Production Reference:Translator's Note: Though the animation studio Sunrise officially ceased to exist in April 2022, when it was reorganized into Bandai Namco Filmworks, the Sunrise World website remains in operation and continues to present lots of interesting interviews and historical material. Here, I've translated some selections from the site's ongoing series of creator interviews that shed light on the history of the studio and its major works.
The following text is copyright © Sunrise • Bandai Namco Filmworks Inc.
Translator's Note: The original Japanese text of this interview was posted in two parts. See Part 1 and Part 2.
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In these creator interviews, we ask the staff members who played key roles in Sunrise works about their memories of the works they were involved with. Our 11th guest is the mecha designer and illustrator Mr. Yuichi Higuchi. In addition to the mecha design for Space Runaway Ideon, he was responsible for the packaging for many Sunrise robot works as part of the design company "Submarine." Here, we've interviewed him about Space Runaway Ideon's mecha design. In the first part, he discusses how he became involved with this work, and the story behind the birth of Ideon's designs. In the second part, he discusses the changing eras of robot anime, his role in designing the heavy mobile mecha, and his thoughts about the upcoming "Ideon Broadcast 40th Anniversary Exhibition: Mechanical Designer Yuichi Higuchi and Eight Sculptors." |
Higuchi: I think it was probably around then. Before that, I'd been doing toy packaging at "DesignMate," where I was working at the time, and we helped with packaging and made instruction manuals for Sunrise works at Clover's request. That's how the job came to us for Future Robot Daltanious (broadcast starting March 1979). One of my seniors at the company ended up doing Future Robot Daltanious, while I helped draw what were essentially storyboards for the boarding sequence and launch scene. But when Tansar 5 came along, I was the one who took that on.
Higuchi: DesignMate Co., Ltd., is actually a graphic design company. I hadn't gone to a vocational design school to become a designer, so I didn't know anything at all about design, but I joined the company after coming across a newspaper advertisement about "recruiting a few designers." I drew some pictures for the written exam, and they hired me on as an illustrator.
I joined in 1974, and after that I ended up designing for "Microman." It was a hit product back then, but I had no idea it existed when I took the exam. (1) I really started out with zero knowledge of the toy industry.
Higuchi: That's right. The company was founded in 1972, and when I joined, we had seven employees. We were so busy that none of us could ever come home from work. Because of that, within a year three people had quit, and and only four were left. Of those four, Mr. Yusuke Sugawara, who later became the president, did the design. Two more were doing what's called "paste-up," creating things that would become the original plates when they were printed. So for the time being, I had to draw the illustrations.
Things were so tough that, after that, we had to add more employees. By the time we did Space Runaway Ideon, the headcount had increased substantially. I was working with the help of junior staff who had just joined the company.
Higuchi: It was (effectively) a planning department that we created in 1978, but it was also a joint-stock company. (2) As per the name "Submarine," it was a place to develop plans that wouldn't appear on the surface. Since they each had their own corporate structure, they each had to generate revenue, so we split into two companies and divided up our clients.
The things that had previously been our main work, like packaging for toys and candy, were done by DesignMate, while the anime-related work we subsequently undertook was allocated to Submarine. Once we started working with Sunrise, the Submarine name began getting out there more and more, and after that it felt like everyone knew about it.
Higuchi: It was. The order for Tansar 5, which was mentioned earlier, was to draw mecha for land, sea, and air use, with the keyword "investigate." (3) The idea that each of the mecha would transform came up in meetings with the sponsor Tomy, so we went ahead and included the gimmick, thinking that they could transform with one touch of a button. After that, when I was discussing our next work with Mr. Eiji Yamaura of Sunrise, he asked me whether I could turn that into a robot.
Higuchi: That's right. Although it was Sunrise that requested it, we had to make a merchandising presentation to the sponsor Tomy, so I designed it as a toy in a similar way to Tansar 5. Of course I was aware of the "Tomica" minicars that Tomy was producing, but I figured we couldn't present it without some kind of story to differentiate it from Tomica. Thus we prepared a simple story, akin to a synopsis, for the presentation.
Higuchi: That's how we all did it back then. First we'd come up with a simple setting and submit an idea for how it would be used. Then we'd work it out through a back-and-forth with the client.
For example, first you give them a sketch and say "It's a flying car." Based on that, the company making the prototype toy creates a "mechanical prototype" to reproduce and verify its functions, saying you put a spring in here, and batteries to drive it, and so forth. Since the emphasis is on reproducing the gimmick, it often doesn't resemble the design sketches. But then we bring that back and create a design that can be used for the production molds, in a form that takes advantage of the gimmick...
Thus, the design itself changes little by little in the course of this back-and-forth.
Higuchi: You've got it. So I don't really have the sensibility of a modern creator or mecha designer. It might sound irresponsible, but it was a process where I couldn't really take responsibility. In short, I'd say "If I can get it this far, then I guess the anime people will get it to move, and the toymakers will make it work." It was a kind of wishful thinking. (laughs) I regret it now, but in those days, that sort of approach was pretty common.
Higuchi: They were. I thought that was fairly normal at the time.
Higuchi: The three-part combination made it complex, and even I thought so at the time. On the other hand, Tomy was insistent that as much as possible, the transformation and combination shouldn't involve removing any parts. When you're trying to satisfy that sort of demand, the mechanisms inevitably get more complicated. You have to add lots of hinges everywhere. Even when the forms are simple and rectangular, it ends up becoming very complex.
Higuchi: I don't think anyone expected that. Originally, the initial setting I wrote was targeted at kids in the lower grades of elementary school. We met with a Tomy department chief a couple of times before the final decision and told them "It's basically something like this."
When we did the final presentation, everyone was there, including the presidents of Tomy and Sunrise. On the way back, Mr. Tomino introduced himself and asked "Do you mind if I change the story a little?" That was our first conversation. After that, Mr. Tomino called me in and asked me about the design, saying "Could you make it a bit more like this?"
My impression at the time was that the things he said were very hard to understand. (4) Knowing nothing about the content or worldview, when I did the initial design I just thought that since it was a robot, it might be doing a little more fighting than Tansar 5. I had no idea the battles would end up being so spectacular.
Higuchi: The only thing that really changed was the face. Since the body transformed, we couldn't tinker too much with its basic style. We added some external parts later on, but the basic design I'd submitted for the toy didn't change.
Higuchi: That was something that even Mr. Tomino couldn't ask me to get rid of. On the contrary, he said it was good that it had a distinctive feature. We had to retain all those mechanical aspects, so instead we changed the face, which we could tinker with as much as we liked. After our meeting, I drew an awful lot of face designs. He was especially particular about the shape of the camera section, perhaps because that was related to the dramatization.
Higuchi: When I was responsible for episode setting, Mr. Tomino made a variety of additional requests. For example, he wanted the protagonists to be able to run around inside the Ideon's body.
Higuchi: Right, right. They told me about it in the meeting. The setting manager Mr. Satoshi Namiki helped me out with that.
Higuchi: He did. But I couldn't get my head around story elements like what the Sixth Civilization was. Personally, I don't know anything about SF. Where that stuff was concerned, the setting manager Mr. Satoshi Namiki had to interpret it for me, saying "Maybe Mr. Tomino is talking about something like this?" Then I'd drop it into the setting. That was very helpful.
Higuchi: As I said earlier, up until then I'd irresponsibly said "If I do this with this transformation, it'll be fine." I wasn't doing detailed mecha setting, just enough that they'd be able to make the thing. In that respect, everything I know about working on animation, I learned through Space Runaway Ideon.
Higuchi: In a historical sense, it seems the mecha setting suddenly got more detailed around the time of Space Battleship Yamato, Mobile Suit Gundam, and Space Runaway Ideon. It wasn't like that before, and they were working based only on concepts.
Higuchi: It was a kind of boundary between eras. When I meet hardcore fans, they sometimes ask detailed setting questions that I just can't answer, like "Are the purple polka dots on the Buff Clan mecha actually all the same, or did you vary them to distinguish between machines?" I was just drawing whatever I felt like drawing, with no logical reason. That was my strong impression.
Higuchi: He got angry at me a lot. (laughs) I remember that very well. Also, he was really detail-oriented. I thought that since it was anime, we could just let the robots fly freely, but he'd give me specific instructions like "The exhaust ports go right here." But Mr. Tomino wasn't the only person worrying about things like that in those days. When he explained his reasons, they were perfectly reasonable, so I had no cause to resist him. I'd just listen to what he said and think "Oh, I see."
Higuchi: Halfway through, I realised "This isn't a work for children, is it?" Around the time of the LP record jackets that came out while it was on the air, I started doing illustrations in a painterly style, and by that point I'd decided not to depict the Ideon like a hero robot. I wanted to do it with the image of a dark world.
The title of the work wasn't originally Space Runaway Ideon to begin with. (5) It was a more hero robot-style title, but after Mr. Tomino became the director, the title changed to Space Runaway Ideon. The sound of the title conveyed that it was focusing a lot on spiritual elements, so I tried to make the illustrations as dark as possible to match that image.
