Japanese Animation: A State of Mind (?)

[Aaron H. Bynum]

Begin the Debate: Only at AnimationInsider.net

In this feature news article, learn about Michael Arias, the first ever non-Japanese Director of a major anime feature film, and the conventional definitions of "anime" so-called he is defying. His movie, 'Tekkon Kinkreet' (prod. Studio 4°C; dist. Sony Pictures), is the long-awaited adaptation of a popular manga about a city whose parameters for violence range far beyond the norm, and the two young boys at its center. This article probes the core of Japanese animation filmmaking as a skilled behavior and as a creative impulse. Is it still an anime, if a non-Japanese holds the project's guiding ambition?

Curious Industry Evolution or Semantics?

[NekrosKoma]

regardless it looks interesting and its from Studio 4°C so i will be expecting good things

honestly i always though of anime as a style that encompasses the entire process of making the animation itself and the storywriting and so on, then a specific type of animation

[tekkonkinkreet]

Hi. Michael here. Intense article.

I don't mean to put a damper on any healthy debate. Rather, if there's any questions about TEKKON's production, my role as director, or about our industry in general, I'm happy to try to answer.

In the meantime, thanks for showing interest in our movie.

m

[Aaron H. Bynum]

What were your goals as the director of a film property that hadn't ever seen an adaptation on such a large scale?

[tekkonkinkreet]

Big question. I'm still at the Berlinale and being pulled in all directions, but I'll try to do the topic justice here. Forgive me if my reply ends up a bit brief.

I'd been trying to get TEKKON made for several years before Eiko, my producer (and ANIMATRIX co-producer), showed interest in my directing the movie at her studio. And, as is often the case, things were well under way before the scale of the project became apparent.

Kimura, Nishimi and I started pre-production without a clear idea of budget, only Taiyo's manga, Anthony's screenplay, and my (half-baked) ideas to drive our approach. And even two years into TEKKON we were still thinking of it as a small independent release, rather than the nationwide holiday season roll out it became.

But passion, it turns out, is infectious. Nonetheless our team grew very gradually at first. Uratani and Kubo, both fans of TEKKON, were at 4c with time on their hands. Kimura invited animators Tomaru and Tanaka (Takahiro) and then eventually the entire STEAMBOY art department on. Nishimi had worked at Telecom with Hamada. My CG director got pregnant and asked her husband, Ando, to fill in, so I ended up with an incredible AD. The Japanese animation community is pretty small so it wasn't long before various artists started stopping by to see what we were up to. Our work spoke for itself and word spread. By the time the project finished we had perhaps the most talented lineup the industry's seen since AKIRA.

But none of this was "by design".

I think filmmaking is a process of discovery, of finding the best way to tell a story. Perhaps a more experienced director would have begun with a clearer picture in mind, but I can only speak for myself here. I had fantastic source material and an amazing script and I'm not joking when I say that I'd have happily spent the next 10 years trying to make the movie on my own, drawing pictures in the sand or who knows what... Happily? Maybe not. But I'd tried to walk away from TEKKON before, only to realize that I'd have to make the movie or live the rest of my life with it stuck, half-digested, in my system.

To be continued...

Not sure if this really goes to the heart of your question. But it's been liberating to put all this into words! Thanks for the opportunity.

m

[NekrosKoma]

i think i read the script was originally in English, if so then how did the translation to Japanese go

[tekkonkinkreet]

Yes, Anthony's script was in English.

To be precise, Anthony wrote the script using both French and English versions of Taiyo's TEKKON as source. I don't read French myself but I think the consensus at the time was that the French edition captured some of the original's nuance better.

Anthony also did quite a bit of location scouting with me - trips all over Japan and to Hong Kong - and interviewed Taiyo a couple of times in preparation for writing his TEKKON screenplay.

Translation of Anthony's final draft into Japanese was a multi-stage endeavor. English-to-Japanese translation presents some unique challenges because of Japanese' linguistic distance from English. Anthony's script was very rich in metaphor - tough to translate this material in a culturally relevant manner. For dialogue, in many cases we were able to go back to the manga's original Japanese. But there was also fair amount of dialogue unique to the script - a challenge to translate while retaining the "voice" of TEKKON's various characters.

And, in addition to the difficulty of accurately representing English prose in Japanese, we also had to compensate for different screenwriting standards. What I mean to say is that we have some screenwriting conventions in Japanese animation that depart significantly from the "format" everyone's used to in the US. If anything, the "format" is much more well defined in the English-speaking world, while over here (in Japan, I mean) it's a bit of a mish-mash. Anthony's screenplay contained some very detailed visual descriptions that might not have been part of the usual Japanese animation screenplay. It's often the case in Japan that a screenplay for animation contains just dialogue and some very minimal description, and visuals are fleshed out later in the design stages of a project.

Translation is an imprecise art. And English-to-Japanese (or the opposite) even more so than say English-French, where there's a great deal of linguistic overlap. But anyone can read Anthony's script and watch the movie and see the same animal, albeit at different stages of evolution. Of course there are departures from the script - I haven't heard of any movie which adheres perfectly to the screenplay; numerous changes were introduced in the design, animation, and editorial phases of the movie.

Actually though I think it's a testament to the strength of Anthony's script that it's remains recognizable despite all the torture I put it through!

m

[NekrosKoma]

did the language barrier cause any sort of problems during the production or was it mostly smooth sailing

[Meechy]

Hello

I've been reading up on the film and your work. Some of the article I've read seem to imply that being the first American to direct a Japanimation is crossing barriers, others seem to say that being an American that the soul or essence of Anime will be lost because you may not have a true understanding of the culture which embodies Japanimation.

