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The Hardest Cries I Ever Animated


“We don’t want watery, thin tears that just stream down the face; I want thick surface tension.”

In some scenes of director Yoshifumi Kondo’s film, Sugar explains, Ghibli’s artists chose to draw the lines of the inside of their weeping characters’ eyes as red instead of the usual black. Based on what we’re hearing, the different levels, the volume, the emotion — we’ll decide how much to open their mouth, what the performance is going to look like, how often they blink, what their eyes are doing, and even the angle of their eyebrows. When Robaire and 4*TOWN finally come up onstage, we do this really, really fast snap zoom into Mei and her friends’ faces where they react and start crying tears of joy.

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