Higuchi: I did some package illustrations for "Big Racing," a slot car product line from a company called Cheryco. For that, I did the illustrations in a realistic racing style. But compared to products like that, doing illustrations of the Ideon was really hard at first. Since it was a robot, it inevitably ended up looking very stiff. But at a certain point I started thinking it was okay not to depict the joints, and I decided it was fine to just move it freely. That made me feel much more relaxed. I was very busy at the time and wasn't really able to watch the anime itself, so I couldn't use it as a model.
Higuchi: I worked on the Soloship, the wave motion gun, and all the other things that were turned into products. As for everything else, I did a little bit whenever I had time. I did all of the basic setting that was released at the very beginning.
Higuchi: When it came to the heavy mobile mecha, it felt like they were all done separately, or rather that each of the designers involved were allowed to come up with their own ideas. They're a race completely different from humanity, right? Their culture itself is different. So they asked us to come up with designs based on different concepts, but in that case, you never know what you should do.
Anyway, we decided to just keep sending in whatever we came up with, and I randomly submitted my rough design ideas along with those of the other Submarine staff. Mr. Tomino would look at them, and whenever he thought something might be interesting, it would be revised for use in the show. Sometimes Mr. Tomino drew rough sketches, and Mr. Tomonori Kogawa drew some as well. The weirdly slippery-looking designs were by Mr Kogawa.
At first, there was no concept for the heavy mobile mecha. But once we'd progressed to a certain point, they requested that we add a pattern like purple eyeballs on a black background in order to give the designs a sense of unity. I also heard that it was helpful to make the patterns slightly different in shape, so that they'd be individually recognizable.
Higuchi: That's right. I didn't really think they'd be merchandised when I designed them, and I certainly had no idea they'd become plastic models. Probably even Mr. Tomino wasn't expecting that.
Higuchi: It was the year after the Gunpla boom began. (6) If they hadn't released the plastic models, I don't think there would have been nearly as much merchandise, and the worldview wouldn't have spread so far. The other day I went to see a "Space Runaway Ideon Aoshima Box Art Exhibition" held by Aoshima, which released the plastic models. I'd contributed a little to that as well, but I think it's largely due to the influence of Aoshima's products that Space Runaway Ideon still survives to this day.
Recently, when I was working with a youngster from Takara Tomy, he mentioned that Tomy used to release Space Runaway Ideon products, and that I'd been involved with that job. He hadn't known that Tomy made Space Runaway Ideon toys until he heard about it from someone else, and it seemed that to him, Space Runaway Ideon just meant Aoshima's plastic models. So I guess there must have been more awareness of the plastic models than the toys.
Higuchi: I think Tomy actually had some trouble with its Ideon toys. Tomy's toys had a gimmick called "Miracle Sound," which played a sound when you pushed a button on the chest, but that was obviously aimed at five-year-old kids. And I don't think it was a work that you could expect five-year-olds to watch. I thought afterwards that if we'd had a better idea of the target audience beforehand, then maybe we could have aimed a little more in that direction. But Director Tomino's strategy was to get sponsors to give him money, and then tell a story aimed at older age groups.
Higuchi: That's because it was doing things like axe kicks. But I was impressed they could get that design to move so well. In that sense, I think it was a work created during the transition to a new era that began with Mobile Suit Gundam, and I was able to experience that interesting time firsthand.
Higuchi: Raijin-Oh materialized after I planned it and brought it to them. We'd heard from company employees that the president of Tomy wanted to make a robot show, so we immediately started planning one in-house. Once the plan was looking promising, I contacted Mr. Yamaura of Sunrise, with whom I had a good relationship, and someone I knew from a certain advertising agency. I asked them if they'd come and present it with me, and we all went together.
Submarine had a full staff at that point, so I felt I could leave most of the work to them while I ran the business. We were also involved in package creation for the "Brave" series at the time. Thanks to that relationship, in those days we'd also lend our anime-loving staff members to Sunrise.
Higuchi: Peace OS is something that I want to make my life's work. I've been making robots for a long time, but if you keep doing that, there's no end to it. You have no choice but to keep going down the road of making the robots' weapons stronger and stronger, and everyone's thoughts go in that direction as well. This project began when I wondered whether we could go in the opposite direction. It's a robot that doesn't fight.
I say it doesn't fight, but it's just that it doesn't fight physically. It still fights to make peace. For example, the decisions of judges can vary depending on who's doing the judging, and people with money and power can hire excellent lawyers, so you end up with power disparities even in the courtroom. To prevent that, the things each party wants to say are turned into data, and they fight it out on a computer. The clash of opinions is resolved logically... It's a bit like two computers playing go or shogi.
The idea that you could do something like that became the basis for undertaking the work called Peace OS. Since I'm not an expert, I don't want to be responsible for making statements. So I avoid doing that as much as possible, but I can accomplish it by expressing things in my own work, and I can take responsibility for that. That's what I wanted to do.
Higuchi: That's right. Since the world is so full of amazing people, computer engineers should be able to do that sort of thing as well. That's my wish. I'm presenting this work in exhibitions and so forth, so I'd be delighted if people who are interested could come and see it.
Higuchi: Indeed. It's been postponed several times due to the Coronavirus epidemic, but it seems it's finally happening. They're holding it from September 15 to October 9 at a place called How House in Yanaka, Tokyo. It all started when I was invited to join a show called "Go! My Robot Exhibition," for which I submitted Peace OS. Through that exhibition I met artists who were making paintings and sculptures of their own original robots. Eight of them ended up getting together to make something on the theme of Space Runaway Ideon, and we decided to hold an exhibition of their works.
For my part, as well as exhibiting old Ideon-related illustrations that I made previously, I'll naturally be displaying new work as well. Many of the participating artists are in their forties and fifties, so they're exactly the people who got hooked on Space Runaway Ideon. They're all participating very earnestly, saying they can't miss this chance to get involved.
Higuchi: They're all artists, so they can't help wanting to express their own personality. That's probably very easy when the motif is Space Runaway Ideon. Even though it's your own work, since the Ideon is the motif, whatever you do can be understood by other people. So everyone is working very energetically, and it would be wonderful if you could all enjoy it.
42 years after the broadcast of Space Runaway Ideon, we can still hold exhibitions like this. I'm delighted I could come across a work like that and get involved in it. As well as experiencing nostalgia, you'll also be able to see a more recent version of Space Runaway Ideon, so I hope you'll be sure to visit.
Profile
Born in Niigata Prefecture on July 13, 1951. Designer and illustrator. He handled mechanical and toy design for many anime works at DesignMate Co., Ltd. and its sister company Submarine Co., Ltd., serving as mecha designer on the Sunrise works Science Adventure Command Tansar 5 and Space Runaway Ideon. After leaving the company, he launched the Mandala Web site in 2009. In recent years, he's been working on Peace OS (Equation). Also, the exhibition "Ideon Broadcast 40th Anniversary Exhibition: Mechanical Designer Yuichi Higuchi and Eight Sculptors" will be open from September 15 (Thursday) to October 9 (Sunday), 2022, at How House East in Yanaka.
(1) Takara's Microman toy series was launched in 1974.
(2) A kabushiki kaisha (株式会社) is a common form of joint-stock company in Japan. In company names, the term is usually translated as either "Co., Ltd." or "Inc."
(3) The Japanese verb tansa suru (探査する), meaning "probe" or "investigate," is obviously the source for the title Tansar 5.
(4) Higuchi's original phrasing is 「随分難しいことを言う人だな」, literally "He was someone who said very difficult things." I think that's "difficult" in the sense of intellectually challenging, rather than unreasonably demanding.
(5) The Japanese title literally translates as "Legendary Giant God Ideon."
(6) The first Gundam plastic models were actually released in July 1980, two months after Ideon's broadcast debut.
Translator's Note: The original Japanese text of this interview was posted in two parts. See Part 1 and Part 2.
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In these creator interviews, we ask the staff members who played key roles in Sunrise works about their memories of the works they were involved with. Our 12th guest is the mechanics designer Mr. Kunio Okawara, who is now celebrating the 50th anniversary of his artistic career. Having been involved with Sunrise's works since the days of its predecessor Soeisha, he participated in works such as Mobile Suit Gundam, Fang of the Sun Dougram, and Armored Trooper Votoms. In the first part, he discusses how he went from his first job with Sunrise to Mobile Suit Gundam, which became a turning point in his mecha design work. In the second part, he discusses his feelings about his own work based on the real robot series that began with Fang of the Sun Dougram, his collaborations with Mr. Ryosuke Takahashi and Mr. Takeyuki Kanda, and the process leading to the "Brave" series. |
Okawara: I first became involved with anime as an employee of Tatsunoko Pro. But around that time, a production supervisor I'd been working with went from Tatsunoko to Soeisha, the predecessor of Sunrise. I kept on working with this person after I left Tatsunoko, and along the way he asked me to meet with Mr. Eiji Yamaura, Soeisha's planning chief. My introduction to Mr. Yamaura was pretty casual. He asked me to do internal diagrams for a work called Robokko Beeton, and I think that was effectively my first job for Sunrise.
