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Translator's Note: The Zambot 3 DVD Memorial Box, released in June 2003, was a DVD collection of the 1977 TV series Super Machine Zambot 3, the first work released by Nippon Sunrise. The accompanying "Liner Notes" booklet includes some exclusive creator and staff interviews, and I've translated a selection of these here. The first edition of the box also included a "Zambot 3 Archives" book with additional production materials, although for now I haven't translated any of that content. |
Super Machine Zambot 3 was released in 1977 as the first original work created by Nippon Sunrise (now Sunrise). Even now, 26 years after it first aired, this work continues to shine like a star in the firmament. We asked Chief Director Yoshiyuki Tomino about the ideas he put into the film, hoping to hear about the daily struggles of the Jin family and the creators who continued to engage in earnest with the work.
The idea behind the naming method was similar to what Toei Doga had been doing ever since Mazinger Z. Of course we wondered whether we could create something new instead, but practically speaking we couldn't come up with a better naming idea. Because there were three things that combined, we shamelessly decided to add a "3."
In the truest sense, we deliberately tried to express things simply. Even though I didn't think the name "Zambot 3" was very cool, the idea that "simple is best" also made it acceptable for Nippon Sunrise, and we ended up using the name "Daitarn 3" as well. Thinking about the overall merchandising plan, I thought the impression of a "3 series" would make it easy for even children to understand. That's why simple is best.
It started out with just Mr. (Yoshitake) Suzuki, Mr. Yasuhiko, and Mr. (Eiji) Yamaura. I was the last one to join the planning. As a director, I understood they had no choice but to call me in, and that's certainly what it felt like.
I didn't, because that's part of the job. If you aren't at the level where you can handle a program picture—in other words, a show you're shooting on that kind of schedule—then you're a student or an amateur.
Since I was the last member to join, some of them had already been finalized according to Mr. Yasuhiko's visualization, and it was my job to accept all of that. Only students think they can create a world just with visuals.
The important thing is how you assemble the staff, and how you demonstrate and harness their talents. That's the director's job. In all my previous jobs, I've essentially never forced through my own preferences. It's not that I'm pandering to the character and mecha designers, but if I've joined a team made up of such talents, I basically can't interfere with that.
Even in today's anime world, it's probably rare for people to work at a job for so long. I've been able to do it this long because I don't have preferences of my own. If I had preferences, I'd have finished once I'd expressed them, so the work wouldn't continue. That's all. This is a very important point.
After almost thirty years, it may seem like it, but I had nothing to do with that one. The same goes for the ending. That's really just the nature of the times, and it seems people have been thinking that way for the last twenty years or so. All I'll tell you is that it was written by a woman. (1)
It's more that I'd inherited those phrases. I figured I probably had to, particularly when Daitarn had the same "3" appended. And after that, I was conscious that Gundam was ultimately another Clover work.
I wrote it that way partly because I didn't have the vocabulary, but I was also conscious of the business reasons I just mentioned, so I couldn't really write as I pleased. Under those conditions, I was mindful that it should seem like a Clover work.
I'm still particularly fond of the ending. Younger staff who don't seem to know about Zambot 3 are always getting mad and asking me to stop singing it. (laughs)
The simple reason is that when Clover showed its products at trade fairs, they never had any merchandise of the enemy. So it's made up only of merchandise.
That's because even robot shows are anime, and anime is film, and it felt like it had a narrative quality that aspired to be cinematic. So I didn't want to give it a completely rigid robot-show opening and ending. With the ending in particular, I was able to match it to the music without using a lot of additional frames. In short, I did it with the anxiety that I wouldn't be able to survive as a professional unless I could pull off something like that, so I couldn't really make it just as I pleased.
But ultimately, once you have that kind of idea, you can do as you like afterwards. Before I brought in that idea, I got Clover's president to agree to it, and then I could create something that made the children who were watching the actual program think "I want to feel like this after watching that episode." I think that's a very important thing for adults to do.
The storyboards weren't easy, either. It was an intensive process of repeated trial and error. If you'd already seen it, you could draw the pictures in thirty minutes, but it took a week or ten days to get to that point.
It probably was. I'm not sure quite how much work went into it, but in terms of the ideas, I still think that may have been my best ending.
Naturally. I did it that way because the nonchalant atmosphere of Tetsujin 28 and Mazinger Z was already almost ten years past at that point, and as a work from a latecomer production company, I thought we had to do a little more.
I wasn't. If you recall something like that, it's probably because there was a shift on the commercial production side toward paying a little more attention to the anime, rather than just the Chogokins the toymakers invented. I think this is where staff began to emerge who felt it might be okay to do that.
There is that, but there's another reason as well. When I was thinking about realism in Zambot 3, the one thing I had to be careful about was that, if I was thoughtless in making it realistic, then the location setting would be rigidly fixed. So from the beginning, I envisioned a landscape of seas and mountains. Otherwise, it would have become a cramped realism.
