Shadows are an important stylistic device in animated films. They influence how the viewer feels and the extent to which they will perceive what they are watching as real, and sometimes they even tell their own stories. For her doctoral thesis at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich, Megumi Hayakawa from Japan is exploring the aesthetic impact that shadows can have in colour-animated films and what purpose they serve. “In Disney animated films, shadows are generally used to make scenes appear more realistic,” explains the DAAD alumna. “However, there are cases where the shadow depicts an entity in its own right, as in the Disney short ‘The Golden Touch’ from 1935. In a key scene, the shadow of the king is transformed into the Grim Reaper, predicting the king’s death.”
For her research, Megumi Hayakawa uses a special video analysis tool to analyse animated films. This VIAN (Visual Video Annotation and Analysis) software works through the film scene by scene, locating and classifying the shadows. The doctoral student is also a member of the Zürich research group SNSF Autonomous Film Colours in Animation and Digital Production, where she explores the technology and aesthetics of film colours in animated films made in the USA, Germany and Japan in the 1930s to 1960s. “Past research has tended to place the emphasis more on Western film productions. That’s why we decided to widen our study to include an intercultural perspective,” she says, explaining that the use of colour in old animated films depends mainly on the colourisation technique used at the time. “In Germany, the USA and Japan, important colourisation techniques were developed and established at different times.” She has found that colourisation is not culture-specific but that the colour of old films fades and changes over time, and also that digitisation changes the colour values.
Megumi Hayakawa’s passion for old animated films was ignited when she was a student working part-time at a film archive in Wiesbaden. She came to Germany on a DAAD scholarship in 2010 and did her master’s in art and cultural mediation at the University of Bremen, specialising in film mediation. She then studied film culture at Goethe University Frankfurt and has been a doctoral student at the University of Zurich since 2019. —