Around the same time as those internal diagrams, they asked me to do designs for The Unchallengeable Daitarn 3, which was being readied as a new work. At that point, accompanying the change of company name from Soeisha to Nippon Sunrise, they were getting started on works with two toy company sponsors. I'd briefly started on the design work, but as the production continued, the sponsor went bankrupt and Daitarn 3 was temporarily put on hold. As a result Super Machine Zambot 3, which was being planned at the same time, ended up taking priority and it came first in the broadcast sequence. Daitarn 3, which was originally being readied as Nippon Sunrise's debut work, was broadcast the following year.
Okawara: That's right. I was very closely attached to Mr. Yamaura. In those days, we'd even go together to meetings with sponsors. I think Sunrise also had other lines of mecha designers such as Studio Nue, but even though they were involved with things like planning, in my case I was more like a handyman. As well as designing mecha, I could also come up with toy-like forms and mechanisms, build mechanical prototypes, and go along to presentations to explain them to the sponsors.
Perhaps because I was useful for those kinds of things, Mr. Yamaura was constantly calling me in, and it felt like I was always meeting with him. It was pretty tough at the time. Mr. Yamaura would suddenly call in the middle of the night, saying "Could you come over for a bit? I just had a great idea." I'd go over to Mr. Yamaura's home on the west side of Tokyo, which was about an hour away by car. We'd sit under a kotatsu table and talk, and then I'd draw pictures of the ideas he was describing. That happened all the time. In the early days, I was constantly working with Mr. Yamaura in that fashion.
Okawara: I made mockups of everything. In my mind, I knew we could do a mechanism where the triangular shoulder parts opened up to cover the head, but I couldn't be sure it was practical unless I'd actually done it. I couldn't present it to the sponsor Clover without trying to build that mechanism, so I made it myself.
If anything, I'd say I naturally prefer making three-dimensional objects to drawing pictures, and I try to craft these mechanical prototypes into a form as close as possible to the final product. When I showed the things I'd made to the people at the toy company who were responsible for the actual products, they'd okay them right away.
Okawara: Mr. Tomino was directing episodes of things like Neo-Human Casshern during my Tatsunoko days, so I'd probably met him back then, but this was the first time we met properly and worked together. Mr. Tomino and I have completely different sensibilities when it comes to mecha, though. Mr. Tomino loves somewhat weird mecha that look like they've come from outer space, while I tend to come up with mechanical-looking things. That's quite a difference in sensibility. Nonetheless, during Daitarn 3, we never had any conflicts over these differences of opinion.
Okawara: The main problem was I'd never have gotten any work done if I was listening to what Mr. Tomino said. (laughs) It was fine during Daitarn 3, but by the time of Mobile Suit Gundam, I was dealing with three or four works simultaneously. Specifically, I was doing Gundam and The☆Ultraman for Sunrise, and Zenderman and Science Ninja Team Gatchaman II for Tatsunoko. So I was working on four shows at the same time. In that situation, it was hard enough just keeping up, so I couldn't waste time fighting with Mr. Tomino. (laughs)
Okawara: That's how bad it was. As far as the pace, I couldn't keep up unless I finished my tasks for each work in two days. Because I was working on them simultaneously back then, I noticed a difference between how Sunrise and Tatsunoko were using my designs. With Tatsunoko, they'd take my finished setting and use it directly to animate the mecha in the show. But at Sunrise, somebody else would do the finishing. That's why I didn't do the finishing on the original Gundam.
Okawara: The design process on Gundam was a little strange. First came the Guncannon, for which Mr. Yasuhiko drew a rough based on an idea from Studio Nue, and then I did the finishing. Meanwhile, since the Guncannon didn't look like a hero mecha, I proposed a samurai-style design which was an extension of Daitarn 3. Mr. (Yoshikazu) Yasuhiko ultimately did the finishing on that. Then, as we were finalizing the designs, Sunrise said they wanted three main mecha, so I drew the Guntank.
Up until Daitarn 3, I'd been doing everything including the finishes myself, but the system changed on Gundam when Mr. Yasuhiko joined in. On the other hand, from the middle of Gundam onwards, Mr. Tomino started drawing roughs of all the new mecha for me. In design terms, I was merely finishing them up. The only ones I took the lead in designing were the Zaku, Gouf, and Dom.
Then Mr. Tomino really awakened around the time of the Gelgoog. If I were thinking in a direction derived from the Zaku, I'd never have come up with a weirdly shaped mecha design like the Gelgoog. In that sense, it's thanks to Mr. Tomino's suggestions that we've been able to enjoy such an abundant variety of mobile suit designs in Gundam.
Okawara: I was just lucky in that respect. Since the Gundam was going to be turned into a product, it had to include toy-like gimmicks, and that gave me a lot of trouble. There was nothing like that on the enemy side, so it was fun to design.
Okawara: I think Mr. Yamaura didn't want us to get stuck in a rut, so he tried to to vary the approach by following up harder works with softer ones. But even when they were doing things like that, there still weren't many mecha designers at the time. Since I'd never failed him, they kept calling me back in.
Okawara: I first met Mr. Yamaura in one room of an apartment. That was the planning office. They had a low table in a tatami-floored room, and Mr. Yamaura was sitting there reading a war novel. Mr. (Masao) Iizuka, who was in the planning office at the time, seemed to be devotedly looking after him. Tatsunoko Pro, where I'd been working up until then, had been a respectable company. So at first I thought "I've come to the wrong place." (laughs)
Okawara: It seemed even more impoverished than that. (laughs) They held meetings in nearby coffee shops. They had a separate studio, of course, but I only ever met with Mr. Yamaura in that planning office. There aren't many people left who know what Sunrise was like back then.
Tatsunoko Pro was a real company that could do everything from planning and scriptwriting to design, animation, background art, and photography completely in-house. It had its own studios as well. Naturally, they'd sometimes ask outside companies to do in-betweening and background art, but they could also do it all themselves like a proper company. The difference was enormous.
Okawara: The company was created by volunteers who'd come over from Mushi Production. So when I began my association with them, it really didn't feel like a company. Back then, Studio 1 was doing the company's original works, and Studio 2 was subcontracting for Toei. I didn't really have much to do with Studio 2, but people like Mr. (Yutaka) Izubuchi were drawing designs for enemy mecha at Studio 2.
It's hard for today's mecha designers since there are so many restrictions, but in those days we didn't have any, so it was more fun. I worked on a variety of things from the concept onwards, and there was no sense of "what mecha should be like." We had nothing to refer to, and if anything, we were just getting hints from the drawings of American illustrators. We were lucky that there was no material to imitate, because we were able to express our originality.
Since Sunrise was so impoverished back then, unless the robots that appeared in its works were turned into products and brought in royalties, they'd end up being failures no matter how good the audience ratings were. And even if the ratings were bad, what mattered was that the merchandise sold. That's what I was working on with Mr. Yamaura.
Okawara: It was terrible for our sponsor Clover, since they didn't make any money. At the time, Mr. Yamaura tried to persuade the people from Clover that if they made plastic models, they'd really sell. But they turned him down. One year later, Bandai said they wanted to turn them into plastic models, and they became a smash hit.
Clover was a toy company, so they had safety concerns because children would be playing with them. We couldn't put sharp points in the designs because children might hurt themselves. There were no such restrictions when they were turned into plastic models, so now any kind of design was possible. But there was also the problem that if you went too far, they'd steadily lose their appeal as three-dimensional objects.
As a designer who's been doing this for a long time, I can't help being scared of things like modern 3D CG, where you can put spikes all over and make things endlessly detailed while still being able to move them. But there's no question it was Gundam that brought about this change in both robot anime and the toy industry itself.
Okawara: The toymaker Takara was was panicked by the Gunpla boom. They decided they wanted to do a real robot show, too, and Fang of the Sun Dougram was the result. With Dougram, I went over to Takara to draw design sketches and build mockups with their developers. Those became a product in the form of the "Dual Model." That product was designed to incorporate every element we wanted to do to give the mechanical feeling of a realistic robot.
At the same time, they'd also started selling plastic models. (1) In terms of plastic models, they were turning out products in the same international scale used by companies like Tamiya, so I thought people would be able to make dioramas by adding plastic models in the same scale alongside the combat armors. But Takara ended up really going for it, and in addition to all the combat armors, they also made products of vehicles like jeeps and helicopters.
The story of the main anime itself was quite political, rather than something aimed at children. When I watched it, I wondered if it would be well-received. But it stayed on the air for a year and a half, so I guess it was a huge success.
Okawara: Though Dougram was successful, its height in the setting was 9.63 meters. It was meant to be established as fairly small, and at first we thought the characters could be involved in the performance through their canopy windows, but in fact they were still quite high up. If you were looking up at them from the viewpoint of a character on the ground, it was impossible to create any dramatic performance.
After watching the broadcast of the first episode, I wondered whether we could find a presentation method that connected them more to the characters,. What I came up with was a four-meter-tall robot, the Scopedog of Votoms. As soon as I thought of that, I built a prototype, but Dougram didn't end for a while, so the prototype was just sitting in my house the whole time.