"Cramped realism" really is the perfect term, but the SF shows that have been coming out in the last few years are cramped realism. I anticipated that danger from the start, and I steered clear of it it. In my case, though it's a rather abstract impression, I feel that's the reason I've narrowly avoided disaster up until now.
I don't think it's that late. I'd expected that if we had a total of 23 episodes, one or two of them might be repeats or compilation episodes, so it wasn't that bad. I came up with a plan to create a main storyline that would seem like a single narrative if we made a two-hour film version of Zambot 3. As I was making them, I was very conscious of which episodes would be omitted from the film version, and which would be included in the main storyline. So I figured I'd be able to compile it into about two hours.
It's different from a modern action movie. Thirty years ago, I was envisioning a structure where they showed up one by one and then built to a climax. I'd include the human bomb plotline in the middle of the story, and then show what happens to the Jin family when the King Bial ultimately breaks apart.
Since it had been decided it would run two cours, I thought it would be easier to make if I created that sort of plan. It was just a question of how to make it. I was confident I'd done a good job in terms of the structure, so at one point, around the time of Daitarn 3, I tried connecting it all up. If I followed the flow of only the necessary episodes, it ended up being about three hours, so I knew I could turn it into a two-hour film. Trying that kind of task, I also realized it made the job more interesting when the series had a fixed overall structure.
None at all. What's really disappointing is that I originally wanted it to be an example, showing that you could make a movie even out of a story like Zambot 3 if you tried in earnest. But nobody took any notice of it.
Thus, when the offer came to do a film version of Gundam, I said I'd only compile it into something of the appropriate length. I never had any intention of turning it into a single film, so I followed the flow of the narrative and made something that lasted about two hours, which I handed over as the first installment of Gundam. It happened to get good box-office results, so they let me do the other ones. That's all there is to it.
But I had that kind of energy back then. The reason I tried doing a film version of Xabungle was that I saw the Gatchaman movie and thought "Oh my, do people think this poorly of anime?"
I'd say instead that the Mushi Pro-style works they were making on the Toei Doga side didn't have a cinematic dramatic flow. The truth is, I was very conscious of that at the time. I knew that Nippon Sunrise was a production company derived from Mushi Pro, and I wanted to provide a complement in that respect.
Looking back on it now, it may seem like a leisurely flow. Having had the experience of trying to roughly summarize it, I thought I should follow a process which allowed children to understand it when they saw it in movie form, rather than suddenly overwhelming them. At any rate, I know I was practicing to do that.
That's the ultimate climax of the kishō part of the kishōtenketsu story structure. (3) It's structured so that, having seen the ugly and frightening aspects of being combatants, the bonds among the members of the Jin family are deepened even though they're misunderstood by other people.
The basic problem in terms of content was that the managers and sponsors were expecting a story that was simply about Earth people fighting alien invaders. But in the course of production, the narrative didn't turn out to have that kind of feeling. In some respects, I was constantly pushing back against their frustration. You might think I was just making it as I pleased, but in those respects, I really was.
But in this case, "as I pleased" doesn't mean it was just personal preference. Since there was already an established Toei Doga style, I didn't want to do the same thing as works like Voltes V and Com-Battler V which resembled that. I'd worked on both of those, so when I thought about it as a creative work and, above all, in terms of selling products, I believed that giving it a different flavor would be more distinctive and successful than making something approximately similar.
That was the lineage leading up to it, so when I say they let me do as I pleased, I don't mean it was just what I liked, but rather that I thought this kind of differentiation in the work might give the merchandise more individuality and help sell products. I wanted that to be accepted, and I wanted it to be acknowledged. Nippon Sunrise's producers served as a protective guard in that respect, enabling us to complete Zambot 3. Having accomplished that, I still remember very well that we were able to hold a wrap party where the staff could all agree we did a good job.
That's right. And I think it was really no mistake in the sense that it enabled me to internalize, at least a little, the techniques for creating a narrative feeling, in other words for creating realism and reality within a fiction, that became the basis for making Gundam.
There's one important thing about that narrative style. I think you could ask whether anything really continued on from Com-Battler V and Voltes V. If you just make things following the trends of the time, it all ends there. But please don't forget that I started out with Zambot 3, and then came Gundam, and I've survived for twenty years since Gundam. I'm not boasting when I say that, it's just a fact.
Even when a studio work exists because of the sponsors and is created according to a schedule, if creators with a different point of view can find a way to inject their own consciousness into it, then it won't be buried with the passage of time. That's the most crucial thing, so now that it's been released on DVD thirty years later, I'd like the people who pick this up to realize and remember it. I hope they'll consider whether it's only coming out on DVD for the sake of nostalgia.
