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Translator's Note: The quarterly magazine Great Mechanics, published by Futabasha, is devoted to in-depth coverage of current and past mecha anime. It frequently publishes exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes features, and I'll be translating a selection of these as I continue researching the history of Sunrise robot anime. The following text is copyright © Futabasha. |
Studio Nue, which specializes in SF-related activities such as SF research and mecha design for countless anime programs, also played a key role in supporting Sunrise works from behind the scenes when the company was first established. Mr. Haruka Takachiho, famous as the writer of the Crusher Joe novels, was Studio Nue's first president. We asked Mr. Takachiho to tell us Super Machine Zambot 3, with which he was involved, and the relationship between Nue and Sunrise.
Takachiho: Around 1972, my doujinshi comrades (Kazutaka) Miyatake and (Kenichi) Matsuzaki were graduating from university, and (Naoyuki) Kato was graduating from Chiyoda Designer Academy. (1) So we were discussing how to get work. I was still in my first or second year of university, but I'd gotten pretty good at drawing, and I thought "Why don't we try to somehow turn this into job?"
Via someone he knew from school, Kato heard that Sunrise—or Soeisha at the time—was looking for something like a mecha designer for 0-Tester. Meanwhile, Matsuzaki had learned that the SF writer Mr. Masahiro Noda had invited us to join the staff of a program called Hirake! Ponkikki. We figured if we had two of these jobs, we'd manage somehow, and if we were going to be working we should form a proper company. Thus we created "Crystal Art Studio, Ltd." Since I was the one who first suggested it, I started out as the president.
Takachiho: I was still at university, and 20 years old.
Takachiho: There was no choice. I didn't know anything, but the others knew even less than I did. (laughs) Then we divided up everyone's roles.
Matsuzaki and I were basically in charge of sales, and since I was living in Kamiigusa at the time, I met with Mr. (Eiji) Yamaura (Sunrise's first planning chief) and Mr. (Kiyomi) Numoto (another of Sunrise's founders). They told me they were buying the mecha designs from the UK, and they just needed us to help out by brushing them up for animation. They asked to see some drawings first, and when I showed them various mecha drawings, they said the lines were messy. When I looked at the lines of other animators, they were really clean. I was amazed how different they were from ours. (2)
But when we started, no drawings came from the UK at all. So they said "You guys do it, you guys do it," and we ended up getting stuck with it. (laughs)
Takachiho: Then came Reideen the Brave. I was working with the Ponkikki team at the time, while Matsuzaki was responsible for Sunrise.
Takachiho: Writing scripts and drawing pictures. We were drawing all day long, every day, as well as doing storyboards to match the songs. (3) It was simple kamishibai anime, like "Spaceship Earth" and so forth. (4) But "Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun" wasn't one of ours. (5) Not a single SF-style one became popular. None of the hits were ours. We were utterly defeated. (laughs)
Takachiho: Meanwhile, Matsuzaki was approached about Space Battleship Yamato through a friend. At that point they were still calling it "Mikasa" rather than "Yamato."
Takachiho: I was wondering if they were really going to do it, and then they got going. But Mr. (Yoshinobu) Nishizaki (Yamato's producer) really loved meetings, so they'd have meetings day after day and Matsuzaki could never get away. Things with Sunrise were looking precarious.
When Director (Tadao) Nagahama took over for the second half of Reideen, I started going in to Sunrise. From then on I was always responsible for Mr. Nagahama, so I never worked with Mr. (Yoshiyuki) Tomino. When it came to the setting for the final two episodes of Reideen, Mr. Nagahama said "Leave it all to Nue," and we did as we pleased. That's why the last two episodes got so weird. (laughs) Kato created storyboard-style setting for all the designs and imagery, and it showed up exactly that way onscreen. We were grateful to Mr. Nagahama for that.
Takachiho: That's right. We became a corporation during Yamato. We also rearranged the staff, because we wanted to do more SF work. There weren't any SF jobs, though, so we ended up doing the same stuff as before.
Takachiho: I have no idea. I thought, "Who's that?" (※)
※ It's been speculated that "John Dedowa" wasn't an actual designer, but the name of a contact person(?) on the UK side, or a fake name invented by a higher-up at Tohokushinsha at the time.
Takachiho: It was basically mechanical design, but gradually we started doing background art as well. They had us do the base in Super Electromagnetic Robo Com-Battler V, but while that was actually background art, it wasn't budgeted accordingly and our fee was too low. Since Mr. Nagahama requested it, I asked Miyatake to do the base and a launch sequence. But he didn't really understand, so I told him "I'm asking you to do a wandaba" and he said "Got it." (6)
Takachiho: That was the moment when the word "wandaba" came to mean "launch sequence." Anyway, Miyatake wrote "wandaba" on the model sheet when he turned it in.
Takachiho: I never imagined something like that would become a common name. (laughs)
Takachiho: No, not at all. Meanwhile, Kato and Miyatake were working hard and winning awards with pictures they'd entered in a Hayakawa (Publishing) illustration contest, and now they were doing cover art. Little by little, they were slipping away. But they fundamentally loved doing mecha design, and they were really busy with Yamato. So now we were doing SF and mecha design jobs.
Takachiho: I think it was in the heat of summer when Mr. Yamaura told me "We're planning something with Mr. Tomino, so come on by." I went to the planning office, and I talked there with Mr. (Yoshitake) Suzuki, Mr. (Yoshikazu) Yasuhiko, and Mr. Tomino. But I don't really recall the details, and I didn't contribute much to the proposal. When things got going, Miyatake did designs for the base mecha, but the only ideas I provided were the name "Killer the Butcher" and giving the Zambot a sai as a weapon.
Takachiho: It's a well-known story. (laughs) I came up with a lot of names for Mr. Nagahama's works, but that's the only one I did for Mr. Tomino.
Takachiho: To me, creating setting is a means to get mecha design work. If you create the setting, then it's easier to get the corresponding design job, right?
Takachiho: No, he wasn't. Mr. Hirayama had nothing to do with Nue. We only worked on the King Bial, and Miyatake would know more about that. I just went to the occasional planning meeting, chatted for a while, and went home again. Well, that, and I named Killer the Butcher. (laughs)
Takachiho: Mr. Tomino is a thoroughly visual version. He has magnificent images floating in his mind that can captivate viewers. But images and logic are different things, so even if he asks you to help, you're never sure if applying logic to those magnificent images will make them any better, or whether he'll accept it.
But what left the biggest impression was when he asked me "Since you know all about it, I want you to make me a list of names of weapons and pro wrestling moves. I'll put it on the wall and come up with ideas for robots." And I actually did see him stick it up.
Takachiho: That was Mr. Yasuhiko's doing. (laughs) I never asked him to do it.