Okawara: My style is basically to design in response to a request, but Votoms was the one time I proposed something because I wanted to do it. When I talked to him about it, the director Mr. Ryosuke Takahashi was of the same opinion, and we thought this would allow us to maintain the comparison to human beings. Mr. Ryosuke said he wanted to do Votoms, so we took the mockup and talked to the producer, who okayed it on the spot. After that, I was simply fine-tuning the design.
Mr. Ryosuke had also worked on Dougram, and there were some aspects he thought hadn't gone very well. So he came up with ideas for gimmicks like the roller dash, turnpick, and arm punch, and we incorporated them using my design as a base. The camera turret was also Mr. Ryosuke's suggestion. I was fretting about whether we could really just stick on a turret from a microscope or an 8mm camera, but Mr. Ryosuke said "It'll be fine." In the end, I think I was able to complete a design that even I was satisfied with. But if you asked me to ride and fight in it, I'd have to politely decline. (laughs)
They've kept on making Votoms works ever since, so I suppose that was a success, too.
Okawara: It's nice that he doesn't complain much about the designs and lets me work freely. Mr. Ryosuke is a little older than me, but we shared the same experience of seeing American army jeeps up close when we were kids, so it was easy for us to reach a mutual understanding about such things.
Okawara: Mr. Kanda really loved mecha. In some ways, it was Mr. Kanda who really created Dougram. I also worked with him on Round Vernian Vifam, Metal Armor Dragonar, and Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team. Mr. Kanda was a graduate of Tama Art University, so he could draw pictures, and even though he loved mecha and military things, he could also make works like Vifam. That was really good, wasn't it? It was very satisfying to work on something that depicted children in such a lively way. That was memorable because we all entered this industry wanting to make works for children.
Okawara: Around 1988, I was obsessed with scuba diving, so I was just going out to sea all the time. The only job I ended up doing was the designs for Leechers Army Merowlink. (2) In the middle of all that, Mr. Takayuki Yoshii, who was a producer at the time and later became president of Sunrise, asked me if I'd like to work on Mado King Granzort. (3) Then, when Granzort was ending, he told me they wanted to make the "Brave" series into something that would keep going for ten years, and I joined in that work as well. (4)
The original Brave Fighter Exkizer was fine, because it was simple transformation and combination, but then Takara started getting more ambitious and it got harder and harder. If seemed like I was going in to work at Sunrise's Studio 7, where it was being produced, every week. I was also getting work from Tatsunoko around that time, so it got even more difficult. (5)
The schedule on a toy-driven work is really tough. You start designing around March, and the design of the final deluxe mecha that will be sold during the year-end shopping season has to be finished six months later. It seems like the planning for next year's shows begins as soon as that's over, so you have to keep working on one after another. In that respect, it was a lot of work.
Okawara: That's why people who are too fond of anime can't do my kind of work. If designers love mecha, they'll end up obsessing over every detail, right?
I basically entered the anime industry to make a living, so I had no choice but to do it. I joined Tatsunoko because it was awkward being unemployed when I was engaged to be married. After that, I became a freelancer, so I wouldn't survive unless I could handle multiple shows. I've been doing it for fifty years with that objective in mind, so I think I've more or less been able to achieve my goal.
Since I wasn't raised on anime and manga, I think to a certain extent I've been able to do the work dispassionately.
Okawara: The most exciting part of my job is when they give me the proposal for the work. It's a lot of fun reading the proposal and thinking about how I'm going to handle the concepts it's presenting. Usually, the basic elements are formed inside my mind the moment I read the proposal. After that, it's just a matter of bringing them out, so I don't have to worry that much about it.
I've been doing this job for fifty years, and thanks to things like the "Time Bokan" series, I have a large and varied store of ideas. So when they bring me a proposal, I suppose I immediately think "I can do something like this."
Okawara: I don't really do anything in particular. I don't take anything in, and I don't watch many movies either. It feels like these ideas come to me naturally. And sometimes, they're sparked by just one word of an idea that somebody's told me about.
Okawara: Of course my work with Sunrise is a large portion of the total. It's even bigger than Tatsunoko. Tatsunoko was a place that taught me a lot, and Sunrise was where I put it to use. Of course, I also worked on a Doraemon movie for Shin-Ei Animation, and I did a lot of one-shot works such as Blocker Corps IV Machine Blaster for Ashi Pro, Space Demon Daikengo for Tori Pro, and Combining Squadron Mechander Robo for Wako Pro. But it feels like I've been working with Sunrise ever since I left Tatsunoko and joined the design company Mecaman.
Naturally, if they'd had more mecha designers, I probably wouldn't have been so heavily involved. But back then, there really wasn't anyone else. It was pretty much just me and Studio Nue, Mr. Yuichi Higuchi, and Mr. Kazutaka Miyatake. There was also Mr. Katsushi Murakami of Popy (a Bandai subsidiary, now merged into Bandai itself), but Mr. Murakami was a company man. Sunrise was comparatively puny, so we were determined not to lose out to Popy. I was still young at the time, and I have a lot of memories from that long relationship.
Okawara: I don't have any particular approach towards future jobs, and I don't expect to make any major changes. Sometimes I'll talk with my wife about whether it's time for me to retire, but I'd probably get senile if I quit working. Fortunately, I'm still getting job commissions, and I'm happy that I have work to do every day. I don't want to deliberately put an end to it, so I'm not going to talk about "retiring" or "hanging up my spurs." (7) As long as they're still giving me work, I'd like to keep on doing the same thing.
Profile
Born in the Tokyo metropolis on December 26, 1947. After graduating from Tokyo Zokei University, he worked at apparel makers before joining Tatsunoko Production, where he debuted on Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. He then founded Design Office Mecaman with Mitsuki Nakamura, and went freelance in 1978. His work for Sunrise includes The Unchallengeable Daitarn 3, Mobile Suit Gundam, Fang of the Sun Dougram, Armored Trooper Votoms, Round Vernian Vifam, and the "Brave" series.
(1) Takara entered the plastic model business in 1981.
(2) The Merowlink OVA series was released in six volumes between November 1988 and April 1989.
(3) The first episode of Granzort aired in April 1989.
(4) Exkizer began airing in February 1990, one month before the end of Granzort's broadcast run.
(5) Presumably the 1993-1994 OVA series Time Bokan: Royal Revival.
(6) Iron Leaguer began airing in April 1993.
(7) The Japanese idiom Okawara uses here, 「筆を折る」 (fude wo oru), literally means "breaking my brush" and means that you're ending your career by giving up the tools of your trade.
Translator's Note: The original Japanese text of this interview was posted in two parts. See Part 1 and Part 2.
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In these creator interviews, we ask the staff members who played key roles in Sunrise works about their memories of the works they were involved with. Our 15th guest is Mr. Ryosuke Takahashi, the director and original story creator of the Armored Trooper Votoms series, which is now celebrating the 40th anniversary of its original broadcast. In the first part, he recalls how he was involved with Sunrise since its founding, and describes the progression from his initial 0-Tester to the hit real robot work Fang of the Sun Dougram. In the second part, he discusses the birth of his masterpiece Armored Trooper Votoms and its development as a series, as well as the novel Armored Trooper Votoms Child ~ Child of God Arc, which has just been released as the latest story in this series. (1) |
Takahashi: That's right. I'd known the Sunrise founders ever since we were all at Mushi Production. The only one who was senior to me at Mushi Pro was Mr. (Kiyomi) Numoto, and all the other people involved in founding the company joined after I did. I guess that made me their senior, but only by a few months. Of the Sunrise founders, I was closest to Mr. (Eiji) Yamaura. Anyway, even though though they were my juniors, they were all older than me because they'd joined Mushi Pro in mid-career. It was something like that, but my memories of the time are pretty fuzzy.
Takahashi: I joined Mushi Pro in 1964, so that's more than half a century. Eventually they'd all left Mushi Pro, and I was doing various different things on the fringes of the animation industry. Rather than working on anime full-time, I'd been wandering around on the fringes of the anime world drawing manga, hanging around with people doing plays, and shooting commercials. Then, when they were producing 0-Tester, which was to be Sunrise's second work, they called me in to direct it.
Takahashi: Sunrise's first work was something called Hazedon, directed by Osamu Dezaki. Madhouse was formed at roughly the same time as Sunrise, and it was another company created by people who'd left Mushi Pro, but it was somewhat different from Sunrise. In a normal company, the people who started Sunrise would be equivalent to department heads. They knew exactly what had brought down Mushi Pro, but they were in a position where they didn't have to take the blame for it. These people got together and made a company with the clear idea that "If we create an organization that lets us make a living from animation, we won't make the same mistakes Mushi Pro did. We'll do the things that Mushi Pro didn't do."
Madhouse wasn't like that. It was a company launched by people lower down in the hierarchy, who got together and said "As of tomorrow, we don't have a livelihood, so we've gotta find work." Thus, Sunrise was a group that could negotiate deftly with Tohokushinsha and get money out of them. Madhouse, meanwhile, started out as a subcontractor assisting other anime production companies. I guess there aren't many people left who could put that atmosphere into words.