I believe if you truly have passion and respect for what you do there is no way that your work will not be successful. Your heart is always translated into your work. That I learned myself; working on becoming an animation writer and hopefully a director. From what I have seen and heard about Tekkon Kinkreet it is a good solid film and I can’t wait to see it this weekend. Great job Micheal.

[tekkonkinkreet]

Ergo:

You can read my reply above regarding translating TEKKON's screenplay. Other than that I don't think language was an issue. I do all my work in Japanese.


Meechy:

Thank you for the support and encouragement.

I have to say the article that began this thread surprised me, by its subject and also the depth of its treatment. I'd never thought of what I was doing as potentially crossing barriers (though I might have aspired to cross "artistic barriers"). And I wasn't aware that Japanese animation was seen as some kind of holy ground until I started reading fan forums and the like for word of our project. Now that I think back, I suppose I did get a hint of this during ANIMATRIX's publicity. Seems so long ago.

I got into animation via a rather indirect route - doing special effects and computer graphics for years, working as a producer, etc. But I've been at it long enough now (even if one only considers time spent on TEKKON and ANIMATRIX) that I don't think I can be accused of having not "paid my dues". Hey, I've lived in Tokyo now longer than I've lived anywhere else in the world, I have a Japanese family, do all my work in Japanese, etc. The suggestion that I had to be born here, to Japanese parents even, to do my job or make my movie "authentic anime" strikes me as wierd, if not insulting.

Honestly, I'm happy for my movie not to be considered anime, because I have no idea what anime is. As far as I can see, "anime" and "Japanimation", as used in English, are artificial constructs. Here (in Japan), when we say "anime" we mean simply "animation". We might be specific and say "Disney anime" or "Ghibli anime" or "children's anime" but it's a pretty general term and not specific to Japanese output. I have a knee-jerk reaction when I hear people discussing "anime" as though the Japanese national identity is somehow tied up in it. For heaven's sake!

So I'm not quite sure what people outside mean by "anime". What would a better term be for what "anime" refers to? Is it "Japanese animation" (that is, "animation from Japan")? Or is it really "animation created by Japanese"? Sounds a little strange. Or is there some other thread tying all these films together? That seems a stretch also, given the variety of animation coming from Japan.

I'm still parsing Aaron's original essay for guidance here, as it seems like he's given a great deal of thought to this from a critical perspective, as it were. I really hadn't seen our work in this context at all.

So where are you seeing TEKKON this weekend? You're in Berlin? Or Tokyo?

m

[NekrosKoma]

i was talking in terms of the actual production, editing and so on

when you were communicating to the Japaneses production team itself while making the film

[tekkonkinkreet]

Again, I do all my work in Japanese, and my Japanese is pretty good, so language wasn't an issue beyond what I've described above.

Of course, communicating my ideas to a large staff, making it all work visually, was challenging, but certainly not because of language.

I'm not an animator myself (not in the traditional sense anyways), and I'm a pretty poor draftsman, so much of my pre-production work was in gathering visual references to inspire and guide Kimura, Nishimi, Uratani, Kubo, and Miyuki Ito (colorist). I did a great deal of "location scouting" and took hundreds, perhaps thousands of photographs to show the artists. I also brought in a great many books of art - paintings and photographs - that I thought relevant to the project.

My storyboards were very raw - just enough to give an idea of framing and timing. Terrible to look at really. Creating production-ready storyboards from my own second draft was a lengthy collaborative process, during which much of my time was spent explaining scenes in depth to Nishimi, Uratani, and Kubo, and then checking and revising the results on paper and on video.

For TEKKON's computer graphics and anything effects-oriented, I was very hands on, exploring methods, creating effects, demonstrating techniques, and compositing shots myself. So the "look" of the film is, in large part, a result of my work with the digital team.

Filmmaking really is a collaborative enterprise, at least for me, auteur theory aside. I don't think it would have been possible for me to spend 4 years with all these artists, working together to construct and nurture (!) TEKKON, and not welcome all their ideas and creative energy. I'm a great admirer of Kon Satoshi's movies but I'd never want to (and never be able to) make movies the way he does, with storyboards and designs all fleshed out and fully realized before the rest of his team gets involved (PAPRIKA animation director Masashi Ando animated several shots for TEKKON and had a bit to say on this subject).

TEKKON was constantly evolving, through every stage of our production, up to and including voice recording, editing, and final mixing. The finished film is vastly more complex than what I'd originally envisioned (and this goes back to my first answer, about the scale of the project not being clear until well into production). I think one of the director's most important functions is to keep the process as fluid as possible and allow the project to continue growing until the latest stage possible. That, in itself, is an enormous challenge, given the technique and technology of cel animation.

It's a balancing act really - to keep things moving forward and at the same time give the artists room to play. Despite the popular image of animation studios as sweatshop operations (and some studios certainly are), the best work is done by artists given the time and freedom to exercise their creative muscles. As director, I was always aware of my responsibility to guard the artists from interference and let them do their stuff.

A bit of a digression but I hope this helps answer the original question.

m

[mikehiroaki]

I am very much looking forward to seeing Tekkon Kinkreet. While I understand that anime is a Japanese tradition, saying that non-Japanese cannot make anime is like saying that Japanese baseball players are not playing real baseball since baseball is America's pasttime.

Just curious but was the CG for Tekkon Kinkreet done in Softimage?

[tekkonkinkreet]

Well, thanks for the support. I agree with the baseball analogy.

Yes, the bulk of our 3D work was made using Softimage|XSI and mental ray. There were one or two MAX shots mixed in there.

m

[mikehiroaki]

Is there any word on a North American release for Tekkon Kinkreet?