Takachiho: Nue's illustrations weren't suitable for space opera, so I told the publisher I wanted Mr. Yasuhiko to do it. The publisher didn't know anything about him at that point, but they said it was fine with them if it was okay with me. When we asked him, he said "No way." Then I approached him via my wife, thinking "He can't refuse if my wife asks him." (laughs)
My wife had been recruited by Mr. Yamaura to do part-time clerical work at Studio 1, where Mr. Yasuhiko was always stationed. But in fact, rather than doing clerical work, she was painting cels for revisions, organizing cels, and so forth.
Takachiho: The Nue guys are fussy about SF. They'll complain about the slightest scientific mistakes in the works of other people in the studio. But space opera isn't about that sort of thing. And personally, I'm totally crazy about Mr. Yasuhiko's art.
Mr. Yasuhiko said he could only draw in pencil, so I told him "It'll be fine if you just make Xerox copies and stick screentones on them." Then he said he'd never applied screentones before, so I told him "Okay, do it like this," and I taught him how to use screentone. (laughs)
Takachiho: It sold well, really well. So they told me to write another one right away.
Takachiho: I didn't do anything for that. Matsuzaki was writing scripts, but I wasn't involved at all. It's just that Mr. Yamaura was always asking me for interesting books, so long before the Gundam plan was launched, I lent him a copy of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and Matsuzaki must have lent one to Mr. Tomino.
Takachiho: Not at all. I had nothing to do with the designs. In those days, I was always holed up in the depths of Nue writing novels, and I was terribly busy. So please write that those rumors are all lies. (laughs)
The only impression I have of Gundam was that when I went to a preview screening of the first episode, Mr. Nagahama went as well, and when it was over he said "Hm, I get it" and went home. But I have no idea what he got. (laughs)
Takachiho: Later, when Mr. Yamaura went to America, he asked me if I wanted any souvenirs and I told him "Get me the rights to Starship Troopers." He replied "You think I can buy you something like that?!" But he actually did come back with them. (laughs)
Takachiho: Anyway, I was always the "Nagahama guy." The one I did the most for was Super Electromagnetic Robo Com-Battler V. I suggested the yo-yo because I knew about the Sukeban Deka manga, and since we wanted to use that as a weapon, we got in touch with the original creator Mr. Gan (the manga artist Shinji Wada), who I happened to know. He said "What? A robot anime? Sure," and approved it immediately.
Takachiho: I was also the one who said we should use the actor Mr. Goro Naya. But Mr. Nagahama and Mr. Naya ended up fighting, and his character was quickly killed off. (7) That was quite a shock. (laughs)
Takachiho: That wasn't me, but when I was coming up with weapon and attack names, it was based almost entirely on the feeling of that phrase. Mr. Nagahama had asked me for impressive-sounding names, so I came up with things like "Grandasher."
Takachiho: Mr. Yoshitake Suzuki also wrote a lot of these in his scripts. But "Battle Chainsaw" was a regrettable mistake. When it was completed, it was a circular buzz saw instead of a chainsaw, What a debacle. (laughs)
Takachiho: The animation was terribly inconsistent.
Takachiho: I think the content itself was well done as a robot anime. The 23 episodes had a proper ki-shō-ten-ketsu story development, which was executed very precisely. Even though all the meetings were so slapdash. (laughs)
Takachiho: We didn't really do any designs for the robots themselves... Probably not until Super Dimension Fortress Macross. And after that, Aura Battler Dunbine. At any rate, I didn't know anything about it. The rule at Nue was "If you say something to Takachiho, he'll blab it to the whole world, so don't tell him anything." They never told me anything at all. (laughs)
I only found out we were doing Macross when they announced it in the magazines. I didn't know we were doing "Gundam Century," either. As for Dunbine, I happened to run into Mr. Tomino in Kamiigusa, and he asked "Is Mr. Miyatake free right now?" I didn't know, so I replied that he was. When I actually asked him, Miyatake was furiously angry, and he complained bitterly. I'd had no idea whether or not he was working on anything else.
Takachiho: Anyway, my goal was to nurture youngsters and put them to work, while I relaxed and enjoyed myself. That's why I made use of (Shoji) Kawamori, who Miyatake was mentoring, and (Fujihiko) Hosono, who Matsuzaki was looking after. Everyone kept saying "It's too soon," but I said "What are you talking about? Kawamori is already better than you were when you debuted." (laughs)
Then we took on some work for The☆Ultraman. Well, in the end that didn't go so well.
Takachiho: Nue's stance can basically be summed up as "Let's do SF." Since Kawamori wanted to do anime from the beginning, we've left that to him.
Takachiho: During Yamato, when Mr. (Yoshinobu) Nishizaki told us we had to explain how the warp worked, we said "What, we're going to explain that now?!" We've always been like that. But personally, I love robot anime. If you treat it as realistic SF, people get mad at you, but on the other hand you can really do as you please. Within that scope, Mr. Tomino wanted to find a way to rationalize things, while Mr. Nagahama was focused on creating entertaining action scenes.
(1) In the Japanese text, Takachiho doesn't use any honorifics for his Studio Nue colleagues.
(2) The Japanese text is ambiguous about whether Takachiho was exclusively presenting his own drawings, but this account is similar to Kazutaka Miyatake's below, so I've used a plural pronoun here.
(3) Again, the Japanese text is ambiguous about whether this is just Takachiho or other Studio Nue members as well, so I've made it plural just in case.
(4) Kamishibai (紙芝居) is a form of street theater which combines live storytelling with a sequence of illustrations.
(5) The 1975 song "Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun" (およげ！たいやきくん) became a record-breaking hit single after it was featured on Hirake! Ponkikki.
(6) Wandaba (ワンダバ) is a term for the background music used when defense forces are deployed in special effects works like the Ultraman series, and more generally, for situations such as launch sequences where this kind of music would be played. The term apparently goes back to the 1971 TV series Return of Ultraman.
(7) Goro Naya's character, Dr. Nanbara, dies in the early episodes of Com-Battler V.
During Zambot 3, Kazutaka Miyatake was involved in the work from the design side at Studio Nue. His approach of designing to include the world in which the mecha exist, rather than focusing on individual designs, was already established by this point. Here, we've asked him to look back on those days, in particular the story behind the King Bial, whose design he worked on.
Miyatake: Our relationship with Sunrise can be traced back to the days of Crystal Art Studio, the predecessor to Studio Nue. Back then, Naoyuki Kato and I went to Soeisha (now Sunrise) to interview for a job. They decided to use me for 0-Tester, but actually Haruka Takachiho also came along as our dealmaker. After that he started hanging around the planning office, and Studio Nue became involved in the planning.
Miyatake: Coming up with ideas, I guess. It wasn't just Takachiho, and Kenichi Matsuzaki joined in as well, and they divided up into separate teams for idea generation. While Matsuzaki was working with Mr. (Yoshiyuki) Tomino and ended up writing scripts, Takachiho was involved with Mr. (Tadao) Nagahama's works from Reideen the Brave to Com-Battler V.