Takahashi: Sunrise decided not to put the creators at the center of the company. They were people who'd seen from Master Osamu Tezuka that creators can run wild when they're making things. Madhouse was a company centered on creators like Mr. Dezaki and Mr. Masami Hata. But Sunrise's approach was that when there was a job to do, they'd contract the creators individually for each work.
Takahashi: Unlike today, it was an era when there wasn't any money to create works. So it's a question of how you feel about having no money. Since Mr. Dezaki was a creator, he went in the direction of "I want to make it like this" and "I want to do that." But Soeisha's priorities were schedules and budgets. As a result, Mr. Dezaki lost interest along the way, saying "This isn't a production company I can stay with," and he left in the middle. Though Mr. Dezaki had been sent over from Madhouse to Soeisha, he ended up going back. I'm not sure how Hazedon was made after that, but its broadcast had been decided even if they didn't have a series director, so the production probably continued under the guidance of the directors of each individual episode.
As a result, they had no idea who to turn to as the director of their next work. If you ask "Who comes next after Osamu Dezaki?" then there's nobody. I happened to be wavering between things at that point, and I was friendly with Mr. Yamaura and Mr. Numoto, so they ended up saying "How about that guy?" Then they called me in.
I wasn't yet established as a director back then, and I hadn't even been going in to other people's studios to direct episodes. My directing experience was all the level of individual episodes, and I wasn't a lead player. Though I worked on things like Wonder 3, Dororo, and Goku no Daibōken, I'd only been doing episode direction while surrounded by ace-class people, and I wasn't even sure whether I was going to make a living in anime. That was my situation when I was asked to do the job, so I said "I'll give it a try anyhow." In that sense, 0-Tester was like a fresh start for me in anime. Fortunately, the products did well commercially, and the broadcast run was extended.
Takahashi: That's right. I hadn't participated in the planning. 0-Tester was created by analyzing the structure of Thunderbirds, which had been a big hit as a special effects program, and reconstructing it for Japanese animation. By the time I joined in, the design of the mecha had been decided as well. Then I was called in at the stage where they were creating the scripts for each episode. It was an enjoyable job, and I was still young, so I pretty much never went home and just hung around the studio while I was working on it.
Just as I was starting to feel I'd created a fairly successful work, Space Battleship Yamato started. This was still in 1974, but our broadcast started in April, and theirs in October. (2) Watching it, I was devastated as a creator. Space Battleship Yamato was leaps and bounds ahead of the animation I was making. So I asked to be excused from directing Sunrise's next work, saying "I'm going to go back and retrain for a while." Mr. (Yoshiyuki) Tomino ended up doing the following Reideen the Brave, and I parted ways with Sunrise for the first time.
Takahashi: After leaving Sunrise, I started my own Studio Akabanten. I made animated commercials and short corporate promotion films, and supported myself by working on Manga Nippon Mukashi Banashi. I was going about my daily life with no thought of returning to the world of TV series animation where I'd once been defeated.
At that point, Sunrise was on an upward trend as a company. Five of the TV series plans they'd submitted to the stations had been approved. As a latecomer studio, it was really a stroke of luck for Sunrise to be doing five TV series at once. But they couldn't pull it off because they didn't have enough directors.
Takahashi: They called for me because they thought "When we're in trouble, that guy will do as we ask." So I was doing Cyborg 009 in 1979, and that was also pretty well received. But just as I was feeling good about it, the broadcast of Mobile Suit Gundam started. (3) I was in the sound studio when it went on the air, and we said "Gundam is airing today, so let's watch it." When we did, I was devastated all over again. (laughs) Once again, I fretted that it was leaps and bounds ahead of what I was doing.
Just as before, I had the feeling that I should go and retrain. But given the situation at Sunrise, I had to keep right on working. The next plan had already been decided, and they told me I was going to be doing it. In the meantime, I was insisting I didn't want to do it anymore, but Mr. Yamaura wouldn't give up. He brought me every episode of Gundam on video, saying "I want you to watch all of it anyway. We can now make things like this, which aren't based on manga but on our own studio's ideas. So I want you to create a work from the same standpoint."
Takahashi: Little by little, their ambitions to be more than just a subcontractor for Toei and Tohokushinsha were solidifying. That was the direction established by Super Machine Zambot 3 and Gundam. From that point on, a fan base with what we'd now call an "otaku" sensibility started to emerge, and Sunrise had become confident that it could keep turning out hits as long as this held up. But Mr. Tomino couldn't carry that burden all by himself, so they called me back in, as someone familiar and reliable who'd work hard alongside them. That's how I ended up doing Sun of the Fang Dougram.
Takahashi: The design of the Dougram itself was already completed by the time I joined in. At that point Mr. Numoto, whose name came up before, had quit Sunrise and was working on the sponsor side at Takara. What Sunrise had presented aligned nicely with the order he'd given, so they decided to go ahead with Dougram. They already had a storyline at the planning stage, but when I looked at it, I didn't really feel like making it. I said "I'll do it, but would it be okay if I recreated the story from scratch?" They replied, "Do as you like." Everything would be fine as long as we were moving Dougram merchandise, so I started out with that as my only constraint.
Takahashi: The most important factor in persuading me was that I'd be in the position of original story creator as well as director. I think the reason I was able to do that was the success of Gundam, or rather, seeing Mr. Tomino do it gave me the determination and motivation to do the same afterwards. I'm grateful to Mr. Tomino for that.
Takahashi: I wasn't really interested in doing robot shows, but the studio wouldn't survive unless the robots sold. As long as they were selling, though, I could do anything I wanted, so I put my own inner feelings into it.
Of course, given my age, there was the student movement. And there'd always been a kind of revolutionary mood among young people in postwar Japan, which reached its peak in the sixties. For young people born in that era, in that kind of atmosphere, naturally they had left-wing and revolutionary inclinations. I grew up breathing that atmosphere, and there were wars all around the world as well. In the fifties there was the Korean War, and then you had the Vietnam War at the end of the sixties. I was still in grade school during the Korean War, so I didn't know anything about it. But by the time of the Vietnam War, I was about eighteen or twenty, so I gradually began to understand what was going on.
Takahashi: I didn't actually participate in any left-wing movements. That's because I was a weak-willed type who wavered in between left and right. But since I'd seen those sorts of things in my youth, I thought I could use things like revolution and resistance movements in a story. So I made Dougram a story about whether or not an oppressed colony planet should launch a war of independence against Earth. And in the middle of this, there's a parent-child conflict between the protagonist and his father, who's like a representative of all the Earth people.
I wanted to express the atmosphere of the days when Japan still had that kind of political climate, and the growth of the boy named Crinn as he's contrasted with his father. Mr. Hiroyuki Hoshiyama, the main writer, had been immersed in the atmosphere of the student movement, so I wrote the overall plot and had him script it accordingly.
Takahashi: With Gundam, it's made so that after seeing the first five minutes, you know "We're rooting for this side." That shows a certain maturity as entertainment. But I was still inexperienced, so there was no way I could create those kinds of distinctions. I had to sell this robot, and the story I wanted to make had to be stuffed into it. That's where I started with Dougram, and I haven't been able to get away from it since.
Takahashi: That's right. I had no feeling for the military, for SF, or for robots. I had absolutely nothing. They'd asked me to do it, but I couldn't do it alone, and since I'd been friends with Mr. Kanda since the Mushi Pro days, I asked him if he'd do it with me. He was always there as a director, leading the production site for me, while I was creating the story.
Takahashi: When I joined Dougram, although Gundam had been canceled, there was already a sense that it would be successful and even be turned into a movie. But I think they saw a danger that the company would decline if it depended on a single hit work.
I'd said I didn't want to do a robot show because I was no good at it, but they told me "Don't worry, give it a try!" and I gave in to pressure. Meanwhile, Mr. Tomino was also changing his style and trying various other things after Gundam, like Blue Gale Xabungle and Aura Battler Dunbine. Back then, he wasn't yet relying on Gundam, and Dougram was a work that began at a similar point in time.
Takahashi: No, I didn't think about Votoms until my work on Dougram was over. Every time Mr. Tomino takes on a new work, he makes something dramatically different, so I thought I should probably do likewise. I asked myself what I hadn't been able to do with Dougram, and the conclusion I arrived at was "a sense of speed." A sense of speed is typically represented by flight, but since Mr. Tomino had already been doing that in his other works, it would be too similar. To avoid doing the same thing, I reduced the size of the robots, with the idea of creating a sense of speed on the ground. And that was Votoms.
Takahashi: Mr. Okawara had already designed it before we started planning, and I guess his proposal accidentally matched what I'd been thinking about. So it seemed like there was no friction when we started on Votoms.
Before I saw Mr. Okawara's design, I'd been imagining something about the size of the Robonoid drawn by Mr. Hayao Miyazaki which appeared in Future Boy Conan. (4) But that wasn't a Sunrise-like robot design, so from the outset we had to do something about that. Mr. Okawara had come at it from a modeling direction, rather than a narrative standpoint, so it felt like we were both inspiring each other.
