How is the traditional ink animation made?

As for the creation process and principle of ink-wash animation, we must first make clear the difference between ink-wash animation and general animation. The process of making ink-wash cartoons is tedious and time-consuming, but not all the animation operations that people understand are completed on rice paper. Although we can see the effect of active ink dyeing on the screen, we can only find the real ink strokes in the static background picture, and only the background picture is the real China ink painting. In the whole process of film drawing, the original painter and animator always use pencils to work on the animation paper. All work is like drawing an animation. The original painter should design the main movements, and the animator should carefully add the intermediate pictures without any mistakes. If you really want to draw so many continuous movements with ink on rice paper, no painter in the world can consistently control the moisture of people or animals in continuous pictures.

A DVD I made not long ago revealed the secret of making ink-wash cartoons. The initial mystery of ink and wash comics focused on the photography department. Every character or animal painted on the animated paper should be colored layer by layer when it comes to the colored part. That is to say, the same buffalo must be divided into four or five colors, and at the boundary between the corner and the eyes, large pieces of light gray, dark gray or just Jiao Mo color should be painted on several transparent celluloid pieces respectively. Each piece of celluloid is shot repeatedly by an animator alone, and finally processed into an ink rendering effect through photography superposition. In other words, the buffalo we saw on the screen had to be "painted" by an animator. The process is so complicated that it takes enough time to shoot an ink cartoon to make four or five ordinary cartoons of the same length. It is no wonder that Japanese who have mastered ink animation skills don't want to try it easily after returning home. For a western cartoon filmmaker who pays attention to timeliness, they won't spend so much time decomposing, drawing lines, layering and coloring every picture, and shooting it again and again on the stage. China people are naturally patient. They can carve a Buddha statue on a hair and a scripture on a grain of rice. With the same intention and the cooperation of so many line drawing women workers, coloring women workers and animation photographers who never complain, ink and wash cartoons are also successful. Mao Dun, then Minister of Culture, was very moved, but he also wrote an inscription to Shanghai "Make a ghost scare".