I think that was purely a matter of personal affinity. Mr. Tomino goes for difficult topics, so Matsuzaki was better suited for that. Mr. Nagahama, meanwhile, focused on entertaining points in the direction. Takachiho seemed to enjoy that, and he'd bring in his own nunchaku and whatnot, and come up with ideas as he thrashed around with them. (laughs)
Miyatake: I did the same thing myself on Zambot 3. In the end, you can't refer to a model, so the most reliable method you have is to figure out the poses yourself. Then you have an awareness that you'd use this weapon in that way. At the time, we also had full-length mirrors at Nue, and we'd take poses in front of them as we drew.
Miyatake: At Studio Nue, we prided ourselves that "Even in the world of SF, we're second to none in our areas of expertise." When Crystal Art Studio became Studio Nue, Takachiho muttered something like "Each person at Studio Nue should be an opinion leader." Wow, I thought, Takachiho is thinking that far ahead. Everyone at Nue is following their own path, and it doesn't matter if the overall thing falls apart. Then we'll try to become opinion leaders in our respective fields. Takachiho as a novelist, myself in design, Kato in illustration, Matsuzaki in scriptwriting. And while we're becoming masters in our respective fields, we'll earn a living doing various things. For Takachiho, one of those things was planning.
Miyatake: The initial participants were Mr. Tomino, Mr. (Eiji) Yamaura, Mr. (Kunio) Okawara, and myself. Mr. Okawara's astonishingly skillful at putting robots together, and the basic combination and balance was all him. When it came to the planning, I also contributed a lot of opinions. I came up with ideas for the design and combination of the Zambo-Ace, and the way it holds its gun was a pose idea I came up with by looking at myself in the mirror.
Miyatake: Well, not just the King Bial. Mr. Tomino and Mr. Yamaura told me I was responsible for the wandaba involving the separated parts of the Zambot 3, which also included the King Bial. It was my job to figure out how the three machines that Mr. Okawara had made should be laid out inside the King Bial.
Miyatake: When it comes to things other than the main robot, like the King Bial, I think the orders tend to come from the desire for a certain feeling of presence as an SF mecha. That's slightly different from realism, and it's more like the impressiveness that SF mecha has. I think for Mr. Tomino, since Nue was in charge, he wanted things that could create a sense of atmosphere simply by appearing in a long shot, even if they ended up being hard to move in animation.
Miyatake: I think the implication of "Don't make it SF" may have been "Don't go too far and add complicated setting." If Studio Nue is involved, there's a fear that's likely to happen. When Mr. Tomino was creating the human drama, he didn't want us making terribly difficult setting that would get in his way.
Miyatake: Basically, it felt like Mr. Tomino was saying "I'm leaving it to you, so do as you please." Rather than telling us anything in particular, it seemed his thinking was "If I leave them alone, they'll give me more interesting ideas."
On the other hand, Mr. Tomino himself also draws pictures, and I'd seen a lot of sketches he'd done of imaginary wartime fighter planes, so I couldn't do it half-heartedly. After all, Mr. Tomino was a disciple of Mr. Osamu Tezuka. He came out of Mushi Pro, so I understood that his approach was that he'd speak up if he had anything to say. It seems Mr. Tomino and I were both envious of Mr. Tezuka. (laughs)
Miyatake: The only thing Mr. Tomino said to me was "If you're doing it, don't draw anything that can be put on the floor." Back then, "mecha that can't be put on the floor" was kind of a selling point for Studio Nue, so I think that impression must have been a strong one. The idea at the time was that "it can't be put on the floor" had a nuance close to "give up on turning it into a toy." But the design still had to maintain a level that would stand up to becoming a toy.
Miyatake: At the time, the general assumption was that only the main robot would be turned into a product, and you wouldn't go as far as commercializing a mothership. But it would be foolish to say "If we want to make a product, we'll just cut some corners." As a visual professional, it's natural that you'd finish each mecha to a level where it would be feasible to commercialize it. The way you approach things is totally different when you're thinking "Let's do this so it could be released as a product" rather than "It'll never be released, so this is good enough."
Miyatake: Perhaps that was inspired by the artificial island base from 0-Tester. That one was designed through a back-and-forth between myself and Mr. Katsushi Murakami, but Mr. Murakami's intention was to commercialize it along the lines of the Thunderbirds base, so we designed it with that in mind, even considering the internal structure. I think it was because of that experience that Mr. Tomino entrusted the job to me.
Of course, when you're creating a work, all the details have to be minutely adjusted. For example, I remember the Bial II's vertical and horizontal tailfins were originally designed so that they pointed outward. But that would be difficult to animate, so I turned then upward instead.
Miyatake: That's true. The method of combining by connecting front and back, and then sandwiching them from the sides, is basically the same.
Miyatake: Putting it bluntly, that's because we didn't have much of a budget. And I guess it was also relatively simple. A three-part combination is something you can manage without absurdly complicated transformation mechanisms and size cheats. From the planning stages, we'd been sharing various opinions about that, and Mr. Okawara in particular knew a great deal about robots.
Miyatake: Basically, the setting was cleaned up by Mr. Ryoji Hirayama. After all, at Studio Nue, our lines were pretty messy because we didn't have any experience as animators. In animators' drawings, each individual line is truly beautiful. A trained animator can make clean drawings without getting their hands dirty.
Sunrise's methodology, which required that anything drawn by someone else, not just Studio Nue, be redrawn at the anime production site, was taking shape at that point. I remember drawing rough sketches for various setting, but the feel of the completed model sheet was very different.
Miyatake: That's right. The feeling of the details sometimes made me say "Huh?" For example, there were corners I hadn't intended to round off, and when I drew them I'd done it with straight lines. Whether or not you pause for a moment can completely change the impression of the drawing. The accumulation of these kinds of parts is very important in design.
However, if they'd left it as I drew it, it would have been hard to reproduce in animation, and my drawings were also quite messy. So during the cleanup stage, they corrected the parts they felt might interfere with the animation.
Miyatake: That's probably a question of your preference as a creator. If you're focused on business, you'll ask how much the extra effort adds to the work itself. Perhaps you'll cut it, thinking "Can we make something that requires this much labor?" Or perhaps you'll adopt it, to prevent the work from becoming irrelevant and trivial. That kind of risk management must be tough for companies that do business with Studio Nue. (laughs)
Miyatake: I was working on Reideen the Brave alongside Space Battleship Yamato, and after that, Zambot 3 and Com-Battler V were progressing in parallel. Com-Battler V, with which Sunrise was involved as a production company, was a stable partnership of Mr. Nagahama and a big sponsor in the form of Popy. Zambot 3, on the other hand, was the realization of Sunrise's dearest wish, a work whose rights they actually owned. But compared to Com-Battler V, it had a tighter budget and was smaller in scale.