That's what war is like. I think hiding things like that is the worst thing you can do to children. My feelings about that still haven't changed. There's no such thing as a clean war. (5) In fact, about twenty years after the end of the Pacific War, I started thinking that the kids watching TV cartoons might only be able to understand the nature of war through film. At that point I decided that, if we're going to show it to children, we should stop lying to them by making it look clean. That's the main reason I included the human bomb storyline.
I was criticized for that by Sunrise's managers, and I myself wondered whether I might have gone too far. Even though I had that feeling, the fact we had a character like Butcher let us use the effective approach of simply expressing what war is like. I thought that was really great, so I had no choice but to do it.
It's because we did the human bombs that we were able to smoothly tie things together in the epilogue with the theme of family. It becomes a perfect mechanism. If it weren't for the human bombs, then when you watched that epilogue scene you'd just be thinking "Yeah, things are so convenient in robot shows."
Even with TV cartoons, if you're making works so that they won't be criticized by the PTA, then in the extreme case there's a danger they'll all end up like Anpanman. You can see that in a phenomenon from this year, where Crayon Shin-chan was well received even by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, but the National PTA Council called it "the program we least want children to watch." And the program they most wanted children to watch was Project X. It's almost laughable.
I can't think of that as anything other than a statement designed to nip children's imaginations and potential in the bud. Even the Agency for Cultural Affairs approves of Crayon Shin-chan. If those guys thought it was no good, they wouldn't have given it an award. (6) If Mr. Shintaro Ishihara had said "No way! You must be joking, giving an award to Crayon Shin-chan!" then they'd have been the ones to blame. (laughs) I'd like the PTA to realize that their stubbornness may actually be ruining their own children.
And when I think about those issues, now that almost thirty years have passed, of course I'm thinking "Oh dear." The fact that I did the human bombs in a mere robot show almost thirty years earlier seems really extraordinary. I actually do feel I went slightly too far, but only slightly. If I were depicting a similar situation now, I might just tone down the expression a little bit, but I wouldn't omit the depiction of human death.
Well, that's reality. It's harsh, but we have to overcome it. With that program, I wanted to show the children watching it that up until now we've lived together in groups, and you can't resolve anything by being oversensitive and hysterical. So you have make an effort not to be too sensitive and pacifistic, but also not to be too belligerent. The closest thing to a story there is simply the death of an ordinary girl. Witnessing that, burning with rage, and resolving everything by defeating the monster would be the kind of convenience that doesn't exist in reality. I wouldn't want to teach that to children.
And because you're powerless, all you can do is to turn your thoughts to what you should do next.
The only thing I could have said to the managers was that they must already have forgotten the war. But I didn't say anything like that at the time. They just said "You're terrible, Tomi-chan," and I said "Yeah," and that was the end of the conversation. That's because I knew that, in twenty years, those adults wouldn't be running Japan anymore, so it didn't matter if they went to their graves thinking that way.
It's even more important than that. At my age, I've become increasingly convinced of Zambot 3's relevance, but this normally isn't seen as important. It's something that fits perfectly into the narrative.
It doesn't matter whether they're good elders or bad elders. Among living beings, animals, and humans, the oldest are the first to die. From Zambot 3 onwards, I started wondering about the mental makeup of those who grow old. Why are so many Japanese people living on without any meaning, and why are there so many weird old people? The elderly are supposed to die. And now that I'm in a position to die myself, because I'm over sixty, I think it's okay to die. You actually have to die.
The important thing is whether or not, when you die, you have the strength of spirit to go quietly. If you have that spirit, you'll do your best so that the youngsters who are building the era will say "Grandpa, grandma, it's okay for you to live." I think that's the duty of the elderly. I was thinking about that during Zambot 3, and I decided to address it once again.
That doesn't need a justification. For a child to have seen his father and mother doing something like that, to have watched his parents die well, is right and proper. When I get to that age, I hope I can die like that, but on the other hand I'm very worried I won't be able to. That's why I hate the adults who always prattle at funerals with sentiments like how young people were, and how early they died, and how they wish they could have lived a little longer. I think people who've lived and died properly wouldn't make a fuss about dying.
It was no accident. The theme of death, as well as the roles of different generations and of men and women in the family, runs throughout the narrative of Zambot 3. Butcher and the Computer Doll and all the rest of that are purely symbols. In that sense, I really have no recollection that I was making a robot SF show.
You could describe it that way if you were taking the story very seriously. But from the standpoint of anime and film, what I'm concerned with is that I'm making it in a way that's appropriate for the expressive medium. In other words, even if that's the scope of the story, in the end it's just a matter of whether it's interesting or boring.
Film and anime are intrinsically that kind of media. I couldn't possibly divide them up into genres, and I wouldn't want to. That's the case with Zambot 3, and the same goes for the following Daitarn 3 and Gundam. In many respects, Zambot 3 was a good test case for creating a story suitable for anime. As far as I'm concerned, when it comes to depicting the realism of 800 lies, the presence of mecha doesn't make it realistic. (7)
This was the first time I consciously experimented with whether or not the story itself would be a typical kind of fiction. Even though the end result wasn't very good, it was a useful job for me as a director because I realized that. So, while I accept its generally poor reputation, I'm really glad that I was able to work on Zambot 3.
