For a cosplay competition of one of my best friends, Alana, I created a fire animation of the character Calcifer from the anime Howl's moving castle by Studio Ghibli. This was such a fun project to practice my 2D animation skills!
I created this animation in Adobe Animate. It's a frame by frame handdrawn fire animation (parts are looped, of course). The animation played in the background as one of the props on the stage. I timed the animation with the performance so that Calcifer responds to what the characters are doing. I also timed the animation with the amazing music that was composed by Alana's cousin.
I loved their performance so much and I even got to help out backstage during their first performance! Projects like these bring me a lot of joy :)
I think the animation shines best in the full show so enjoy!
Animecon Classic 2022 - Group Contest Friday - 01 - Howl Moving Castle - Howl & Sophie
Filmed by esby
If you want to see the full animation in more detail, I've added it below. Unfortunately, Calcifer's exit wasn't captured in the video above so you can check that out in this video as well.
The different faces of Calcifer
I love how expressive Calcifer is in the movie and I tried to recreate his attitude a bit. As I finished this project in a couple of weeks I didn't express a lot with the fire animation because that was super difficult! But I will practice with more fire animation in the near future :)
Interactions with Howl and Sofie
The part that I had the most fun with was the "acting" of Calcifer. He essentially functioned as the third character on the stage and responded to the happenings and emotions of Howl (Melissa) and Sofie (Alana). To this end, I watched a practice reel of their performance into oblivion so that I could time Calcifer with Howl and Sofie, as well as with the music.
Below, you can see some shots of the characters on stage together.
Pictures by Kees Stavers
Fire loop sequence
I have a beautiful artbook of the movie "Howl's moving castle" by studio Ghibli and I used a still from that book as the starting point of my looped fire animation.
Calcifer's exit
I created Calcifer's exit sequence by studying how a candle is blown out! This part was really fun to animation and it was only during this final stage that I realised that fire can be animated much more expressively.
