Skip to main content

Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli Releases Free Backgrounds for Virtual Meetings: Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away & More

To a degree that surpasses any other studio in animation history, Studio Ghibli has created a reality of its own. All of its fans around the world appreciate the artistry of its films, directed by such luminaries of Japanese animation as Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and many appreciate it so fervently that they'd prefer to occupy any of Ghibli's worlds to this one. The studio has responded to their desires by not just continuing to produce motion pictures — the "retired" Miyazaki is now at work on his latest, How Do You Live? — but by authorizing a wide and ever-changing range of merchandise, and even building a museum outside Tokyo and a theme park outside Nagoya.

Alas, like most museums, Ghibli's is temporarily closed. Neither the Ghibli theme park nor How Do You Live? will open any time soon, and even if they could open today, it would hardly be an opportune time to do so. With so few of us anywhere able to go to movie theaters, let alone theme parks (though we can now, at long last, stream Ghibli movies online), we have to enter the realm of Ghibli in a digital fashion.

To make this a bit more possible, the studio has officially released a set of eight backgrounds, suitable for use as backdrops on Zoom or other video-conferencing applications. You'll find them all at Ghibli's web site: in Japanese only, true to form, but even non-Japanese speakers can easily click and save the images. (For instructions on how to set one as your background, see our previous post on the subject.)

Drawn from the sweep of Studio Ghibli's history, from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Ponyo, Arrietty, and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, the backdrops show the wide aesthetic range of its work. Some of them depict memorable settings from these films (any Ghibli fan will know exactly where you "are" the moment you connect) but others capture a character, an icon, or an atmosphere.

Whichever Ghibli background you pick, it will remind your interlocutors of the formidable imagination exercised by each and every one of the studio's films, whether its characters soar across the sky, live beneath the sea, or plunge into an unseen underworld — do anything, essentially, but stay at home making calls.

Related Content:

Watch Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Characters Enter the Real World

Build Your Own Miniature Sets from Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Films: My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service & More

Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Characters Reimagined in the Style of 19th-Century Woodblock Prints

Calm Down & Study with Relaxing Piano, Jazz & Harp Covers of Music from Hayao Miyazaki Films

Studio Ghibli Releases Tantalizing Concept Art for Its New Theme Park, Opening in Japan in 2022

Customize Your Zoom Virtual Background with Free Works of Art

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli Releases Free Backgrounds for Virtual Meetings: Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away & More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3aekAoj
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...
Post a Comment
Read more

Board Game Ideology — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #108

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_108_10-7-21.mp3 As board games are becoming increasingly popular with adults, we ask: What’s the relationship between a board game’s mechanics and its narrative? Does the “message” of a board game matter? Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by game designer Tommy Maranges , educator Michelle Parrinello-Cason , and ex-philosopher Al Baker to talk about re-skinning games, designing player experiences, play styles, game complexity, and more. Some of the games we mention include Puerto Rico, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Sorry, Munchkin, Sushi Go, Welcome To…, Codenames, Pandemic, Occam Horror, Terra Mystica, chess, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Photosynthesis, Spirit Island, Escape from the Dark Castle, and Wingspan. Some articles that fed our discussion included: “ The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism ” by Luke Winkie “ Board Games Are Getting Really, Really Popular ” by Darron Cu...
Post a Comment
Read more

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...
Post a Comment
Read more