In a way, I think it was important that they could do it successfully even with a low budget. Sunrise at the time was desperately poor. Then they went on from Zambot 3 to The Unchallengeable Daitarn 3, followed by Mobile Suit Gundam.
Miyatake: During 0-Tester, I was working feverishly, but it was also the first time I'd ever been involved with anime, so I was just trying to do my best. After that, through the experience of Yamato and Reideen, I think I'd begun to understand the nuances of mecha design work. In particular, with the setting for the phantom empire side in Reideen, I was handling not just mecha but also fantasy elements. That led to me designing the worldview itself, which was really interesting.
In the sense of "constructing a world" rather than just pure design, what I'm doing hasn't changed from the days of Zambot 3 up until now. We launched the first plan for Super Dimension Fortress Macross right at the time of Zambot 3, but our experience with various works leading up to that gave us the impetus to say "Let's create something here at Studio Nue."
In the previous issue's Blue Gale Xabungle feature, Director Yoshiyuki Tomino mentioned that Super Machine Zambot 3 gave him a feeling of crushing defeat. But on the other hand, doesn't that suggest he's rather attached to it? Zambot 3 was later acclaimed as a shocking work. It could also be described as the origin point leading to the subsequent Unchallengeable Daitarn 3 and Mobile Suit Gundam. What was Director Tomino, who was in his mid-thirties at the time, trying to do with this work?! And what does he think about Zambot 3 now?
Tomino: In the days before Zambot 3, Sunrise's predecessor Soeisha was subcontracting on Toei's giant robot shows, and I ended up assisting with that. In the process, I learned techniques for making TV anime and giant robot shows under Mr. Tadao Nagahama, but I thought I couldn't keep doing that forever. Perhaps children could keep watching endlessly if you just changed the names of the enemies and the finishing moves, but as a staffer, I felt I'd end up trapped in the world of that work and I'd never be able to get out. I can say with certainty that I did Zambot 3 because I was wondering what I could do to escape from that.
Tomino: Given the quantity of resources required for TV anime, sorting through all those jobs becomes your top priority, and as an adult you end up having to put the brakes on what you yourself want to do. In other words, you get trapped within the boundaries of the Toei "robot show" style.
With Zambot 3, I thought that even though it was a giant robot show, it would be broadcast as a TV anime, a work presented to the public, and it would surely be targeted at an audience of children. Given these assumptions, when I considered what I should do, I thought I couldn't keep doing the Toei style forever. That's why I created the relationships among friend and foe and the people around the Jin family, the incidents in the story, and so forth the way I did.
I think that sort of thing is an appropriate goal for a fiction writer. But there are also parts we couldn't do well, and those are aspects of Zambot 3 that I can't do anything about...
Not only is the animation in Zambot 3 terrible, but the cuts were also pretty badly made. Nonetheless, children watched it, and I gathered that they were particularly interested in the story. I thought "We must always value the viewpoint of these children." And then perhaps we could use the look of a giant robot show to tell a story that would spark their interest and curiosity.
Tomino: As part of the "Gundam Global Challenge," a project to make a life-sized moving Gundam is now under way, and the other day I had the opportunity to talk to the engineers for the first time. They included people who'd helped develop Honda's ASIMO, and engineers from major heavy machinery manufacturers. Talking to them, I could see that in all seriousness, that had an influence on them going into that line of work.
They went on to clearly present their opinions and points of view as engineers. What did it mean to think realistically about making a life-sized Gundam move? The issues that arose in moving an eighteen-meter humanoid object included problems of weight, mass, inertial motion, speed, and environment. They showed me a plan created by a heavy machinery manufacturer in video form, but the video was actually sped up by five times. They told me that this speed was absolutely impossible. In technical terms, it would also be unthinkable to exhibit it outdoors.
On the project side, it seems they'd assumed it would actually be moved by a giant crane, but the weight distribution of heavy machinery such as a crane is naturally different from that of the Gundam. The ASIMO developers suggested things like making the upper body out of styrofoam. When they tried to approach it from an engineering standpoint, people said things like "Sorry for misleading you, but this is as far as we could go," so we just had to do that. Even if we could stand it upright, they advised us that its weight would make the sensors on the soles of its feet useless, so we couldn't balance the left and right sides and it would fall over.
This conversation reminded me that, after working on Toei's giant robot shows, I was considering where to place the skeleton of the story for Zambot 3, Gundam, Dunbine, and so forth. Listening to engineering discussions like these made me think "Ugh, I don't get it, isn't this good enough?" But it's not about just being good enough, and if you don't understand that, you don't really understand giant robots. I realized that in animation production, people didn't worry that much about the practical issues, because it's all a fantasy. So they didn't think about anything more than making up a story and filling the time.
On the other hand, back then Director Nagahama was intensely concerned with the creation of drama, and he taught me that "The most important thing in drama is how it looks to the average person, and that has nothing to do with with giant robots or mecha." It was certainly a cinematic way of thinking. But this cinematic approach of "seeing through to the heart of the story" was probably the area where subsequent animation directors, and other people who do this kind of work, were most likely to cut corners.
Tomino: I can't help depicting Japanese people, and that's the only point of view I can have. Since I'm from a generation that internalized the postwar trends, I can't help but depict such aspects, whether I like it or not. "The theme is the Japanese people" doesn't sound like a compliment. There's no point to anime if that's all you can do with it. In some respects, anime has to have a broader narrative scope. Otherwise, I believe it'll never be worthy of international recognition.
Tomino: That's because I was born in Odawara. It's neither an urban nor a rural area, and perhaps the characters of Zambot 3 were born from that distorted feeling. (2) Even though I was born in Odawara, I was an outsider from the moment I was born. For as long as I can remember, the people around me nicknamed me "little boy," not with the literal meaning but almost with the sense that I was a magnet for bullies. (3) Calling me "little boy" completely separated me from the people of my hometown.
Tomino: That's right. I was "the child of a little boy and little girl from Tokyo," and even the landlord of our rented house called me "little boy." That infantile term went on to become my nickname. Up until roughly the first year of middle school, the barrier between myself and the children around me felt very high indeed.
As a nickname, the everyday phrase "little boy" felt terribly unnatural. Because of this, I could never fit in with the children around me. I grew up that way, as someone unable to fit in.
In the second year of middle school, I fell in love with a girl, but something terrible happened. She was a girl who'd moved there from Tokyo. There was something about her that felt different, but I thought "In the end, maybe I can only fall in love with a girl like that." There were other pretty girls at the school, but even though I thought they were pretty, I didn't fancy them.
Tomino: At the time of Zambot 3, I wasn't really conscious of that at all. But when I talk about it like this, the sense of nativism becomes vividly clear. (4)
Tomino: I guess that did have an influence. I wasn't the neighborhood bully. There was one really scary kid who used to intimidate me, and when I was in the sixth year of elementary school, we got into a fight in the middle of the street.
