Naoyoshi Shiotani: Anime Man

While currently perhaps not quite as well known as people like Hayao Miyazaki, Mamoru Oshii, Satoshi Kon, Koji Morimoto or Mamoru Hosoda, Naoyoshi Shiotani could easily shape up as the next big anime thing, evidenced in his directorial debut – the gloriously bittersweet anime Tokyo Marble Chocolate (2007) – and more recently the man’s prolific input into Shinsuke Sato’s CG/anime feature Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror, for animation heavyweight Production I.G (Ghost in the Shell).

That opening paragraph has left me a little breathless (my kingdom for a stray full stop), so here's where I pass on the baton.

"There’s nothing in animation that can be described as ‘easy’. Directing, drawing, design... These are very different roles that require different skills; therefore I could hardly establish which one is the most challenging," Shiotani told me in a recent interview we undertook, to be published in Impact mag over in the UK in a couple of months' time.

"However, I must admit that I’m probably still uncomfortable with character designing. Once Ishikawa-san [Production I.G’s president and CEO Mitsuhisa Ishikawa] told me that the human characters I design are too unique, and they’d fit only in an art movie."

Shiotani's exact involvement in Oblivion Island (ホッタラケの島 ～遥と魔法の鏡～) is not all that clear - he's been listed alternatively as unit director, animation director and character designer of the stuffed toy sheep character Cotton – so what other input exactly did he have in this movie?

"My role can be described as ‘animation director’," he suggests.

"Shinsuke Sato, the director of this movie, has come from live action film making, so my role was to adapt and expand his ideas into the animation medium. I joined the production when the script was almost completed, so the first step was to share with Sato-san our mutual vision.



"A movie director may not necessarily be present in the studio all the time, so I also had the role to supervise the animation team. Sato-san and I had long brainstorming sessions in order to be sure that I would proceed in the direction he envisioned, and that he agreed on what I had in mind; we exchanged ideas on everything – like how to make the story more gripping and compelling? How should the characters look? What should the island be like? And so on.

"I added most of the action scenes you see in the second half of the movie, but I won’t list them here, as I don’t want to spoil it for people who haven’t seen the film. I can only say that what Cotton does in the second half of the movie was not in the original script! Most of all I convinced Sato-san to add the scene when Haruka and Teo watch the memories inside the mirror, and when I saw the final result I was glad I’d been so persistent.

"I also made rough concept designs for the island, as I wanted it to fit with the story concept, and I designed Cotton – the younger Haruka’s toy stuffed animal. After all these modifications I drew the storyboard, a tool that can be described as the movie blueprint, and from there I had meetings with each section of the crew. We decided the lighting and camera angle for each scene, how the characters were supposed to move, the visual effects, the colours, and so on.



"But apart from being the supervisor, I also had a very important job to do: since the island’s conceptual design was fundamental to the project, I was determined to keep the same style and atmosphere in each scene. This, however, ended up with me drawing the background art boards – the reference drawings used by the background artists – for about 1000 scenes. When everybody in the studio left I was still at my desk drawing, sometimes till the next morning... So, you see, I did a wide variety of things for this movie."

Shiotani shrugs.

Cotton himself is a super-cute soft toy that cannot only do song-and-dance numbers, but can ride to the rescue of our heroine even after being torn in half. What's the inspiration behind his concept and character?

"Cotton’s the stuffed animal everybody had when he or she was a kid. I wanted everyone in the audience to relate with and overlap his/her personal childhood memories the very instant Cotton appears on screen. His role in the movie is the answer to the question: if a toy could be given the opportunity to move and talk, what would he say?

"He’s a neglected childhood treasure who has the chance to meet up again with his owner, the very person that left him lying around and eventually forgot him. Within the context of the movie’s main themes, Cotton is one of the most emblematic characters," the character designer suggests.

"I wanted him to be cute in his appearance and movements, so I went through a process of trial and error – and I concluded that he would look cuter if I did not change his facial expression. The risk was to have a very creepy doll, so I came up with the idea of using buttons for the eyes."

Going back for a moment to Tokyo Marble Chocolate (東京マーブルチョコレート), the movie was awarded the Grand Prize in the feature film category at the 12th annual Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival (SICAF) in 2008.

I worked with Francesco Prandoni from Production I.G on the English subtitles for T.M.C., and two years later I'm still curious as to where Shiotani got the inspired idea of the manic mini donkey-in-a-nappy...