(Recorded at Sunrise on April 22, 2003.)
Profile
Yoshiyuki Tomino / Born in 1941 in Kanagawa Prefecture. He graduated from the cinema department of Nihon University College of Art in 1964, and joined Mushi Production in 1965. (8) After serving as a production assistant on Mighty Atom, he debuted as a scriptwriter and episode director on that series. He left the company in 1967, and joined a commercial production company before becoming a freelancer. He first served as chief director on 1972's Triton of the Sea, and directed Sunrise works such as Super Machine Zambot 3, The Unchallengeable Daitarn 3, Mobile Suit Gundam, and Space Runaway Ideon. Major works as a director include Blue Gale Xabungle (1982), Aura Battler Dunbine (1983), Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack (1988), Mobile Suit Gundam F91 (1991), Brain Powerd (1998), ∀ Gundam (1999), and Overman King Gainer (2002).
(1) The lyrics for Zambot 3's opening and ending are credited to the Nippon Sunrise planning office. According to longtime planning office employee Yoshie Kawahara, they were actually written by the wife of company president Yoshinori Kishimoto.
(2) The interviewer is comparing the Zambot 3 themes to 歌国 (utakuni) or "national anthems."
(3) Kishōtenketsu (起承転結), or "introduction, development, turn, conclusion," is a classic narrative structure widely used in Japanese storytelling.
(4) The Japanese term the interviewer uses here, and which Tomino then echoes, is 物語のらしさ (monogatari no rashisa). I think this expression generally refers to the distinctive characteristics of a particular story.
(5) The Japanese adjective Tomino uses here, kirei (きれい), could be interpreted as "clean," "pure," or "pretty."
(6) A 2002 Crayon Shin-chan film won the grand prize in the animation division at the 6th Japan Media Arts Festival, hosted by the Agency for Cultural Affairs.
(7) "The realism of 800 lies" is a concept that Tomino discusses at some length in his interview for the 2004 V Gundam DVD Memorial Box.
(8) It's usually said that Tomino joined Mushi Pro in 1964, and he debuted as an episode director in November of that year, so the 1965 date cited here is surely an error.
Through Sunrise's very first works, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko displayed his ability as an animator and director from an early point. He created attractive characters for this work as well, playing a key role in making it so memorable. We asked him about the secrets of its creation, and the situation at the time.
I thought it was only natural. It would be boring to just keep doing subcontracting work forever. If anything, I felt it would have been better to do it sooner, and it came almost too late.
It didn't. One thing that bothered me was the fact they hadn't appointed an animation director. I complained to Mr. (Eiji) Yamaura about it, saying this work should be a valuable asset in the future. They had proper animation directors for Com-Battler V and Voltes V, which they were making as subcontractors for Toei, so it seemed strange that they didn't have them for their own original work.
That wasn't it. At the time, I was really busy working on Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato, so it would have been physically impossible for me to do both at once.
Of course, if it were possible, I'd have wanted to do it. After all, I'm attached to the characters I create. But it was totally out of the question. So I asked what they were going to do about an animation director, and they said that if I couldn't do it, they wouldn't appoint one. I was a little sad to hear that. It was like they were saying our job was so trivial it could be done without us.
I understand that, but it was still outrageous, even just in terms of maintaining the quality of the work. I wondered whether they were really putting any effort into it.
It was a long time ago, so I don't remember very well. When I heard about the content, I thought it sounded interesting because it was a little different from previous works, for example with the protagonists being a family.
I don't really remember that either. But I got rejected one time when I drew the first draft. He asked whether I could make the legs a little longer. Just before that, I'd been doing a work called Robokko Beeton where the characters were two heads tall, and I just couldn't shake that habit, even though I was trying to make them sleek and slender. (laughs)
As I read the storyboards each week, I realized the story was getting more and more serious, so I wondered whether we were really okay with those characters. If I'd known that, I might have done things a little differently.
From that point on, the design of the main robot was often decided on the sponsor side. You couldn't use it in animation as it was, so it had to be rewritten for animation use.
And that's after they'd been reduced. (laughs) I think the original had even more.
I may just be guessing about some of this, but I'm pretty sure it was me who requested that someone else create rough designs for each week's enemy mecha. It would have been a really exhausting job creating that kind of mecha every week. I didn't have any creativity in that area, so I wanted someone to do rough sketches for me.
Mr. Hiruta had been coming in to Sunrise ever since Reideen, giving us all kinds of ideas. So he was probably the only one I could have asked to do this kind of job.