Tomino: I honestly wasn't aware I was doing it. But I can only create works by using those kinds of things within myself. By the time of Gundam, I'd gotten pretty good at creating works, so I was able to project myself into both characters, Amuro and Char.
It was good that, through the accumulation of such experiences, I came to understand "Aha, this is what it's like to be a creator." But when I considered what to do next, I entered production hell after Dunbine. I realized what it means to say you don't have much left inside you.
Tomino: As I was wondering what I should do as a creator, I was also fighting a battle to get copyrights. After Dunbine, I started writing things like the Wings of Rean novels in an attempt to secure copyrights somewhere far away from TV. In short, I wanted a profit margin that would let me earn a living as an author. But when I tried it, it seemed that unless something extraordinary happened, it would be impossible for me to survive on royalties alone.
It's not just a matter of ability, but whether or not you can write works that fit the times. It took me the next twenty years or so to realize that I couldn't adapt myself to the era purely through my own abilities or depth of feeling. Having said that, I think the reason I was able to try it was because of what happened up until Zambot 3 and Daitarn 3.
Translator's Note: Tomino goes on to discuss the state of the anime industry, Hayao Miyazaki's films, and his relationship to the Gundam series. But since there's no further discussion of Zambot 3, I'll end my translation here.
(1) Tomino was born in Odawara, in Kanagawa Prefecture. Suruga Bay is close to Odawara, on the other side of the Izu peninsula.
(2) 屈折感 (kussetsu kan) means a sensation of twisting, refraction, warping, etc.
(3) 坊やちゃん (bōya-chan), literally "little boy," can imply a pampered child but that's not necessarily always the case. Unsurprisingly, this term comes up a lot in Tomino's works. いじめられっ子 (iijimerarekko), or "bullied child," also implies that you're a habitual target of bullying. Here, I think Tomino's comment 「本人はほとんどいじめられっ子の気分だったんです」 means that the nickname made him seem like a bullied child, rather than that being called this felt like bullying.
(4) 地付き感覚 (jitsuki kankaku) doesn't seem to be a common phrase. Literally this would be something like "indigenous feeling," and given the context of the following conversation, I think it might refer to the xenophobic attitudes of longtime residents towards newcomers.
(5) Literally "the twenties and thirties of the Showa era," roughly 1945 to 1965. I've phrased this here as "the postwar years" for the sake of simplicity.
Thought it was one of Sunrise's giant robot shows, as well as a work by Director Tomino, The Unchallengeable Daitarn 3 was a complete departure from the utterly serious approach of the previous Super Machine Zambot 3. Instead, it adopted an absurdist, freewheeling, gag-filled variety format. Viewers were dumbfounded by this work, but in talking to Mr, Kenichi Matsuzaki, one of the scriptwriters, we had a chance to explore part of the mystery of why it turned out like this. Our navigator is Mr. Koichi Inoue, who is well-known in relation to Sunrise robot works, though he says he was just an ordinary viewer at the time of Daitarn 3.
Navigator / Koichi Inoue
Inoue: Mr. Matsuzaki, you're famous as a scriptwriter on Mobile Suit Gundam and as an SF research staffer. But your scriptwriting debut was actually on Daitarn 3, wasn't it?
Matsuzaki: That was my official debut.
Inoue: Did you participate in the planning of Daitarn 3, or serve as an SF "brain"?
Matsuzaki: No. I was a complete rookie at scriptwriting, so they called me in after the whole thing was finalized, and I wasn't involved in the planning. (1) All they gave me was (part of?) the setting materials. I only knew the main mecha, that the hero's name was "Banjo Haran," and that he had two female assistants.
Inoue: And did they tell you what kind of a work it was supposed to be?
Matsuzaki: In his usual "Tomino manner," Mr. Tomino told me "It comes when you call it!" (2) (laughs) So I thought I'd look at the setting materials, come up with a plot, and if I got anything wrong then they'd point it out. I felt I'd figure it out if I could just go along with that.
Inoue: Nowadays, they create rigidly detailed setting right at the beginning, and I gather there are a lot of people who can't write scripts otherwise. But in the old days, the writers would come up with plots by first deciding what kind of drama they wanted to create.
Matsuzaki: Right, right. The setting was created as the story progressed. All of it was retroactively tacked on afterwards. (laughs)
Inoue: It seems the robot in Daitarn 3 was created even before Zambot 3 as a "toy-oriented" design. Due to certain circumstances, Zambot 3 was turned into a program first, even though it was planned afterwards. I gather the planning process back then began with the robot, and then an image concept was added and it became "Let's do 007 with robots."
Matsuzaki: That image, though, only applied at the very beginning. It became almost irrelevant as we went along. All we had was the character of Banjo Haran, and there was no notion of what we were doing in general.
Inoue: It was set in a fictional location, and although the Meganoids were doing all these things, the people there didn't seem particularly bothered.
Matsuzaki: Nothing like that was depicted at all. And the only person who wanted to depict Banjo's origins was Mr. Tomino. So at the end, he tied up the loose ends that he himself had created.
Inoue: According to the records, Mr. Yoshihisa Araki wrote the proposal and served as main writer. How did you work with him?
Matsuzaki: Mr. Araki certainly wrote the proposal, but I never really saw him in the meetings. Daitarn 3 basically consisted of standalone episodes, so it didn't need a so-called "series structure," and Mr. Araki wasn't doing anything special. In general, the meetings consisted of just three people—myself, Mr. Tomino, and Mr. Hiroyuki Hoshiyama.
For episode 32, "Shoot That Flag," we met at a coffee shop downstairs from the old Studio 1, which was a different location from its current one. We were all discussing what would be a typical launching base for a giant robot, and we came up with a pattern where the enemy tried to seek it out and attack it, but got it wrong. (3) Anyway, it was kind of a parody.
Daitarn 3 represents Mr. Tomino's antithesis to giant robot anime. That was the very heyday of giant robot anime, and it had been generally decided what you should do in it. One might say that, in some respects, it was a mocking attempt to ask, "But is that enough? Should giant robots remain like this? If that's okay, then how about this?"
Once upon a time, on a certain TV program, I described Mr. Tomino as a "rebel." But he's someone who tries to surpass all previous works, whether by other people or himself. That becomes an antithesis. He asks, "Is this enough? Why don't we all think it over?" This ultimately led to Gundam as well.
Inoue: This was your first work as a scriptwriter. What kind of specific memories do you have?
Matsuzaki: Of course I had a little trouble since I was a complete rookie, but none of it was directly because of that. I think that's thanks to Mr. Hoshiyama and the others. Once the plot was approved, they'd give me comments and corrections like "Going from this to that feels unnatural," "This kind of character wouldn't say that line," or "That doesn't match the character personality the director had in mind." Once I'd seen that a few times, I began to get it. So they didn't really tell me anything in particular. It was basically a question of what kind of drama I could write.