"I must confess that I’m particularly happy with the success of this little, devilish character because, to tell the truth, when I first presented ‘him’ to the other staff I got a mixed reception, both regarding his look and the way he moved," remembers the director.

"The idea for the mini donkey comes from a fashion magazine I had at the time; there was this picture of a model walking in the park of a big city... with a donkey. The donkey had this misty look in his eyes that somehow struck my imagination, so everything started from that photo. I re-sized the donkey to make him a pet that you could keep at home, and then added the diaper while thinking about those pet owners who force animals living in big cities to wear baby-like garments."

He laughed at that point.

"The diaper also helped me with giving him a stronger personality and more colour, as donkeys are just grey and I wanted a fairy-like creature. At a first look, you don’t know whether you should laugh at or be scared of this mischievous beast! But he’s a character you learn to understand and appreciate once you spend time with him."

The rest of this lengthy chat will feature in Impact magazine shortly.





Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror
© 2009 FUJI TELEVISION NETWORK / Production I.G / DENTSU / PONY CANYON

Tokyo Marble Chocolate
© 2007 Production I.G / Project Tokyo Marble Chocolate

PREVIEW: Satoshi Kon's The Dreaming Machine

Late last year I interviewed essential Japanese anime director Satoshi Kon (he of the notoriety of Paprika, Tokyo Godfathers, and the brilliant Millennium Actress), and that interview appeared in the January issue of Impact mag over in the UK.

I'll be running with the somewhat lengthy interview on this site sometime in the next couple of months.

In the meantime, however, Kon is gearing up for the release of his long-awaited next anime movie: Yume Miru Kikai (The Dreaming Machine) is coming up through Studio Madhouse and it has its own funky new website here. The movie features central characters called Ririco, Robin and King - and all of three are automated. Kon has dabbled quite extensively with technology (and its impact on people) before, but this time there's a different slant.


"This is my own original story - therefore different from my previous work," Kon told me during that recent interview we did; it was the first time we'd chatted and he was surprisingly open, humourous and verbose.

"While I was developing the script, I heard about a movie called WALL·E... and I got a little nervous that it might be similar to mine. I can't tell you how relieved I was when I learned that the two stories were totally different," he laughed.

"In The Dreaming Machine, only robots are there. I want the audience to enjoy the adventures of robots who survived even after their parents - human beings - had become extinct. After Paprika, I ended up taking a vacation for over a year, so we've just started development on this. You can see this movie in 2011."


Here are some sneak preview images from the new film.

Also on board is art director Nobutaka Ike, who performed the same role on Millennium Actress (千年女優 Sennen Joyu, 2001) and Paprika (パプリカ, 2006).

Till then, if you haven't checked it out already, here's the promo teaser (below) for Kon's Millennium Actress - perhaps my favourite anime flick from the 2000s, even up against stiff competition from Miyazaki's Spirited Away and Oshii's Innocence.

Essential viewing.





© 2009 Madhouse

Shusuke Kaneko: Kaiju Man

Check out Shusuke Kaneko on imdb.com and you’ll find that he’s currently involved in post-production on the movie Bakamono, starring Hiroki Narimiya (from both Nana movies and the Honey and Clover live-action TV series) and Miho Shiraishi, who previously appeared in the bizarre Calimari Wrestler (2004).

At the beginning of this year he also helmed the over-the-top rival opera singer romp Pride, starring Hikari Mitsushima – a.k.a Sayu Yagami in the Death Note movies.

Which is no coincidence, since three years ago Shusuke Kaneko directed both Death Note and its sequel Death Note: The Last Name.

The man responsible for the sequel to Ryuhei Kitamura’s Azumi popped up a decade before as one of three directors for a 1994 American/French adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon.

He then steered into kaiju (monster) territory when he directed a trilogy of movies featuring Gamera, the giant flying turtle (1995 to 1999); two years later Kaneko hit paydirt when he helmed Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack.

While recently the principle involved in the Ultraman reboot TV series, Ultraman Max (original Ultraman director Akio Jissoji and the great Takashi Miike were others alongside him), at the same time that the Death Note spotlight fell, Kaneko in fact started out in the 1980s as an assistant working in the roman (romance) porn industry for respected production company Nikkatsu – just like fellow directors Tatsumi Kumashiro (Woman with Red Hair) and Koreyoshi Kurahara (Antarctica).