Takahashi: That's true. I don't have that kind of energy anymore, but of course I was thinking of myself as a creator. So I felt very strongly that I should make something new, rather than just doing the same thing I did last year. Still, it's hard to create so many different things.
In my own career, Votoms was close to the peak in terms of my energy, the work itself, and my characteristics as a director. That's because I was about forty years old at the time. I feel my abilities were at their highest when I was forty, and then they've gradually diminished again over the course of the following forty years.
Takahashi: It didn't really exist in Japan, but there was a mood like that among young people in America, which was directly involved, and that's reflected in a lot of movies. For example, Rambo influenced me when I was creating the character of Chirico, and there were other movies like Taxi Driver about returning Vietnam veterans.
Takahashi: Yes, it was. I'd never heard of Mr. Shioyama before that. When I was wondering what to do for Dougram's character designs, I had several people draw roughs, but the one I liked best was no longer available. At that point, Mr. Masami Iwasaki from production said "I know someone who's really good," and introduced me to Mr. Shioyama. He was stationed in Taiwan at the time for a job, so we had to call him back, which was a lot of trouble. But when I saw what he'd done, it was better than anything I'd previously seen.
Takahashi: Mr. Shioyama hadn't done a lot of character design work before. So first I had Mr. Soji Yoshikawa, who was once a superstar animator, draw something like rough drafts of the characters based on what I told him, in order to get the overall image of the work. (5) I also used his drawings as a basis for deciding on the general structure of the story. Mr. Yoshikawa had done a drawing of the Donan family that resembled a family photo, and as I looked at it, I gradually decided on their roles within the story. That's how I solidified the narrative.
After that, Mr. Yoshikawa drew rough drafts of the characters to help Mr. Shioyama understand the worldview, then Mr. Shioyama cleaned them up for animation. It seemed like Mr. Shioyama didn't really approve of Mr. Yoshikawa's drawings at first, but along the way he started to say "Wow, these drawings are great." In short, he'd come to understand that they were being drawn with the character roles in mind. After that, I think Mr. Shioyama started getting excited about the job as well.
Takahashi: Votoms was definitely a blessed work. On Dougram, although I was the original story creator and series director, I was creating the story in consultation with the scriptwriters. But this time, my orders from producer Mr. Yamaura were "On Votoms, you'll write the entire plot, then have the scriptwriters create scripts based on it." It was tough having to send a plot to the scriptwriter each and every week, but it was fun as well. When I started writing, it turned out a lot of things had been building up inside me, and I was able to vent them all of them through Votoms.
Takahashi: At the beginning, I was impudently scribbling my own roughs to convey the atmosphere. I gave them to Mr. Shioyama and asked him for images like that, and then he'd rearrange them and bring thing them into his own world. That back-and-forth worked really well. The worlds Mr. Shioyama and I shared in common were very similar. So when we were creating characters, we could explain them very quickly by saying something like "this role in that movie." It was nice that the person describing what's in their head and the person doing the actual drawings could communicate with no misunderstandings.
Takahashi: Mr. Shioyama loves Westerns and World War II movies. Meanwhile, I really wanted to bring out the atmosphere of the battlefield, and the people living their lives alongside it, that's depicted in Apocalypse Now.
Speaking of the Vietnam War, the news coverage was amazing. At the time, America allowed news media from all over the world to enter the battlefield almost unconditionally. So naturally, there was competition for coverage, and about seventy cameramen were killed. As I was researching this, I became very interested in these war photographers and journalists, and that led to my later work FLAG.
Translator's Note: The interview goes on to discuss the enduring popularity of the Votoms series, Takahashi's feelings about the later sequels and his recent novels, his mixed feelings about Gasarakai and Intrigue in the Bakumatsu—Irohanihoheto, and some parting advice for aspiring creators. I've omitted this here because it doesn't really relate to my current area of research.
Profile
Born in Tokyo on January 11, 1943. Animation series director, episode director, scriptwriter, producer. An instructor in the Character Creative Arts Department at Osaka University of Arts. In 1964, he joined Mushi Production, Co. Ltd., where his main works included W3 (Wonder 3), Dororo, and Princess Knight. After leaving Mushi Production, he worked on 0-Tester (series director, 1973) in the early days after Sunrise was founded. He went on to direct Fang of the Sun Dougram, Armored Trooper Votoms, Panzer World Galient, Blue Comet SPT Layzner, Gasaraki, and Intrigue in the Bakumatsu—Irohanihoheto. His new novel Armored Trooper Votoms Child ~ Child of God Arc, which depicts the aftermath of Armored Trooper Votoms Genei ~ Phantom Arc, is now available from Kadokawa.
(1) Both volumes of Armored Trooper Votoms Child were published on February 10, 2023, the same day the first part of this interview was released.
(2) Takahashi may be misremembering the dates here. 0-Tester's broadcast began in October 1973, and Yamato debuted in October 1974, almost exactly a year later. Their broadcast runs overlapped for the final three months of 1974.
(3) In the Japanese text, Takahashi says the broadcast of Gundam began half a year late, but I don't know what he means by that.
(4) The Robonoid seems to be about 2.5 meters tall, or 3 meters including the human operator riding in its open cockpit.
(5) By this point, Yoshikawa was better known as a scriptwriter, in which capacity he'd worked on Takahashi's 0-Tester and Cyborg 009.
Translator's Note: The original Japanese text of this interview is available here. I'd also like to thank Nina of the Mobile Suit Breakdown podcast for calligraphy jargon support!
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In these creator interviews, we ask the staff members who played key roles in Sunrise works about their memories of the works they were involved with. Continuing on from last time, our 19th installment features another main staff member of Aura Battler Dunbine, which is now celebrating its 40th anniversary. This time we're speaking with the mechanical designer Mr. Kazutaka Miyatake. |
Miyatake: I see. Well, in that case, it might be best to go back to my starting point as a designer. I began doing this job with the ending illustration for Mazinger Z, when I was still a student.
Miyatake: Mr. Go Nagai had requested "Something that would look cool even in the eyes of children." The design of the Mazinger Z itself was created by Go-chan, and I had to cram it full of mechanisms that would look convincing to children. In other words, drawing it so it looked like technology that kids could easily understand.
Miyatake: The Mazinger Z's engine runs on photonic energy, but to children, that's nothing more than a vague "wonder gadget" that feels closer to fantasy than SF. So which other parts would they be able to understand?
When it comes to the feet, even kids know the sensation of the impact being absorbed between the toes and the heel when they're walking, so they're aware you need to have a working suspension. Kids were also used to seeing coil springs in things like bikes. So I thought the best approach was to draw the feet with links and coil springs.
Miyatake: And 1972 was also the year in which Soeisha, the predecessor to Sunrise, started up. Naoyuki Kato of Nue had a senior art-school classmate there who told him they were looking for designers, so I went over there with two hundred of my design drawings. And there I met Mr. Kiyomi Numoto.
Miyatake: Mr. Numoto had very keen eyes. One by one, he looked at the designs I'd brought, and after taking in the whole picture his eyes would move as he scrutinized the key points. His gaze was very sharp. He finished looking at all two hundred of them in about thirty minutes, then gave me the order "We want distinctive mecha for the three protagonists. Please do that." He had no other requests at all. So I went home and finished up the designs.
Miyatake: That was it. So when I designed them, I added the quirk that the aircraft piloted by the three characters combined to form a single mecha. But aircraft have broad wings and a flat shape, so I had a hard time giving them the sense of volume that kids would want when they were turned into toys. After all, it was my first professional design job.
Miyatake: That's right, and Mr. Numoto said "We'll take it." Then he went on to say "We'll take it, but I'm keeping this to myself. I can't show such an inept drawing to the other staff."
Miyatake: "You have no idea how to draw," Mr. Numoto said. "You have to start by knowing how to draw. You do calligraphy, don't you?" And indeed, I'd reached the fifth dan. (1) He told me that when working as a designer in the animation world, calligraphy techniques were actually a hindrance, so I should get rid of them.
Miyatake: For example, when you look at this cup sitting here, or a car parked in front of you, you ask yourself where the buttsuke is in the shape and whether it has any hane. (2) Buttsuke and hane are techniques for writing text characters, not for designing. That had become a habit for me, so I wasn't even conscious of it.
Miyatake: Mr. Numoto had been the head of Mushi Pro's animator training school, so I guess he couldn't tolerate the idea of abruptly putting down the point of the pencil and then pulling on it with a flick. Real objects aren't like that. The point of the pencil gently descends onto the paper, moves, and then gently rises into the air again. That's how you draw perfectly parallel lines, he said. And the human hand is designed to pivot at the wrist and at the elbow so you can draw big curves. It's no good if you just draw by following the strokes, he told me, and you have to consciously control the pencil yourself. I still remember every word Mr. Numoto said.
Miyatake: Right. I drew parallel lines on straw paper until it turned pitch black, and then after I'd done my parallel line training, I'd practice radial lines. First I'd draw them from the outside into the center, and then from the center to the outside. I kept that up for about two weeks, and then he said "That's enough" and told me to draw my original design over again.
