The Artist Who Colored Ghibli

A still from My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

We’re back! With the mid-year break over, the Animation Obsessive newsletter returns with a new issue. We’ve done a ton of prep over the past few weeks to get ready for the rest of our 2026, which begins today.

Here’s the slate for this Sunday:

• 1. On Michiyo Yasuda, a master of color.
• 2. Animation newsbits.
• 3. The last word.

Now, let’s go!

1. Ghibli’s colors

The art of Studio Ghibli isn’t really duplicable. People have tried: the internet is full of attempts, the bulk of them machine-generated. Even when those images vaguely recall Ghibli, though, it’s not so simple to paint light like Kazuo Oga did in My Neighbor Totoro, or to animate a smile like Makiko Futaki did across the ‘80s.

Many tiny and hyper-specific choices, down to the individual frames, made Ghibli films what they are. These choices came from stars like Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, but also, critically, from the way less famous people on their teams.

Among the most central of the less-famous people, for most of Ghibli’s existence, was Michiyo Yasuda. She’s far from a household name. Yet the one-of-a-kind colors of Ghibli’s animation, which shape the whole look and feel of its films, were selected mainly by her.

Miyazaki once called Yasuda “three times sharper and more particular than me.”1 Takahata, who worked with her on Grave of the Fireflies (1988), said glowing things about her abilities. He pointed to the worn-out pants of one character in that film:

[S]he chose a color that looked faded from many washings. Although I say ‘chose a color,’ in reality, she was choosing texture. Whether the fabric is thick or flimsy depends on the color chosen. Yasuda-san has a subtle perception that allows her to grasp such things.2

As Ghibli got established, its colors stood apart. They were more nuanced, more subdued, richer than the norm. That was Yasuda’s area. “The reason animation films suffer creatively has to do with the fact that they all use the same colors,” Miyazaki…