What was unique about the way you wanted to depict a spaceship or an explosion that hadn’t been seen before?<\/span><\/p>\n\nBack then if you let an animator depict an explosion, the flames or debris would fall to the ground, and that’s not how an explosion should take place in zero gravity. So I would draw examples of how it should look, and tell the animators to do it this way. As for the movement of a ship in space, they might be traveling at a very high velocity, but it’s very hard to depict such movement when the stars behind them are supposed to be moving in relative proportion. I’ve seen examples where a ship might be panning across the screen at high speed, but that doesn’t give you a good sense of scale for the ship itself, so I went the other way and made the ship move very slow to give you a sense of scale.<\/p>\n
\nHow did your job evolve as Yamato<\/em> went on?<\/span><\/p>\n\nMy job didn’t really change much from beginning to end, but what I remember the most was the production going on for 10 months and not being able to go home much. But aside from that, there were very few animators who were versed in the concepts of science fiction, so I had to teach that to all the staff and by the end of production I could leave it to them and be assured that they would get it. And it might be hard to believe today, but back then no one in the anime industry besides probably just me and the people at Studio Nue knew anything about science fiction, so evangelizing SF concepts was a lot of work for me.<\/p>\n
\nWas it true that the deadlines were so tight that an episode would be finished only the day before it had to be broadcast?<\/span><\/p>\n\nIn fact, we were relatively still on good time if we could finish a film the day before broadcast. A lot of times we ended up delivering the film on the day of<\/em> broadcast. The actual airtime would be 7 or 8 in the evening, and the film would come back maybe 6 or 8 in the morning, we would take a look at the results without being able to comment on or fix anything, we just had to deliver it to the station. The tightest example of this would be the Yamato<\/em> TV movie special (The New Voyage)<\/em>, where the second roll was being developed as the first roll was being broadcast. <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault-images\/apr12\/69106.JPG\")
<\/p>\n
There’s a unique shot at the very end of Yamato<\/em>‘s launch sequence at the end of Episode 3. How was this assembled?<\/span><\/p>\n\nIn this age of digital production it’s so trivial, but you see a very gradual enlargement of the ship in the frame, and to film it required a very elaborate setup. That cost about three thousand dollars in today’s money. This really angered the producer, and I was almost fired for it.<\/p>\n
\nHow did you come up with all those abstract ideas for the first space warp?<\/span><\/p>\n\nWe had a lot of fun working with Leiji Matsumoto on that. We did manage to use most of our concepts, like superimposing three different images over filters, or the image of going through time, that was Matsumoto’s idea. And if we had access to digital technology back then it would have been a little more suave, but you can sense the effort that went into that sequence.<\/p>\n
\nIn Episode 11, there’s a very odd scene where Dessler’s skin color changes from pink to blue. Can you explain why this was done?<\/span><\/p>\n\nThat’s because up until the previous episode all the Gamilas are shown to have pink skin and Producer Nishizaki sometimes asked for the impossible. He suddenly said “all the Gamilas are blue-skinned.” And as animators we have our own pride. We could have just given everyone blue skin, but we wanted to give sort of an explanation, saying it was the effects of lighting that made Gamilas’ skin appear pink but it was actually blue.<\/p>\n
\nAs another example of Producer Nishizaki asking for the impossible, in mid-production he started to insist that Yuki was the only female on the crew, but if you look at Episode 3 you clearly see other female crew members boarding the ship. But we had to obey his insistence.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault-images\/apr12\/69107.JPG\")
<\/p>\n
Was there ever a moment during the production when you realized Yamato<\/em> was going to be something very special?<\/span><\/p>\n\nLooking at the actual TV ratings, Yamato<\/em> didn’t do well. It was actually cancelled in mid-season. This was because Yamato<\/em> was going up against very tough competiton, Girl of the Alps Heidi<\/em>. So Yamato<\/em> never went over 10% in ratings, and we were very depressed that perhaps it once again proved that SF doesn’t do well on television. I was especially depressed because this was something I always wanted to work on. But during production we noticed that a lot of high school and college students started to visit the studio and they were very avid viewers of the show and we found that very encouraging, so we started to give out production cels to them like candy. In retrospect, I think we could have been a bit more savvy about that.<\/p>\n\nHow did Yamato<\/em> climb out of this situation to become such a classic?<\/span><\/p>\n\nWe had to wrap up production and the producer went broke as a result. But he thought that he might be able to recover his costs by selling Yamato<\/em> to the American market, not as a 26-episode TV series, but a two-hour feature. By then there were a lot of Yamato<\/em> fans all over Japan and they had fan clubs and fanzines, probably the first ones in Japan. The fans got wind that there was going to be a Yamato<\/em> feature and they demanded to see it. <\/p>\n\nAt first, Nishizaki thought that perhaps he could gather some fans and do a small convention to screen it. But he eventually saw there was going to be a lot of demand, so he started negotiations with a couple of theaters in Tokyo. The theaters were booked, and in the first two days 100,000 advance tickets were sold. That’s when the rest of society noticed there was something going on with this title called Yamato<\/em>. The movie was going to be released on Saturday, so the fans started camping out in line on Friday night. This was also a first in Japan, and it was so rare it made the evening news. <\/p>\n\nThat was the moment when I believe the anime boom in Japan first began. All of us on the production staff were so excited that we went to investigate these lines, and Nishizaki himself started shaking hands with everyone camping out in line.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault-images\/apr12\/69108.JPG\")
