Studio Ghibli’s archive is the key to its 4K restoration process

When Princess Mononoke first debuted back in 1997, it marked a major turning point for Studio Ghibli. The studio had already dabbled in computer-generated imagery and digital compositing with films like Isao Takahata’s Pom Poko and Yoshifumi Kondō’s Whisper of the Heart. But Mononoke was the first instance of Ghibli really embracing CGI as a tool to enhance one of its hand-drawn animated projects — something that writer / director Hayao Miyazaki had staunchly opposed in the past.

The original prints of Mononoke that screened in theaters were already a gorgeous showcase of how seamlessly Ghibli could incorporate cutting edge technology into its traditional production workflow. But the studio plans for its upcoming Mononoke 4K restoration to be an even more visually-stunning example of how newer innovations can revitalize classic art. When I recently sat down with Ghibli’s vice president Atsushi Okui, who previously served as the studio’s director of photography for animation and worked on films like Porco Rosso and Howl’s Moving Castle, he told me that the process of restoring Mononoke in 4K actually began about a decade ago when the standard was first starting to become more widely adopted.

“We scanned Mononoke over 10 years ago, and I’m so glad that we did it in 4K then because it’s only now that people are starting to see the format’s effectiveness,” Okui said. “The new restoration really speaks to the great potential that celluloid film has because it really, really works for the big screen.”

Depending on how a movie has been preserved, there are different ways production houses can go about restoring and remastering them. In instances where a film’s original negatives have been excessively damaged or lost, studios can use exported prints to create upscaled visuals at higher resolutions. With artificial upscaling, the end result always involves some degree of a computer making informed guesses about what individual frames should look like based on the limited visual information that’s available. But Mononoke was shot on 35mm film, and because Ghibli preserved the initial negatives, it was able to produce 4K scans in line with Miyazaki’s original vision.

“Many of the things that you’ve seen before were delivered in 2K DCPs [Digital Cinema Packages], but it’s not that they were made in 2K,” Okui said. “Because Mononoke was shot on 35mm film originally, the data scanned was of 4K quality. What we’ve done this time around is incorporated that data into the final print and delivered the completed film in 4K.”

Rather than adding new detail or — as was the case with the recent Interstella 5555 remaster — awkwardly trying to approximate the original’s visuals, the new 4K Mononoke restoration sticks to faithfully presenting the film as its creative team intended. Its clarity wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for Ghibli making sure to preserve its negatives with care. And with Mononoke heading back into theaters on March 26th, the studio is already thinking about plans for its next restored release.

While there are no announcements about which movie Ghibli wants to tackle next, Okui says “that’s something we plan to discuss going forward.”