The treatment of the characters was very serious, with close friends being turned into human bombs and killed. I thought it was also really interesting that he used specific place names, like Noheji in Aomori Prefecture. That kind of realism was refreshing. The average person, hearing the name Noheji, probably wouldn't even know where it was. (laughs)
Of course, I think a lot of it is the power of Tomino's direction. And another reason is that Mr. (Yoshinori) Kanada and Studio Z really worked hard under the difficult conditions of having no animation director. Mr. (Nobuyoshi) Sasakado, who was responsible for the final episode, also did a really great job. I think this work drew attention thanks to the efforts of such staffers.
And conversely, the fact that there was no animation director let them work more freely. This brought out some powerful images in the series, which the young staffers were able to create without restraint. That was definitely part of it. So I think you should try talking to them about that.
The order was for a depiction of the Jin family, but I said they must be kidding because there were so many of them, so they had me do just three people plus Chiyonishiki. The hardest part was laying out the characters with the Zambot 3. Zambot was a work from the days when giant robots were at their very largest, and according to the setting I think it's almost 100 meters tall, so I'm not sure I properly expressed that sense of scale.
The order also asked for a bright image. Given the image of the work, it tends to end up being darker, but which would the fans prefer?
(From phone interview on May 2, 2003.)
Profile
Yoshikazu Yasuhiko / Born in Hokkaido in 1947. He entered Mushi Pro's training school in 1970, and then worked on Wandering Sun and Moomin. He became a freelancer in 1973, expanding his activities to include character design with Reideen the Brave, and planning and original story creation with Wanpaku Omukashi Kum Kum. He first served as chief director on the 1983 theatrical film Crusher Joe. He also began working as a manga artist with Arion in 1979, and his Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin is currently being serialized in Kadokawa Shoten's Gundam Ace.
Mitsuru Hiruta became involved with Sunrise's works when he handled the comic adaptation of 0-Tester, after leaving Dynamic Production and going freelance. At the invitation of planning chief Eiji Yamaura, he then began participating as a planning brain as of Reideen the Brave. He was also responsible for the comic adaptation serialized in Kodansha's "TV Magazine." This led to his involvement with this work as well.
His main task was creating rough designs for the Mecha-Boosts featured in each episode, and it seems he turned in several pages of designs for each one. Receiving these, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko would combine the head from one, the torso from another, and so forth to create the final design. Even after going through this kind of working process, it's interesting that the Mecha-Boosts, while they naturally have their individual differences, all somehow have a Hiruta or Nagai flavor. (The Galchack which appears in episode 8 is an archetypal example.) Another important part of the job was providing ideas for creating images in the actual film production process. (It seems Hiruta had been a fan of Tomino's direction since the Reideen days.)
The last time he was involved in this way was Mobile Suit Gundam. Since he'd worked on a succession of robot shows, he was only involved in the very earliest stages, but it's said that his son later reproached him when he found out about this. It's a funny story, but at the time, no one could have predicted it would become such a hit. His last job for Sunrise was storyboarding episode 28 of The☆Ultraman, "The New Captain is Here!!" which he did on Yamaura's recommendation. As of now, that was also his final anime job.
(This article is based on an interview with Mitsuru Hiruta.)
Profile
Mitsuru Hiruta / Born in Fukushima Prefecture in 1947. He joined Dynamic Production and served as Go Nagai's first assistant. He then became a freelancer, and many fans came to know his name through the countless comic adaptations he handled during this time. His major works include Devilman and Ultraman Ace. He remains active in a wide range of art-related jobs, including background art for games such as Biohazard Zero and Clock Tower, and in addition to the previously mentioned works he's also the author of Hoero Ryu (original story by Sho Fumimura) and Banana White Paper.
Mr. Masao Iizuka was responsible for planning and setting since the launch of Sunrise, while Mr. Hiroshi Kazama and Ms. Yumiko Tsukamoto went from fans to staff in the course of Sunrise's works. (1) We asked these three people who walked alongside "Zambot 3" for their unvarnished tales of the energy at the production site that supported this work.
Iizuka: It started from the idea that "We'll never make a profit without an original work." As to what kind of thing we should make, that conversation goes all the way back to Reideen the Brave.
When I talked to children back then, they felt that in their families they had big brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, who were all pushing them down. They longed to metamorphose and get bigger so they could turn the tables. By getting into a giant robot, the hero can metamorphose and become huge, then defeat enemy robots and monsters that a flesh-and-blood protagonist couldn't compete with. The appeal of giant robot works was that they fulfilled the children's desires through the TV.
Also, the earlier Mazinger Z and Great Mazinger had been foreign knights clad in Western armor. So we decided to go with a Japanese warrior, like in Japanese historical dramas and ridiculous samurai movies. (2)
Iizuka: That's right. When I asked the children about their favorite colors back then, they said "red, blue, and white," the so-called tricolors. Since it's a helmet and armor, the decorated parts should be gold, but that's not a cel color so we made them yellow. That's how we arrived at the Reideen. We looked into it again when we started on Zambot, and there still wasn't anything else like that, so we went with a Japanese warrior and tricolors again. That's how we started out.
