How Gorillaz's new film turns anime nostalgia into something fresh

With this latest Gorillaz project, The Mountain, the Moon Cave and the Sad God, London-based studio The Line continues to sharpen its identity as one of animation’s most distinctive contemporary voices. Founded in 2013, the studio has built a reputation on high-end commercial work and cinematic projects for major clients including Riot Games, Blizzard and Marvel, while steadily carving out space for its own original ideas.

The Mountain, the Moon Cave and the Sad God feels like a natural extension of that trajectory, but with a twist. Here, The Line leans into an intentionally ‘old-school’ visual language – one that draws on traditional anime backgrounds, poster-paint techniques, and analogue processes – and reinterprets it through a modern production pipeline. It feels like the ideal way to transfer Gorillaz creator Jamie Hewlett's style onto the screen. The result is a film that sits somewhere between eras: nostalgic without feeling retrograde, digital without losing the texture of the handmade.

At the centre of that balancing act is art director Eido Hayashi. With a background in painting and layout, and credits spanning games, film and commercial work, Hayashi brings a tactile sensibility to the project’s environments, overseeing the background team while defining the film’s colour, mood and cohesion.

Below, she talks us through the process behind the film’s striking aesthetic, and you can follow Eido on Instagram for more.

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I worked using Nicker’s Poster Paints paint app for backgrounds and I tried to implement it into a digital pipeline. I loved the harmonious colours and wanted to use that for the nostalgia and old-school animation feel for the music video.

In the earlier stages, we wanted to keep the traditional, simplified elements. But then we got feedback from Jamie Hewlett saying, ‘We want more detail.’ In the end, it was a lot more digital, but I’m glad that we started off wanting to do it traditionally.

What I did was I took one of the storyboards that Jamie Hewlett gave to us, printed it out on paper, and tried to redraw it to get the mannerism. For the design language, I tried to incorporate more of Jamie Hewlett’s fun angular shapes, while doing explorations, and to mix that with the traditional process in the early stages of production. I wanted to utilise the traditional aspects of anime backgrounds. I wanted the basis to be painting traditionally.

In Japanese anime backgrounds, it’s called 地塗り(Jinuri, ground paint), where you try to get most of the far-background details and base-painted before the paper dries, that part is so rich in textures and colour harmony that I find it hard to replicate in Photoshop. Then, the detailing process is done after the paper is dried. I wondered if that could work on the computer, and I tried to mimic the strokes digitally. All the traditional background elements you see were painted by Arnaud, who had hosted the background workshop alongside Liu Yuxuan that I attended back in May of 2024.

I think that, ultimately, with the time frame and lots of feedback, it was easier to paint digitally for some of the shots. But we did manage to sneak in a few analogue shots, like the close-up shots of the animals and some of the style frames. I think the background team was so incredible in that aspect to harmonise everything, and we got such incredible-looking backgrounds in the end; so very gorgeous.

Visit The Line's website for more on this project and others. If you're inspired, read our best animation software guide and our Procreate tutorials to start creating.