Miyatake: But when I took in my redrawn designs to show Mr. Numoto, he'd already left Soeisha. (laughs) He'd gone to join Takara, so I visited him there, and he offered me work for Takara as well. That's how I got involved with Microman. So to me, animation design and toy design ended up being equally weighted. Even when I'm drawing designs for anime, I'm also thinking about how they could be turned into decent toys.
Miyatake: That's right. During Reideen, we had Mr. (Yoshiyuki) Tomino who directed the first half, Mr. Katsushi Murakami from the sponsor Popy, and Mr. Yoshikazu Yasuhiko the character designer. Since we were starting from scratch, I felt like I could come up with lots of gimmicks and ideas alongside Mr. Yasuhiko.
On Reideen, we were aiming for a perfect transformation, but in reality it wasn't quite that rational. I made use of that experience in Super Electromagnetic Robo Com-Battler V and Super Electromagnetic Machine Voltes V, and the combination gimmicks became more logical along the way.
Miyatake: Those forty years went by in the blink of an eye, didn't they? I think Mr. Tomino called me in for Dunbine because he liked the various ideas I suggested during Reideen. He was hoping I'd come up with something weird.
At the very beginning, Mr. Tomino told me "Even with transforming robots or combining robots, the more you tinker with them, the less individual personality and presence they have." This time, instead of transformation and combination, he wanted something with a distinct personality and the strongest possible character.
Then there was the size. He said it should be sized so that it could be placed alongside the pilot figure when it was made into a toy. Then the figure could be sculpted with enough detail that you could tell who it was.
Miyatake: At first I was deliberately trying to be told "no" and have things rejected, so I submitted roughs that were like a stone idol clad in armor. And of course he said "No, we're not going in that direction." After that I did various new drawings, and among them was one where it's riding on the back of a cicada, holding reins. We settled on that one, and decided we'd go in the direction of a robot with an insect motif. I don't think the name "Byston Well" had been decided for the setting at the point when I started designing.
Miyatake: First I did the setting for the Drumlo used by ordinary soldiers, which was based on a flower beetle. (3) Then I designed the Dunbine, based on the Japanese rhinoceros beetle, as the protagonist's machine. To make the Dana O'Shee's face look more scary, I combined the head of a longhorn beetle with a goat skull. I also designed the Zelerna and the Fow.
Miyatake: I think character means "something that symbolizes the world of the story." So I have that in mind not only when I'm designing robots, but with giant space battleships like the Yamato and Arcadia as well. Even with the Reideen, I was thinking about it in terms of establishing the character, including the idea that it appears from an undersea pyramid.
Miyatake: Right. It's a painting 2.59 meters high and 5.82 meters wide, bigger than anything I've ever done before. (4) Due to its size, I used up an astonishing number of pencils just doing the underdrawing. (laughs) Since I'm a designer rather than an illustrator, when I was finishing it, I decided it was okay to unapologetically depart from standard practice by using all kinds of art supplies, including sign pens and correction fluid.
For the shock waves of the Mazinger Z's rocket punch, and the light produced by interference from the Reideen's barrier, I also used special model paints whose color changes based on the viewing angle thanks to structural color. I figured that was fine since the painting was meant to be seen in real life rather than in printed materials.
Miyatake: There's an eighteen-meter moving Gundam in Yokohama, right? Only Japan could make something like that. This exhibition was also made possible because we have that kind of culture, and I hope it will show the essence of that culture. It's rare to make a painting that pushes you to your physical limits, so I hope you'll enjoy my giant painting of these six robots as well.
Profile
Mechanical designer, illustrator, and concept designer. Born in 1949 in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture. A founding member of Studio Nue alongside Kenichi Matsuzaki, Naoyuki Kato, and Haruka Takachiho. He was a trailblazer in establishing the profession of mechanical designer in Japan, and pioneered the field of internal cutaway diagrams. His major works include Psalms of Planets Eureka seveN (conceptual design) and Macross F (conceptual design).
(1) As with karate, advanced students of Japanese calligraphy are evaluated via a system of 段 (dan) ranks. Fifth dan is one step short of the very top.
(2) The second term Miyatake uses here, ハネ (hane), is an upward flick that ends a calligraphic brushstroke. ブッツケ (buttsuke) means diving straight in without a preliminary sketch, so I'd interpret this as some kind of starting point.
(3) The Japanese name クロカナブン (korokanabun) refers to Rhomborrhina polita, a species of flower beetle in the scarab family. They resemble the familiar cockchafer, or June beetle, found in Europe and the Americas.
(4) Or, if you prefer, 8.5 by 19 feet.
Translator's Note: The original Japanese text of this interview was posted in two parts. See Part 1 and Part 2.
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Our interview this time features the producer Masami Iwasaki, who participated in the establishment of Sunrise's predecessor Soeisha as one of the seven people who laid its foundations. In the first part, he begins by recounting anecdotes from his days at Mushi Pro. In the second part, he discusses the many works he was responsible for after the establishment of Sunrise. |
Iwasaki: I'd always loved theater, and I was in the drama club in middle and high school. I was the club president, so I got to do everything. After graduating from high school, I didn't go to college, and I got a job at a company called Naigai Textile. A year later, they transferred me to Tokyo. I didn't know anyone there, but I wanted to keep doing theater, so I joined a few theater companies like Gekidan Wakakusa. I still had my corporate job, so I could only do theater activities on Sunday, which was my day off.
I also appeared as an extra in a movie called The Birth of Japan, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and starring Toshiro Mifune. I was supposed to tumble down a mountain wearing something that looked like a judo uniform. They postponed the shooting several times for weather reasons, and I remember I spent about a week going back and forth between Shinbashi, where I was living at the time, and Toho's Kinuta Studios. I also did dubbing work on a few Western films.
Iwasaki: I couldn't make a living just from that, so I also did a lot of part-time jobs. I sometimes worked for a film lighting company, helping out a friend from a theater company whose father was the president. I was a bystander on Edo Girl Detective and Shinsengumi (starring Takeya Nakamura), and I worked as a lighting man for Hanayagi School dance performances, Asami Maki Ballet Tokyo, and the stage debut of Akihiro Maruyama (later known as Akihiro Miwa). I'd like to think that having connections to some fairly well-known people helped me with my personal development later on. But I was still a novice, so I didn't know anything and I got scolded a lot. I kept pointing the light where I wasn't supposed to.
But I couldn't keep on living that way. I'd gotten married and had a child, so I needed steady work to support my family, and I replied to a Mushi Pro production staff recruitment ad I saw in the newspaper. I suppose I wanted to work in movies, rather than something completely unrelated, but at that point the film industry was already in decline. Though I knew nothing at all about animation, I figured it was still the movies.
Iwasaki: I interviewed with Mr. Eiichi Yamamoto and some other people. When they asked me what I knew about animation, I replied honestly that I didn't really know anything. Nonetheless, for some reason I passed. I was just glad to have a steady job, and I ended up becoming a production assistant.
Iwasaki: It was Jungle Emperor, directed by Mr. Yamamoto. The episode directors were a team of Yoshifumi Seyama and Chikao Katsui, who took turns doing the storyboards. The key animators included Mr. Hideaki Kitano and Mr. Hisashi Sakaguchi, so in hindsight, it was a pretty distinguished group.
Iwasaki: I was surprised that the animators simply didn't do any work. (laughs) They'd show up in the morning, punch their time cards, and then go off somewhere, saying "I wonder what I should work on today?" It seemed like they'd usually head for the nearest coffee shop. Since it was my first time working in animation, I was really at a loss as to how I could get them to do their jobs. It felt like Mr. Katsui was leaving it to me to manage the animators. "Please take care of it, Iwa-chan," he said.
With anime, you can't do anything at all unless somebody is actually drawing pictures. Of course, that goes for the scripts and storyboards as well. But in movie terms, the animators are like actors, and they perform by drawing pictures. I guess that's the special ability they possess. Production assistants, on the other hand, had no status at all back then. We were just errand boys.
Iwasaki: I went from New Jungle Emperor: Onward, Leo to Dororo. When he saw a preview of the first episode, (Osamu) Tezuka-sensei said "This isn't my work," and we all panicked. There was barely any time before the broadcast, but when the original creator and president of the production company says he's going to fix it, you have to do it. Tezuka-sensei briskly issued instructions as if he had every cut in his head, and he really did fix it. I thought he was really impressive.
Iwasaki: As of that work, I became an assistant producer, but I had a terrible time managing the budget. Mushi Pro itself was pretty deeply in the red by that point. So I started making my own budget and schedule management charts, which I called scrolls.
The budget was also the reason we used tracing machines at Mushi Pro for the first time. We never had enough tracers to begin with, so I was doing it myself in the middle of the night. At the time, the only things it could reproduce well were lines drawn with a Mitsubishi Uni B pencil, so I had the animators standardize on that. That's when I became friends with Mr. (Eiji) Yamaura, who was in charge of photography.
After that came Moomin. I was previously on the Belladonna of Sadness crew, but the Moomin team working on the first floor asked me to come and help them out for a week, and I ended up remaining in charge. (laughs) So I transferred over before I'd really done any work on Belladonna of Sadness.