Oh, and in the Admiral Magellan episode, his actual brain turned into some kind of floating thing onscreen. But it was supposed to mean something other than literally just that. (4)
Inoue: It was supposed to be a story about Admiral Magellan's consciousness being transferred to an artificial brain, right?
Matsuzaki: That's right. What I'd had in mind was something purely mechanical, like what we'd now call an AI. But this way he was just a kind of cyborg, no different from a Meganoid.
Inoue: Still, the fact that Admiral Magellan had shot down several Death Battles with an antique warship was a rare example of someone other than Banjo's group fighting the Meganoids.
Matsuzaki: True. I was aware of that aspect. So technically, I was trying to show that a fight against the Meganoids was also going on in the social background.
Inoue: But if you were depicting it seriously, you couldn't summon a 120-meter giant robot to the middle of town.
Matsuzaki: The damage would be tremendous.
Inoue: They already showed that in Zambot 3, so Daitarn 3 came as a relief. Were there any episodes where you were focused on the mecha?
Matsuzaki: Maybe the one with the Bugs. Episode 28, "Completed! The Super Transforming Robo!"
Inoue: They were little mecha that could swarm all over big ones. Come to think of it, I've heard that when he was doing the battle with the Adigo in Space Runaway Ideon, Mr. Tomino said "The hardest opponent for something big is something small."
Matsuzaki: I've actually proposed similar plots elsewhere, but they were rejected. (laughs)
Inoue: Although your scripts are SF-based, the drama has a punchline at the end, which makes it something like a slightly weird rakugo story. (5)
Matsuzaki: That's because I love rakugo. (laughs) I wrote a scene where Beauty is fishing and she reels in a kettle, then an octopus pops out of it and spews ink at her, turning her pitch black. Mr. Hoshiyama said, "You've done a gag so classic we'd all forgotten it." (laughs)
Inoue: Presumably they added you to the staff because they wanted the SF and mecha aspects. (laughs)
Matsuzaki: Well, yes. That was certainly the case with Gundam.
Inoue: Were you the one who suggested the space colonies in Gundam?
Matsuzaki: No, that was Mr. Tomino. Then he asked me "Make it seem reasonable that they're fighting with giant robots."
Inoue: And the Minovsky particle was born from that order.
Matsuzaki: Right. The "Tominovsky particle." Yes, I'm Dr. Minovsky. (laughs)
Inoue: You're famous for that as well. (laughs)
Matsuzaki: But even if there was any logic to Daitarn 3, it wasn't real. If you only think about reality, you can't create anything different from what already exists.
Inoue: Since Daitarn 3 was made up of standalone episodes, it was wonderfully easy to see the idiosyncrasies of the individual writers. The scripts directly expressed the personality of the person writing them.
Matsuzaki: That's true. I feel more comfortable doing something like that than a series type where the stories are broadly linked together, even if there are standalone episodes. There's nothing that you're absolutely required to do. Anyway, it was just about how the Daitarn 3 was going to fight.
Inoue: There was no need for explanations, and the story never depended on the previous episode.
Matsuzaki: At most, there were the bio-Megaborgs.
Inoue: The hero was initially a mysterious character whose identity was completely unknown. After all, there's no back story in 007 either. All you know is that he's 007.
Matsuzaki: And so we didn't need to think about the story direction, either. The constraints were terribly loose. On the other hand, it could also be tough because you had nothing to work with. They'd say "You can understand this without being told what to do step-by-step, right? You guys are pros!" (laughs)
Inoue: There was actually another reason for doing standalone episodes. In the past, when they were sent to local stations, they were sometimes shown out of order or even cut off in the middle due to issues with the broadcasting time slots.
For this reason, it seems there was also an order not to do continuing stories, and "a series of one-episode standalone stories" was actually written in the original proposal. That seems a little weird, doesn't it? (laughs)
Matsuzaki: During Gundam, between Mr. Tomino and the writers, we only had a few lines of plot for each episode. Mr. Tomino asked "How can you guys write a continuing story with just that?" We told him "That's the kind of people you have writing for you." (laughs)
Inoue: The writers in those days could work like that. It was like that on Armored Trooper Votoms, too. They'd write one episode, and then entrust their leftover plotlines to the next person, who accepted that because there was no choice.
Matsuzaki: It was like that for everything. Even on other works, a given writer would do just one or two episodes, and even though there was no setting they'd pass it on and say "You write the next bit." (laughs)
Actually, it was like a serial version of a sandai-banashi in rakugo. (6) If they were good, characters and setting that were created just for one particular episode would live on until the very end.
Inoue: I've heard that a lot. (laughs) Your episodes have a sense of wonder, while Mr. Hoshiyama's are about human drama... There was also the fact that Banjo and the Commanders knew each other. (7) There weren't really any bad guys among the Commanders. You couldn't hate them.
Matsuzaki: Even though they ended up getting beaten, they basically related by "understanding each other with their fists." (laughs)
Inoue: It's a wonderful world. (laughs)
Matsuzaki: The Meganoids even had a "disciplinary committee." (laughs) In general, the Commanders were all what we'd now call otaku. Mr. Hoshiyama said this as well, but the Commanders were invariably obsessive about something. Their Soldiers cheered them on, too. (8) They were almost like a hobbyist club. So Commanders are club presidents, and Soldiers are the members. (laughs)
Inoue: I see! That's very convincing. (laughs)
Matsuzaki: But you couldn't make something like that in the current era.
Inoue: First of all, you'd have to find writers who could do it. Unless they can write a one-off with just a handful of cues, they won't be able to write a series of standalone episodes.
Matsuzaki: Well, we were all pretty careless. Neither the sponsor nor the higher-ups said anything to us, so we were left to run wild. (laughs)
Inoue: Even if they did say anything, Mr. (Eiji) Yamaura, the planning chief, probably absorbed all of it.
And anyway, Daitarn 3 sold an awful lot of toys. Unlike today, they didn't make products of the the enemies, so only the hero's robot was released as a toy. But the previous Zambot 3 already sold well, and Daitarn 3 sold even better. Apparently the sponsor Clover was able to upgrade its company building with the proceeds. It's for that very reason they were able to make Gundam afterwards.
Daitarn 3 was also the first time Mr. Okawara designed a transforming main robot for Sunrise. Did you feel anything special about it?
Matsuzaki: Mr. Okawara was originally from Tatsunoko Production, but the slapstick gags reminded me of the old Time Bokan series—or rather, Tatsunoko Production as a whole.
Inoue: The "Mr. Kokuni" who designed the enemy characters was actually Mr. Tomonori Kogawa, and come to think of it, even Mr. Norio Shioyama was an animator from Tatsunoko Production. (9)
Matsuzaki: In other words, all the main designers were from Tatsunoko Production, weren't they?
