industry shifted away from ink and paint onto cels.

• 6. Retirement and Legacy

  ›

  Yasuda officially retired after completing work on Ponyo in 2008. That was her declared endpoint after a career that had run for five decades. She came back once more, contributing colour design to The Wind Rises, Miyazaki's Academy Award-nominated feature released in July 2013. In between those two films she also worked on the short Pandane to tamago hime, made for the Ghibli Museum.

  In 2011 the Japanese Movie Critics Awards gave Yasuda an Animation Lifetime Achievement Award, a formal acknowledgement of a body of work that most audiences never consciously registered. Her name appeared in the credits of Hols: Prince of the Sun in 1968 and in the credits of The Wind Rises 45 years later.

  She died on the 5th of October, 2016, at the age of 77. The filmography she left behind runs from theatrical features to television series, OVAs, documentary work, music videos, and short films made for a museum rather than a cinema. The question she spent her career answering, what a colour can tell you about a character or a world, remains at the centre of how animated films are made.