As you know, they were originally making Moomin at Tokyo Movie, but the original creator complained and the production site moved to Mushi Pro. We had to start all over again from the characters onward, and I thought we should get someone whose style was close to the original creator, so I brought in Mr. (Manshu) Fujiwara from outside the company. But there was an incident where Mr. Fujiwara got into a huge fight with the director, Mr. Rintaro, and he ended up dropping out. All I remember about Moomin is difficulties like that.
I was also in charge of the new Moomin series that resumed after Andersen Stories, but I got into a car accident as I was making the rounds of the outside staff. I was so sleepy I couldn't help it. I was so busy I didn't even have time to spend my long-awaited raise in salary.
Mr. (Kiyomi) Numoto, who trained the new employees back then, kept saying that one of his rookies could really draw storyboards... I think he must have been talking about Mr. (Yoshikazu) Yasuhiko.
Andersen Stories had terrible budget problems, too. Though there were a few two-parters, each episode was basically an independent story. We had to create new setting every time, so the budget was much higher than an ordinary work. Various experiences like that eventually led to my going independent from Mushi Pro and starting Sunrise.
Iwasaki: Knowing that Mushi Pro was operating at a big loss, we thought there was no point in staying there, so the seven of us started Soeisha. In those days, forming a joint-stock company required at least seven incorporators—in other words, shareholders. They were Mr. Yoshinori Kishimoto, Mr. Masanori Ito, Mr. Yasuo Shibue, Mr. Kiyomi Numoto, Mr. Yasuhiko Yoneyama, Mr. Eiji Yamaura, and myself. I think we each put in about 100,000 yen... But that alone wasn't enough capital, so we ended up turning to Tohokushinsha.
Iwasaki: The first thing we made was Hazedon, from an original story by Mr. (Haruyuki) Kawashima. Next came 0-Tester. That was a work we made on Tohokushinsha's orders. Back in the day, they'd been the Japanese license-holder for Thunderbirds and it had become a huge hit, so their dream was to do that again. Fortunately it was successful, so Tohokushinsha gave us all a bonus. I think it was 100,000 yen. "Well done," they said.
Iwasaki: Our goal with Soeisha was to make it a company that turned an absolute profit. After witnessing the last days of Mushi Pro, we didn't want to end up like that. At the beginning, we couldn't afford to waste a single sheet of paper, a single pencil, or a single eraser. That's because we eventually wanted to get out from under Tohokushinsha's umbrella and become independent.
Iwasaki: I worked on Fire and Foal (planned by the General Insurance Association of Japan) at the request of the president of Asahi Pro (Mr. Yamaura's older brother, Yuichiro Yamaura). That's where I met Mr. Yasuhiko. I recall that he understood the aim of the production very quickly, and it turned out well.
After that came Star of La Seine. We were really starting from zero. There was an original story written by Mr. Mitsuru Kaneko of MK, the husband of the Toho actress Ms. Mie Hama, but it was just a few pages. We didn't have a complete story, or a production site. So the first thing we had to do was find a space for it.
The advertising agency was Dentsu. But the characters Dentsu had prepared looked just like the ones from Heidi, Girl of the Alps, and Mr. Masaaki Osumi, who we'd asked to direct it, rejected them. "I can't make a work about the French Revolution with characters like that," he said, and he repeatedly asked us to go to Dentsu and turn them down.
Iwasaki: We'd already scripted four or five episodes, so we had no choice. We went to Dentsu and said "We can't do it with these characters." They asked us why not, and we explained the reason. In the end, they told us to do as we pleased.
So we ended up redoing not only the characters, but the scripts as well. We asked people like Mr. Takashi Iijima (credited as Jiro Yoshino), who was at Toei, to write us short scripts for episodes 1 and 2. I went to Toho myself to select some live-action footage of flames that we could borrow for the opening. In the past, I'd visited various movie companies while doing part-time jobs, but I never imagined it would come in handy like this.
Iwasaki: He went off to Europe. It wasn't really sudden, and we'd heard about it beforehand. So we asked Mr. Satoshi Dezaki, who'd been the assistant director, to take over for him. But then Mr. Dezaki quarreled with the staff, and he ended up leaving too. I wondered why anime people were always fighting with each other, but we couldn't keep on making the work like that, so we had to find somebody else. We ended up calling in Mr. Yoshiyuki Tomino, who'd just left Reideen the Brave. Somehow he accepted, and everything worked out just fine.
Iwasaki: Episode 39 was the final one, right? We'd actually planned to make a total of 42 episodes.
Iwasaki: When a team finishes a job, naturally they have to look for the next one. At that point, the company had grown in size, and out of a hundred people, 80 percent of them were people I'd hired. So I had to keep them fed.
Nonetheless, plans don't just show up one after another, so I had to do some sales work myself. Then Toei commissioned us to do Com-Battler V. Normally they would have ordered it from Toei Doga (now Toei Animation), but it seems Toei Doga wasn't happy with the budget. So we told them we could do it within that budget, and we took it on.
Those scrolls proved useful during that run of series, too. You can't make it through a one-year period without thinking ahead. When you're thinking a year ahead and deciding how to adjust your budget and schedule, making a scroll gives you a bird's-eye view of the whole thing. You also realize that, if you're one day behind schedule, it can take you a month to make it up. I learned all of that on Wanpaku Tanteidan.
Iwasaki: I arranged that myself. Mr. Nagahama had a proven track record from Reideen the Brave, and Mr. Yamaura provided an introduction. But since it was the first time we'd worked together, I wrote out a notebook filled with "Things not to do" and gave it to him. Nonetheless, Mr. Nagahama would do things like adding cuts that weren't in the storyboards during the revision stage. "This one sheet is fine," he'd say. But I was the one paying for it. (laughs)
By adding that one sheet, though, it really came together properly as a film, so I had no choice but to accept it. Thanks to those kinds of exchanges, Mr. Nagahama came to have a lot of trust in me, and I continued working with him up until Future Robot Daltanious.
Iwasaki: I was the one who recommended Mr. Sasaki for that. Since he'd started in the middle on Daltanious, this was effectively his first time as a series director. He already understood how I approached things as a producer, and even though he was a first-timer, in some respects you can't tell whether someone has talent until you give them a try.
Of course, since he was a first-time series director, I did have some anxiety. So I wanted to read all the scripts very thoroughly, and I also had repeated discussions with Mr. (Wataru) Sekioka, who was the producer at Nagoya TV. Thanks to that, I became good friends with Mr. Sekioka as well.
Iwasaki: Indeed. It couldn't fail. If it failed, nobody else would take the responsibility, so we were desperate.
Iwasaki: That was in name only. Mr. Kishimoto asked me to do it, so I had to accept. I was busy with Trider G7 and the followup program Robot King Daioja, so even though I did it, I was thinking "Give me a break." In general, I wasn't involved with Gundam at all.
Iwasaki: Mr. Takahashi asked if we could use Mr. Kanda right at the beginning. I'm sorry to say this, but I was a little uneasy. Nonetheless, I okayed it on the basis that Mr. Takahashi would support him, and I entrusted the content of the work to the two of them.
After Dougram, I was in charge of an American co-production called Centurions. It was the first work for which Studio 7 was responsible. Naturally, I entrusted the production site was to Mr. (Takayuki) Yoshii, and I was exclusively devoted to negotiating with the Americans. Once, I even had to go to America to collect fees for revision work. I negotiated with their producer in my terrible English.
Iwasaki: I didn't think elders should keep on making works for young people forever. So I wanted to stop while I could.
Iwasaki: First of all, animation is something you can't do without people, so I thought people were our biggest assets. That's why you have to keep them fed. I was always struggling with that pressure.
Also, you have to look at the production site on a long-term basis. I felt it was important to sense the trends of the time. Ever since Mushi Pro, I've never lived close to work. In the Mushi Pro days, I lived in the Kugenuma area of Fujisawa. After moving to Sunrise, I lived in Higashikurume on the Seibu Ikebukuro Line, and Mukogaoka-Yuen on the Odakyu Line. Higashikurume was the closest I came, but I still had to go through Ikebukuro and Shinjuku on my way to work.
Now, however, I think passing through the city center may have helped give me a sense of the trends in the world. What was becoming popular? What were young people feeling? Even if it was accidental, living far away from work might have enabled me to see that. Purely in terms of the commute, of course, it's much easier to live closer to work.
Iwasaki: It was. Also, it helped that the division of labor at Sunrise was very clear. Mr. Yamaura was in charge of planning, Mr. Ito handled sales, and I was doing production. So I could concentrate on production without worrying about extraneous things.
Profile
Born in 1939 in Kyoto Prefecture. He joined Mushi Pro in 1965, and later participated in founding Soeisha with colleagues from that same company. As a producer at Sunrise Studio, Soeisha's production site, he was responsible for works such as Star of La Seine, Super Electromagnetic Robo Com-Battler V, The Unchallengeable Trider G7, and Fang of the Sun Dougram. He received an Achievement Award at the international animation film festival "Tokyo Anime Award Festival 2025."
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