Inoue: Now I think about it, they were! The style was based on Tatsunoko Production! "It comes when you call it" is definitely a little reminiscent of Tatsunoko, too. (laughs)
Matsuzaki: Sunrise didn't have that sensibility. (laughs)
Inoue: So what was Daitarn 3 like for you?
Matsuzaki: At first, I thought it was just some weird robot anime where "It comes when you call it." But it turned out to be an "anything goes" situation, as long as we didn't deviate from Mr. Tomino's image, and it was never consistent.
Inoue: So it was a relationship where Mr. Tomino was Don Zauser, and the writers were like Commanders. (laughs)
Matsuzaki: And the easygoing Mr. Yamaura left us to our own devices. But eventually Mr. Tomino couldn't stand it anymore, and he started delving into what was going on behind the scenes with the Meganoids, Banjo's father, and Banjo's personal life. Banjo's mother also said that he had enough money (gold ingots) to live on for a lifetime, but that's not so important.
Inoue: I don't think he could maintain that Banjo Mansion with just the money his mother left him. Garrison (Tokita) must have managed it pretty skillfully.
Matsuzaki: He had gold ingots or something, but what happened to them? Mr. Tomino seems to love gold. (laughs)
Inoue: I guess he was the only one who knew the whole story. (10) Garrison was the number one key person in Daitarn 3, wasn't he? He must have known all about Banjo's father, too, but he didn't say anything until the very end.
Matsuzaki: Daitarn 3 leaves a lot of room for the viewer's imagination. I think that's what makes it fun.
Inoue: It's full of mysteries, and the conclusion is open-ended. And yet Daitarn 3 has all the proper aesthetics of a giant robot show.
Matsuzaki: That's the "Tomino smell." (laughs) At first glance, it looks like a typical giant robot show or gag show, but he gives it a grown-up aroma. He doesn't simplify it just because it's aimed at children. He always includes things that will give the kids a suitable challenge. Mr. Tomino never makes fun of children.
Inoue: I think the late Director (Tadao) Nagahama shared the same policy. Mr. Tomino once said to me "Why can this protagonist ride the robot? As long as you can answer that, everything else will be fine."
But why does the mecha itself exist? In Daitarn 3, it's never really explained. You have to rely on the Meganoids for that.
Matsuzaki: I think that's fine because you're free to imagine it. It's no fun if it's created too rigidly. The Tomino spice is a subtle secret ingredient, and that's okay because the ending still feels "somehow Tomino-esque."
Inoue: Right. It doesn't matter what episode of Daitarn 3 you start with. Tomino fans can just watch from the episode with Banjo's back story until the last one.
Matsuzaki: You start watching with the idea that it's a mere gag anime, and then you fall into the Tomino trap. It's like a set meal that still has the Director's smell. (laughs)
(1) Matsuzaki's first scriptwriting contribution to Daitarn 3 was episode 17.
(2) This line is presumably a reference to the way the Daitarn 3 is summoned, with the hero calling out "Daitarn, come here!"
(3) This episode was written by Hoshiyama, not Matsuzaki, so I've interpreted this as a collective idea.
(4) I think Matsuzaki means that the floating brain shown in the animation wasn't meant to be Admiral Magellan's surgically extracted brain. The episode was storyboarded by Tomino, under his "Minoru Yokitani" pen name, so presumably this was the director's fault.
(5) Rakugo (落語) is a traditional form of Japanese comedic storytelling.
(6) Sandai-banashi (三題噺) is a rakugo performance in which the storyteller improvises a story based on three topics suggested by the audience.
(7) The English loanword "Commander" (コマンダー) is used in Daitarn 3 as a specific term for the commanding officers of the enemy Meganoids. I've capitalized it here to reflect this usage.
(8) Like "Commander," the English loanword "Soldier" (ソルジャー) is used in Daitarn 3 as a specific term for the lower ranks of the Meganoid forces.
(9) Though they participated as freelance animators rather than company employees, Kogawa and Shioyama worked on many of Tatsunoko's most famous anime productions.
(10) I think Inoue is referring here to Garrison, the hero's butler, rather than to Tomino.
Translator's Note: A translation of this interview by idango was previously published at Cries In Newtype. I've done my own translation here, mostly to standardize the references to Sunrise's internal organization, but idango's version is wonderfully readable and I want to give them credit for bringing this interview to my attention in the first place.
Mr. Ryoji Hirayama was responsible for the mecha design of Super Machine Zambot 3. This was actually the only time he was ever credited by this name, and since then he's been working as a director under the name Ryoji Fujiwara. In addition to the inside story of the birth of the Zambot 3's design, we'll ask Mr. Hirayama about interesting topics such as the Nippon Sunrise planning office and the situation in the studio at the time, where the production was supervised by Director Yoshiyuki Tomino.
Hirayama: Yes. I started out by joining the Nippon Sunrise (now Sunrise) planning office. But even though I was in the planning office, at first there was nothing for me to do. (laughs) I remember the planning office chief Mr. Eiji Yamaura, who later became the president of Sunrise, was just reading books all the time, and for a while he didn't give me any instructions.
Hirayama: Before I joined Nippon Sunrise, I was apprenticed to a certain manga artist, who had me doing things like box art for a plastic model series he was working on. (1) So I quit and started doing part-time work. Then an acquaintance I'd made through doing box art, Section Chief Kiyomi Numoto (originally of Mushi Pro, and one of Sunrise's founding members) of Takara (now Takara Tomy), referred me to Nippon Sunrise. I don't even remember whether I was a company employee at the time. (laughs) They were just paying me enough to survive, but I was planning to get married, so I was grateful to have a salary. (laughs)
Hirayama: None at all. Since I'd been given no instructions, I just spent every day in idle chatter. So Mr. Masao Iizuka (later manager of the Sunrise reference room) said "I'm going to teach you the basics of anime," and he took charge of me. I'm truly indebted to Mr. Iizuka for that.
After I'd spent about half a year assisting Mr. Iizuka, Mr. Yamaura suddenly asked me to think up a robot. When I asked him what he wanted, he said "Come up with a gimmick where three or so mecha combine." As I was drawing, I just went with the flow, saying "This part fits in here... This is the chest, these are the legs." And somehow it turned out well. "I've done it," I thought. (laughs)
After that, aside from the design details, I finalized it with Mr. Yamaura and the others, saying things like "Let's try adding wings." We got it into a form that could more or less combine. Meanwhile, I remember they told me to go to Takara to discuss whether or not they could turn it into a toy.
Hirayama: That's right. Nobody else came with me. (laughs) I went by myself, and I heard the opinions of the Takara people, which were like "You can do this, you can't do that." Through these conversations, we refined it further and finally arrived at something we were confident could combine properly.
At this stage, Mr. Yamaura suggested I stick a crescent moon on its head. Back then, there was an unwritten rule that this kind of robot had to be symmetrical. This was so it could be traced from the back when they were drawing the anime, but we weren't going to be using back-tracing here, so we attached a slightly tilted crescent moon.
