As nicely animated this bit looks on its own merits it always bothered me how little this looks like the '30s American animation it's referencing. The timing is all wrong (and looks like it's in slow motion), the individual drawings more resemble TMS's work for Warner Bros. in the early '90s, the use of depth is too advanced (Disney was doing some neat stuff with depth around this time but not like what you see here), everything stays a bit too rigidly on-model, the outline inking style is anachronistic... uh... These all seem like nitpicks but the overall effect is I see something like this and think "1990s Japan". I'm curious how successful Miyazaki and Kondo felt the mimesis was.

Yeah, this is reminding me of a TTA episode on slow motion (not a good thing, considering it's a fast paced series). I get the feeling neither Miyazaki or Kondo actually saw a 1930s cartoon and just tried to ape TMS's WB work without realizing how it worked.

Miyazaki is on record as admiring Fleischer animation, though the only Fleischer indication here is that a character is modeled after Betty Boop. Disney was only just developing the illusion-of-life techniques like overlapping action and easing and they hadn't disseminated to the other studios yet... and of course only Disney was concerned with consistent physical plausibility. Note the Porco Rosso short's complete lack of impossible surreal gags you'd always see from Fleischer, Warner and Van Beuren... really even Disney would consistently go more outlandish with its gags except in its features and "Old Mill" type shorts...

NAveryW said:
Miyazaki is on record as admiring Fleischer animation, though the only Fleischer indication here is that a character is modeled after Betty Boop. Disney was only just developing the illusion-of-life techniques like overlapping action and easing and they hadn't disseminated to the other studios yet... and of course only Disney was concerned with consistent physical plausibility. Note the Porco Rosso short's complete lack of impossible surreal gags you'd always see from Fleischer, Warner and Van Beuren... really even Disney would consistently go more outlandish with its gags except in its features and "Old Mill" type shorts...

Well if that's the case, maybe the blame can be pinned entirely on Kondo and whomever did the inbetween frames.

It amazes me how restrained this sequence actually is, like it wanted to focus on both, the audience and the film, yet somehow applied the movement and timing of the former with the latter, instead of making them two completely different entities. It'd be almost easier to give the Fleischer-style animation to another animator capable of it, or for them to do both separately them edit them together.

I wonder if this was originally done on ones but that made the "real world" animation look jerky in comparison so they brought it down to twos by slowing it to half speed instead of taking out half the drawings.

NAveryW said:
I wonder if this was originally done on ones but that made the "real world" animation look jerky in comparison so they brought it down to twos by slowing it to half speed instead of taking out half the drawings.

Could be, it looks like it was sped down instead of being reanimated to match.