Notes on Nausicaa graphics by Tom Mitchell:

...but first, an introduction.

            In 1985 I first discovered Japanese animation from Japan for myself via laserdiscs imported from Japan. I was immediately hooked on anime when I first saw the Macross Movie, and then Miyazaki's "Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind", and Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's "Arion". Having always loved animation, and just getting into computer graphics at the time, this was quite an inspiration to me!

            From about 1985 to 1993 I drew many anime fan art pictures on my computers. I had started drawing on computers in the early 80's when I got my first Atari 800 8-bit computer, and then I got into the Atari ST, and then into Windows PCs and the Macintosh, where I am now.

            The NAUSICAA.GIF and NAUSC01A.GIF pictures you see here were done in about 1987. Takayuki Karahashi was the founder of the anime group on CompuServe, and my anime sensei. He introduced me to Miyazaki's works and helped me in my early days of learning Japanese. As an anime fan, Taka is quite famous now as he is now one of the editors and translators at Animerica Magazine, and often serves as a translator for visiting guests from Japan at major anime conventions in California.

          As for me, as productive anime fan I've settled in as one of the sysops of our anime group on CompuServe, which is now known as the digital anime club called "The CompuServe Anime & Manga Forum". I was well known for writing and illustrating the first regular digital anime newsletter online known as Anime Stuff. I may start publishing it again someday! (^_^)

          Together as fans, Taka and I collaborated on two important fan activities. First, we were the first fans to notify and show Miyazaki and Ghibli what had been done to his masterpiece film "Nausicaa" here by sending him a copy of the mangled US "trashlation" (as Taka would put it) of New World's "Warriors of the Wind". This certainly made Ghibli change their notion of control and presentation of their works abroad! (Awww. More work for Disney...) Secondly, we were responsable for the definitive translation script of the Macross Movie.

          And we liked drawing with our computers. Below are notes on the two Nausicaa pictures I worked on. These are the only two pictures of the Princess that I had ever done in pixels. I might have to try again these days, what with all the cool new computer graphics stuff I have!

-Tom Mitchell (Tomzer1@compuserve.com)

NAUSICAA.GIF: Takayuki Karahashi did the line art drawing of Nausicaa and Teto, and I drew the background and added the color. He used his classic monochrome Mac to do the line art, and I colored it with my Atari ST a year later. You see, originally when CompuServe pioneered online graphics, the first format was monochrome bit-maps only! This was called the RLC (Run-Length Encoded) format. Taka did a few pictures in this format around 1985. A couple years later, Compuserve invented the color format GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) and I re-did, with his permission, a couple of his pictures in color, adding some additional background elements. The above picture is the result.

NAU01A.GIF: Again, more history of bit-mapped personal computer graphics... (^_^) This illustration was orginally drawn in 16 colors (out of a palette of 512 colors) on an Atari ST with Tom Hudson's famous graphics program D.E.G.A.S. Of course these graphics look small today because back then, 320 x 200 pixel displays were pretty common for high-color graphics. Not long after I drew the picture, a program called Spectrum 512 came out that allowed one to paint with all 512 of the Atari ST's colors on the screen at the same time! It could also be used for smoothing the jagged edges (or anti-aliasing) in low resolution graphics. That's how this graphic was processed.

            At the time I was drawing pictures like this, I was getting formal art-training to improve my skills. I had always like to draw, but gave it up as my life was occupied with other things. When I was little, I wanted to be an animator, but at the time, the US animation scene was very depressed, and I got occupied with computers, business, and school... So I didn't have much time or interest to draw. Anime and computers inspired me to start drawing again. What I did with this picture was similar to what I had done with all my other pictures at the time -- do a freehand portrait of an anime character, drawing with the computer's mouse. (And people always crab that they can't draw with a computer mouse...) My focus was always to be as if the character was sitting for me for a portrait, and I was also trying to emulate anime cel colors. This illustration was based on a wonderful poster by Miyazaki of Nausicaa that was sold at the time. The original is water color, but I drew the pose as an anime cel-style portrait.

(my thanks again to Tom for taking the time to type these statements)

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All text and artwork, unless otherwise specified, by Griffin Waldau. Updated December 20, 2000.

e-mail: griffin@waldau.com

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