These days, at the age of 54 and with the Death Note movies on his resume, Kaneko is one of Japan’s more in-demand film-makers and he made time in September to chat with me in an interview this month published in its entirety in Impact magazine – nicely translated to full effect by my wife Yoko.

Here's the straight Q+A version.


Why do you enjoy directing, and which part of creating movies makes you the happiest?

“I’m happy when I feel my originality and talent are alive – the times that I think other directors would never shoot like this, or they wouldn’t think that way; the moments when I know my choice is the best choice. That moment comes all of a sudden while I’m making a script, shooting, editing. If the moment becomes continuous it can be fun, though sometimes it’s not. So I can’t say which process, in general, makes me the happiest.”


I note that you are now completing postproduction of the feature Bakamono – could you tell us more about this movie?

“Yes, we’re working on that now. This movie is about a guy who lives in a local city for about a decade, from the age of 19 to 29 years old. He doesn’t have any skills – he was raised by a sweet family, so he’s a nice guy but rather stupid. He is hurt in love, becomes an alcoholic… then he become a ‘man’. This story describes his path with a bit of a poetic touch.”


How was the earlier experience of directing the Death Note movies?

“Because of my super-tight schedule, the work required lots of concentration from me. The offer came on 10 December 10, 2005, and at that time it was already planned that the first-half movie would be released in June 2006, and the rest of the story in the second part in November 2006. So shooting took place in February and March 2006. I had also committed to work on Ultraman Max for TV around the end of the year and the new year, so while making the script for Death Note, I shot Ultraman Max. It ‘s fun to think back to that busy time now.”


Had you read the original manga by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata before doing the Death Note movies?

“Two years before I got that offer, my elementary school son brought me the first volume of the comic. At the time I thought the concept was interesting, but I didn’t imagine that that kind of thing would be made into a movie, so I didn’t read the rest of it. But straight after I received the offer to make the films, I went straight to a manga café and read the whole series – then went to the meeting.”



Why do you think the Death Note franchise has been so successful in Japan?

“When the Internet had established itself across Japan, Death Note appeared [in 2003] and it created a realistic setting for an otherwise impossible story. The imaginative superstition – that you’ll die if you write your own name in the notebook – coincided with the phenomenon that an anonymous note on the Internet could harm a person quite physically.”


Some people argue that the Death Note stories encourages kids to be violent...

“I think it’s possible. But there’s a lot of other stuff that makes kids violent. I certainly don’t think I’m making good stuff in the educational realm.”


Could you tell us more about the Ultraman Max experience, directing with Takashi Miike and other directors?

“Tsuburaya Productions offered me a job as main director, and I was in the position of controlling the scriptwriter selection, other directors and the cast. The producer approached Mr. Miike to shoot two episodes as a guest director, so I thought he would be great for that job. My view of the Ultraman Max world was closer to that of the original Ultraman rather than science fiction; an anything-is-possible place. So I wanted the other directors work freely and I think Mr. Miike could do so in that way too.”


How did you get involved directing the Gamera movies, from Gamera: Guardian of the Universe in 1995 to Gamera 3: The Awakening of Iris in 1999?

“I can’t describe that in such short space, but I think people thought me suitable for the Gamera directing job since I had just given a presentation to the producers, Diei Motion Picture Company, on Ultra Q.” [The 1966 sci-fi/kaiju monster series was the most expensive TV series in Japan at the time.] “I wasn’t a Gamera fan when I grew up. I hadn’t exactly thought Daiei’s monster films were childish, but I liked Toho’s monster films better when I graduated from elementary school. Just before I got into adolescence, which is when I got into girls, I was also a manic fan of monster movies; at that time I was making a monster illustration book by myself. Therefore, when I was directing Gamera, I felt happy that I could revert back to my childhood.”


In 2001 you directed the wonderful Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack.

“There was something I quite deeply felt about that... I started with Gamera, and reached up to Godzilla. Since Toho studio was producing movies more systematically than Daiei, I could hop on that flow and make movies myself. Then again, we had more time to prepare for Gamera but there wasn’t enough time to think about Godzilla – I feel like we made that movie on impulse power. But, of course, Gozilla is charming.”


Imagine a battle between Godzilla and Mothra. Who would win, and how?

“They had fights so many times already, so please talk to Toho about that suggestion, and get them to offer me the director’s chair so I can start dreaming up ideas!”


The rest of this interview has been published in the November issue of British anime & action movie magazine Impact - see HERE for details.