Iizuka: At first, we were combining blocks and pillars to come up with a three-dimensional design that could be exactly reproduced as a toy. However, that wouldn't work as an object of childrens' desires to metamorphose and get bigger. Though it was a robot, it was still animation, so of course it had to have a personality as a character. Thus we had Mr. Yasuhiko rewrite it for us, just like with Reideen.
Iizuka: He used to be an assistant to the manga artist Mr. Satoru Ozawa (the creator of Submarine 707). We said "Then you can design mecha, right?" and he said "No, I can't draw robots and stuff, I'm no good at drawing." We persuaded him by saying "Don't worry, if we give it to Mr. Yasuhiko, he can rewrite it for the anime." (laughs)
Iizuka: At first, I thought we should use Yamanaka Shikanosuke's antlers, which I really like. (laughs) But they said antlers wouldn't work, so we went with the crescent moon from the forehead of Utaemon Ichikawa's "Bored Hatamoto"... Date Masamune's helmet is like that, too. (3) But that was a terrible mistake. We got scolded by the people on the production site because they couldn't trace it from the back. (laughs)
Iizuka: So on the following Unchallengeable Daitarn 3, we made it symmetrical.
Iizuka: In Japanese film terms, it's a samurai movie, and in Western film terms, it's in the Western genre. So it's armed with a sword, a spear, and a handgun.
Iizuka: We invented a coined word based on the ridiculous ones Mr. Yamaura uses. Most English words are already registered, so you can't trademark them. Mazinger Z had already used "majin," but we were really impressed by Tatsunoko's "Time Bokan" series, and we decided to go with a name like that. (4) The name "Zambot" comes from "San-Robot," because it's a Sunrise robot and the robot is formed from three mecha. (5) But that seemed somehow inadequate, so we decided to add "three" to the robot's name. The president of Clover also asked us to give it the subtitle "Unchallengeable Robot," but we refused. (laughs)
Iizuka: Right. And what's more, now we'd finally managed to get a sponsor, we wanted to keep going for at least two or three works. Since it was descended from aliens, we decided to call it an "Unchallengeable Superman" surpassing the people of Earth. (6)
We wanted to do an "Iron Man" next, but since there was already an Iron Man 28, we had to come up with something else and we used "Steel Man" for the Daitarn 3. When the time finally came for us to use "robot," we fulfilled the wishes of Clover's president by calling the Trider G7 "Unchallengeable Robot." (7)
Iizuka: Back then, children were still the mainstream audience for anime. We really wanted to attract them, so we wanted the protagonists of Zambot to be close to elementary-school age. We wondered if that was implausible, but we figured it was okay if they were descended from aliens, and the whole thing started from that nonsensical place. (laughs)
We told Mr. Yasuhiko "It's fine for Uchuta and Keiko to be age-appropriate, but even if they were high-schoolers, some of those are still as small as middle-school students while others are growing beards." So we asked him to make the protagonists as childlike as possible. We made Kappei a middle-schooler as well, but sooner or later we really wanted to target grade-schoolers, and we were finally able to achieve that with the later Unchallengeable Trider G7.
Iizuka: When we started, the story hadn't been decided all the way to the end. A general framework and direction for the story development were created based on ideas from Mr. Yamaura, the series structure creator Mr. Yoshitake Suzuki, and the SF setting researchers at Studio Nue. Then we handed it over to the series director. Since it was an original work, after that it was just a question of what he wanted to do, and what kind of worldview and narrative he wanted to put on film. The series only got properly started once the director had joined in.
Kazama: All I remember is that Mr. Iizuka told me "Starting tomorrow, come in every day."
Iizuka: Since we didn't have any staff, I said "Start by answering the phone, and then do whatever." And we really did make you everything from revision work to animation.
Kazama: The Zambot team was initially in the old Studio 3, on the second floor above a grocery. That's where they did Wanpaku Omukashi Kum Kum and Dinosaurs Catcher Born Free, and the studio was filled with all those cels to about this high (indicating about 130cm with hand). (laughs) Mr. Iizuka said we couldn't use it unless something was done about that, so I spent every day of the next three weeks or so singlehandedly tidying up the cels.
Kazama: That's right. But it was really cramped, with only enough room for the producer, the production manager, and two desks for revision work. Once we put in the pre-shooting desk, that was it. (laughs) Before long, the main production site moved to the vacant Studio 1, so we were making Zambot in two studios at the same time.
Tsukamoto: I originally met Mr. Kazama at Sunrise. I think we were introduced by (the later) Mr. Tadao Nagahama?
Iizuka: I believe Mr. Nagahama introduced us because "We're all fans."
Kazama: Then you drew for Zambot.
Tsukamoto: Right, right. Whenever I had time, I'd visit the second floor above the grocery to do revisions and in-between animation. In the worst case, I even did finishing.