Hirayama: I think at first, we hadn't yet decided what kind of mecha were going to combine. As I was thinking about the combination, I created them by saying "This should be this shape." Then, as I thought about how the mecha would combine, I was simultaneously deciding on the types and characteristics of the combining mecha, saying things like "The back feels lonely in design terms, so let's add caterpillar tracks and make that a mecha that travels underground." I think requests for an aircraft and a tank came up along the way.
Hirayama: I don't know anything about all of that.
Hirayama: I remember my first meeting with Director Tomino when he joined the studio as Zambot's director. Director Tomino taught me a lot about directing after that. Personally, I think of myself as "Director Tomino's number one disciple." I have fond memories of fooling around every day with the episode director Mr. Toshifumi Takizawa, jokingly saying things like "I'm Director Tomino's number one disciple," "No, I'm the number one disciple."
Hirayama: I never talked directly with Mr. Haruka Takachiho and Mr. Kazutaka Miyatake of Studio Nue, but they gave me ideas for weapons and designs via the production assistants.
Hirayama: I think we went in that direction because Mr. Yamaura said "Rather than an ambiguous design, we should incorporate something accessible that everyone understands! Like Japanese armor!" At any rate, since I started out thinking about combination gimmicks, the design was still pretty boxy and rectangular. Then the design was completed by adding ideas from other people such as "Why don't we make these wings a little bigger?"
When it was animated, Mr. Yoshikazu Yasuhiko anime-ized it (cleaned it up), and I was blown away when I saw his drawings. "He made it look so cool!" I really thought I was dealing with someone amazing. I think Mr. Yasuhiko may also have incorporated ideas from Studio Nue. As far as the animated Zambot 3, I just drew the basic artwork for the combination gimmicks and so forth, and I believe things like the orthographic views were drawn by Studio Nue.
Hirayama: I made the robot first, and then divided it up into three parts. As I was working on that, I got stuck on one of the parts. I spontaneously thought "This could turn into a humanoid form" and made it that way. I think I simply said something like "Couldn't a head pop out of here?" But I was worried about how that would work in the toy. (laughs)
Hirayama: If they're made to prioritize the gimmicks, things like style will inevitably suffer. But it was still good that you could simulate the anime with the toy.
Hirayama: I knew we were working on those, but since that was at a different studio, I didn't really have any information about the setting and so forth. I knew nothing at all about their combining robots and the toys based on them. That's why I initially didn't take it very seriously, saying "I guess I can just combine three things." (laughs) So I was truly astonished when I later saw the animated Zambot 3. I recalled doing various rough designs, but I no longer remembered what I'd actually drawn.
Hirayama: Once they began production of the anime, my robot-related work was over, but when the studio opened they asked me to start doing mecha design. So I was working on ordinary mecha like jeeps and cars, while Studio Nue was in charge of the SF mecha.
After that, during The Unchallengeable Daitarn 3, I was helping out by cleaning up cels and so forth. Then I wondered whether I might be able to direct an episode, so I discussed it with Director Tomino and the producer Mr. Yasuo Shibue. They replied, "Why don't you try drawing a storyboard?" That wouldn't be so easy to do nowadays, but it was no problem at the time. (laughs)
They handed me the script for the episode and told me "You have a month to draw the storyboards." I managed to do it by learning from imitation, so naturally it was terrible, but Director Tomino said "I'll acknowledge that you made it through to the end." I think that was episode 9 of Daitarn 3, "A Strange Pursuer," where Commander Franken first appears.
Hirayama: That's when I started working under the name Ryoji Fujiwara. They suddenly had me both storyboarding and directing.
Hirayama: I consulted with episode directors like Mr. Kazuo Yamasaki and Mr. Kazuyuki Hirokawa, and I learned from them as I went along. As far as storyboarding, the only thing Director Tomino cautioned me about was the imaginary line (the relationship between the positions of the character and the camera), and he didn't teach me anything else. So after that, I really did learn by imitation.
I'm sure someone who went through a vocational school would have known a lot more than me about the basics of anime. I learned about things like shooting techniques day by day as I was being scolded. So after that, I left the planning office and became a director. (laughs)
Hirayama: No, not at all. I originally wanted to do manga, so as I mentioned previously, I became an apprentice to a certain manga artist. But I never got to draw any manga, and all he had me do was plastic model box art. Along the way, I also became interested in anime, and perhaps that's what motivated me to join Nippon Sunrise. I didn't hate mecha and robots, so that experience was probably useful during Zambot 3.
Hirayama: Of course, he didn't teach me step-by-step like in school. But I was always working at a neighboring desk alongside Director Tomino, and that was a learning experience.
Any time I gave him storyboards, Director Tomino would end up redoing more than half of them himself. I think that was true of all the storyboard artists. People like Mr. Shinya Sadamitsu said he redid almost everything. He didn't really revise anything on Daitarn 3, but when it came to Gundam, he redrew virtually all of it.
I'd heard that Director Tomino's storyboards weren't like those of other people. I remember him saying "Not many people notice that." Of course I didn't understand it at the time, and simply had a vague feeling that they were somehow different. But I recalled hearing that Mr. Tomino had a live-action orientation, so I thought perhaps they were more like the way you'd shoot live action than an anime layout. I still don't really get it, though.
Hirayama: Afterwards, I went on to work at other studios, and it was very lonely. At Nippon Sunrise back then, we'd chatter late into the night, and that's where our ideas came from. I'd ride in the production assistants' cars while they chased after the key animators, and I'd do general affairs work like carrying baggage. Technically we were supposed to start and leave work at specific times, but almost nobody honored that. Despite all that, it was a lot of fun.
Hirayama: No, I didn't. Mr. Yamasaki and Mr. Hirokawa were also freelancers, and most people were working like that.
Hirayama: The anime environment has changed a lot, hasn't it? The recent changes due to the move to digital are particularly striking. The homogeneity of the artwork has improved the drawing efficiency, but it's more boring because the individuality of the animators is being lost due to the stylistic homogenization. Mr. Yoshinori Kanada, Mr. Nobuyoshi Sasakado, and Mr. Yasuhiko all had their own distinct styles, and I really enjoyed seeing that.
What's more, those people were able to build scenes even when they weren't directing. I thought it was amazing that when you handed over the storyboards, they'd pick up on your intentions and then add to the performance.
(1) This manga artist was apparently Satoru Ozawa, known for Submarine 707 and Blue Submarine No.6. Ozawa is also credited with the character design and original story for Imai's Robodatchi plastic model series, launched in 1975, and it appears this was the project Hirayama was involved in.
Mobile Suit Gundam is copyright © Sotsu • Sunrise. Everything else on this site, and all original text and pictures, are copyright Mark Simmons.
