A single hand-drawn animated film can require over one hundred thousand individual paintings

Studio Ghibli is famous for preserving the meticulous craft of cel animation, where artists hand-draw up to 24 frames for every second of film. A 90-minute masterpiece like Spirited Away utilized roughly 160,000 individual paintings to achieve its fluid, lifelike motion. This process involves layering multiple acetate sheets to create depth and using 'squash-and-stretch' physics to mimic real-world inertia.