Kazama: In those days, we did it all. (laughs)
Kazama: He was there a lot. I don't remember well, but maybe it was episode 2... it was around the beginning, but the schedule was already terrible.
Iizuka: We didn't have any decent production assistants, and the animation and finishing weren't properly set up yet, so we were just calling anyone who was free and asking for help on an ad-hoc basis.
Kazama: When the Zambo-Ace dives into the sludge, it was left unpainted so that you could see the background colors. We thought that was overdoing it, and then Mr. Tomino suddenly grabbed some cel paint. He said "This stuff is supposed to be slushy, so it's okay if it's slushy," and he started mixing together a bunch of different paint colors. (laughs)
Iizuka: We'd finished up to about episode 4 before it started airing. The opening, though, was done after that.
Kazama: Normally, you're supposed to use your best staff for the opening and ending. But that time, aside from the key art, it was a real mishmash.
Iizuka: Even if we'd tried to outsource it, no animators would take it. So we had no choice but to do it in-house.
Kazama: I think it was episode 14 when Tsukamoto-chan had to do the in-between checking, as well as looking over all the artwork like an animation director.
Tsukamoto: I did that for about two episodes. I honestly thought I was going to die.
Iizuka: We really wanted Mr. Yasuhiko to do the animation direction and, if possible, key animation as well. But it never came to pass.
Tsukamoto: Mr. Yasuhiko did correct all of the opening and ending, though.
Kazama: Anyway, the animation was such hard work that we fell behind schedule. Then, by chance, Mr. (Nobuyoshi) Sasakado became available because Super Electromagnetic Machine Voltes V had ended first, so we requested that he do the final episode. Because Mr. Sasakado was so fast, the final episode ended up being finished before the others. (general laughter)
So we asked Mr. Sasakado if he'd help with the previous episodes, too. We figured we might as well make the artwork pretty, and the in-between animation was done by insider staff as well. The post-recording for the final episode was actually done first, and all the coloring was already finished.
Kazama: For example, Mr. Kazuyuki Hirokawa, who directed the final episode, was an incredible perfectionist. He'd bring things to us and ask that we revise it like this, because he wanted it like that. He wanted the Computer Doll's brain to get brighter and dimmer as it pulsated. Since he wanted the brain section to look like it was glowing slightly from within, he had us apply water to the reverse of the background drawing paper, gradually peeling away the individual fibers.
Kazama: That's the kind of processing we used to make major revisions to the completed cuts.
Iizuka: Even though animation is specialized work divided among many departments, it's still a creative work, not just a product. As long as you're creating something, you want to add your own ideas, and when those are recognized you can advance to the next step. Sometimes you can't convey that to outside veterans when you send it to them, and people on the inside understand the content of the work better, even if they're amateurs. We put some really unreasonable demands on everyone, and they were constantly having to do the impossible.
Kazama: But we didn't know any better, so we didn't realize it was impossible. We figured that was just the way things were.
Kazama: They normally held preview screenings of the film at the lab, but they also screened it for the staff in that cramped studio. Even when we were packed in so tightly, because the story was the way it was, the girls who were drawing it all came back in tears after watching episodes like "Aki and Kappei." That's when I first had the feeling we were making something great... People like me, who were just minions at the time, started to think "Wait, I need to be taking this seriously."
Tsukamoto: It felt like Mr. Tomino became steadily more short-tempered in the second half of Zambot.
Kazama: That's right. It was around the time we started doing the "Zambot Chorus" dance... (8)
Kazama: The Zambot has one of these (a crescent moon) on its head, right? When it does the Moon Attack, it raises its hands and sticks its neck out like this. It all started because we said that looked just like a Bon dance. At the year-end party, Mr. Tomino suddenly asked me whether we had any cardboard. He painted it yellow and started cutting it out, creating a crescent shape he could wear on his head. "Let's have the whole staff dance a Zambot Chorus," he said. (general laughter) The two of us were dragged into the dance, and Mr. Tomino went out in front by himself, dancing to the music and saying "Za zan za za-zan" with that thing on his forehead. (general laughter)
Tsukamoto: And I think Mr. Nagahama made us do "Even if the Storm..." (from Voltes V) a lot, too...
Kazama: I don't think I ever danced that one. (laughs) But dancing was pretty popular back then.
Iizuka: It already feels like another era. We were very far from being a proper company back then. (laughs) We were all just making the most of our experiences at Mushi Pro, and somehow getting the job done. We weren't living day to day, but we were living year to year. (laughs) If a work was approved, we'd say "We'll have jobs next year!"
Trying to create some kind of permanence, we happened to make Reideen and entered the era of the giant robot show, an era in which the main sponsors were toymakers. That's when we finally found a way for Sunrise to survive. Zambot was the first work which concretely embodied that, and if it hadn't been for that, we truly couldn't have made Mobile Suit Gundam.