<\/p>\n
Your next Yamato<\/em> production was the feature film called Farewell to Yamato<\/em>. This set many records and became one of the most famous anime films of all time. How it was different from the first Yamato<\/em>?<\/span><\/p>\n\nIn the early phase of production we had a lot of time, so we could put in a lot of effort. Toei Animation gave us their full support and we had access to many of their veteran animators, so that gave a lot of strength to the production value. We started almost immediately after the first Yamato<\/em> movie, so we had about a year to make this. The producer was obsessed with meetings, so he would rework the script many, many times. Each time there was a script revision all of the animation had to go on hold, which was very typical of Nishizaki. With so many revisions we ran out of time, so about 70 percent of the film was made in the last two months.<\/p>\n\nThere is a shot of the Andromeda<\/em> landing that uses the same photography technique as Yamato<\/em>‘s first launch. Did you have an easier time the second time around?<\/span><\/p>\n\nAfter the theatrical success of the first Yamato<\/em> movie, the producer became a rich man, so he stopped complaining.<\/p>\n\nAfter Farewell<\/em> premiered in movie theatres, Yamato 2<\/em> appeared on TV only two months later. When did you begin working on Yamato 2<\/em>?<\/span><\/p>\n\nWe were still panting for breath after the movie finished, and the next day we began working on Yamato 2<\/em>. Counting backward, you know that the scripts would have to begin a few months earlier, but since I was so busy working on the movie, I had no time to go into the script meetings.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault-images\/apr12\/69109.JPG\")
<\/span><\/p>\nAfter Yamato 2<\/em>, you moved on to some of your own projects. Why did you decide to leave at the peak of Yamato<\/em>‘s popularity?<\/span><\/p>\n\nThe biggest reason I left after was that Yamato<\/em> was no longer a science-fiction story, it was turning into a war story. As an example of that, you see the robot Analyzer. In the latter productions he turns into just this robot that shows up to make reports, and loses character as a member of the crew. You can tell that Nishizaki wasn’t fond of Analyzer.<\/p>\n\nLeiji Matsumoto and I are the same age, and Producer Nishizaki is five years older than us. For someone of our generation, these five years are significant. Because Matsumoto and I were born post-WWII, we were born with concepts such as democracy ingrained into us. But because of these five years, Nishizaki was born as a boy of a war nation, so the concept of war is pretty much ingrained into him. We became more convinced of that as Yamato<\/em> continued. We sort of suspected that he would start to deviate from the concept of science-fiction and go into “war mode” and when this was confirmed, neither of us wanted to have involvement in that kind of story any more.<\/p>\n\nLooking back at some of your hands-on work in the battle scenes, you seemed to be very good at destroying things.<\/span><\/p>\n\nI love destruction! I may have been the one who started the trend of lavish destruction in anime. Those who followed after me would be Ichiro Itano of Macross<\/em> and Hideaki Anno [Evangelion<\/em>], and these guys have also become directors. I think this is a tradition that should continue on.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault-images\/apr12\/69110.JPG\")
<\/p>\n
What do you believe is the strongest influence Yamato<\/em> had on other anime?<\/span><\/p>\n\nLooking at the design of the Yamato<\/em>, animators complained that it was so complicated it was hard to animate. They kept complaining to Leiji Matsumoto, asking could he at least remove the third bridge from the ship. But you could say Yamato<\/em> was the very first show in which mecha design started to become elaborate and very embellished.<\/p>\n\nThis, of course, set a precedent that forced everyone to work harder from then on. Any regrets about that?<\/span><\/p>\n\nI don’t know if this is something I regret, but since the design of Yamato<\/em> was so complicated, we wanted to have lots of stock footage ready. One good example of that was the scene where you see empty space, then you see a point. It starts to enlarge into Yamato<\/em>, it pans across the screen and flies away and reduces back to a point. This scene took over 500 cels and it was done in a month by one animator. We used this footage all over the series. Looking back at this, the coloring was inconsistent and the design sometimes skews and you could tell that it was hand-made. Today this could be done so easily in a digital environment. Whether that’s good or bad I don’t know, but you can tell that times are very different.<\/p>\n\nWhat was your most valuable lesson from working on Yamato<\/em>?<\/span><\/p>\n\nYamato<\/em> was the very first title in which I was involved from the conceptualization all the way to the end. Before that I just worked on whatever came to me. But by being involved in the startup of a show, I learned a lot about preproduction and how much fun it is to be involved in the whole thing, and that’s the way one should work. I also learned that science fiction could indeed be valid in Japanese animation. Yamato<\/em> is the title that convinced me. Those are the best lessons I got from Yamato<\/em>.<\/p>\n
![\"1204icon\"](\"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault\/wp-content\/uploads\/1204icon.JPG\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault-images\/apr12\/69101.JPG\")
<\/span><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault-images\/apr12\/69102.JPG\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault-images\/apr12\/69103.JPG\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault-images\/apr12\/69104.JPG\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault-images\/apr12\/69105.JPG\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault-images\/apr12\/69111.JPG\")
<\/p>\n