Tsukamoto: It's the work on which I was able to do my most fulfilling work as an animator. Actually, I suppose a lot of people may be puzzled that the quality was so different from modern anime, but if you watch the whole thing, it's a really enjoyable work. I think it's very watchable, and I'd be happy if you take another look at it.
Kazama: I liked Sunrise's works, and I was able to get that job because it was still in its early days. And it's because Zambot was in that state that I could try everything from finishing to animating, production assistance, and what amounted to publicity. Thanks to that I saw the whole picture, and who did which tasks in the creation of animation. It enabled me to imagine how the work of everyone in each department could be made easier, and how to make it enjoyable for the people who would finally watch it. Later on, that was a tremendous advantage in everything I did. I believe that's why I could go on to do setting management and planning afterwards.
When people watch it, I'd like them to remember in some way that it's a work from an era when all these things were packed into it. I think Zambot is the work that most faithfully shows how hard Sunrise and the staff were struggling for the sake of their future.
Particularly now, in the digital age, I'd like people involved in production to be sure to watch it. I think it would be good for them to see at least once that animation is truly something that everyone struggles to create through collective effort, and I feel it's worthwhile for that reason. I also think it's wonderful that everyone still loves it to this day, and it think it shows they have good taste.
(At Aoyagi in Kami-Igusa on April 15, 2003. Interviewers: Dosuke Hikawa, Maki Nagashima.)
Profile
█ Masao Iizuka / Born in Tokyo Metropolis in 1941. Former chief of Sunrise reference room. After joining Mushi Production in 1963, Iizuka worked in the company's reference room, and in 1973 he was hired to assist with planning at Soeisha and materials management at Sunrise Studio. After the establishment of Nippon Sunrise in 1977, he continued working in the planning office, where he was responsible for planning, publicity, and materials. He was involved in the planning of works such as Reideen the Brave, Super Machine Zambot 3, The Unchallengeable Daitarn 3, and Mobile Suit Gundam, and incidentally it was his hand that drew the final version of the "Balarant alphabet" in Armored Trooper Votoms.
█ Hiroshi Kazama / Born in Tokyo Metropolis. From 1975 onwards, Kazama assisted with various tasks on the production site, as well as organizing publicity materials, at Sunrise Studio (now Sunrise). They formally joined the planning office after working as a setting assistant on works such as Super Machine Zambot 3, going on to do setting and script management on Robot King Daioja, Blue Gale Xabungle, and Giant Gorg, and working on the planning of Mashin Hero Wataru. Becoming a freelancer in 1989, they are now active as a writer under the name "Yoshie Kawahara," while also participating in the planning of Sunrise works and online activities.
█ Yumiko Tsukamoto / Born in Tokyo Metropolis. From 1975 onwards, Tsukamoto assisted with various tasks on the production site at Sunrise Studio (now Sunrise), as well as working on the animation staff of Super Machine Zambot 3. She was responsible for publicity on Panzer World Galient and Blue Comet SPT Layzner, then worked on Dirty Pair, Giant Gorg, NG Knight Ramune & 40, and Magical Emi, the Magic Star as a scriptwriter. Her major works include the Vision of Escaflowne novels and the My Hero series (with Aki Tomato).
(1) "Hiroshi Kazama" is the masculine pseudonym of the female staffer Yoshie Kawahara. While the Japanese honorific "-san" is gender-neutral, Kawahara's coworkers generally seem to have referred to her Kazama persona in masculine terms, so I'm using a masculine form of address here; perhaps we can think of this as a kind of roleplay.
(2) The Japanese terms Iizuka uses here are 時代劇 (jidaigeki) and チャンバラ (chanbara). Jidaigeki is a genre of live-action historical drama set before the Meiji restoration, and chanbara is a subgenre focusing on swordfighting action, which I've glossed here as "samurai movies."
(3) Hatamoto Taikutsu Otoko (旗本退屈男), or "Bored Hatamoto," is a historical novel whose title character has a crescent moon-shaped scar on his forehead. Utaemon Ichikawa played the hero many times in movies based on the novel.
(4) The Japanese term majin (魔神) means "devil," "djinn," or "evil spirit."
(5) "Sunrise" is rendered in Japanese as "sanraizu," and the number three is usually pronounced "san."
(6) Zambot 3's Japanese subtitle, 無敵超人 (muteki chōjin), literally means "Unchallengeable Superman."
(7) The official English titles of these works are The Unchallengeable Daitarn 3 and The Unchallengeable Trider G7.
(8) Literally "Zambot Ondo" (ザンボット音頭). An ondo is a style of traditional Japanese folk song, typically with one lead singer and a larger chorus, which is associated with the Bon dances performed at festivals. I've glossed it here as "Zambot Chorus," but this does strip away some of the nuance.
Mobile Suit Gundam is copyright © Sotsu • Sunrise. Everything else on this site, and all original text and pictures, are copyright Mark Simmons.
