・From Producer to Director
In episode 8, there is a story about Yukino from Arima's point of view.
That is my favorite episode in the original work.
(It was published as a short story separately from the serialization.) When I read it, I thought, "I love it, this is the one I want to make into an anime.”
So when it went on the air, I accidentally said to myself, "Oh, it's a good one, I can finish this anime now."
And then it became true... (grin smiles).
After many things happened, including the pressure on the schedule caused by the work mentioned earlier, Anno burned out in three months (laughs)....
One of the reasons for the burnout was probably my fault...
I was not able to control the level of separation between the original work and Hideaki Anno's work while respecting it.
I was stressed about it too much and told Anno that I couldn't do it anymore.
Then, Anno dropped out of the project first.
He said, "For the time being, I'm going to change your title to "Director: Hiroki Sato," but you don't have to do anything. Each episode has a director, so you can make it."
Anno had also been the sound director for "Kare Kano", but he quit that and asked Toru Nakano, who had been working with him, to do the second half of the project.
But Anno came to the production studio every day to check the finished pictures.
If something was bothering him, he told Hiramatsu (Tadashi) like, "Help him a little here," and so on.
He just stopped controlling the sound and editing frame by frame, but he continued to do his normal duties as a director of a TV anime.
・The manga itself was animated
The manga itself was animated
From episode 14 until the final episode, it was "Directed by Hiroki Sato, Anno Hideaki (in Katanaka)".
Thanks to Matsukura's efforts, we were able to gather a large number of staff members to follow up on the drawing and direction.
I am truly grateful to everyone.
For the second half of the project, I asked Tatsuo Sato to write the screenplay for an original story, which he did creatively.
We also had a plan to have Hiroyuki Imaishi do an original story.
The reason we set aside a slot for an original story was that it was obvious from the start of the anime project that we would catch up with the latest story in the magazine at some point.
We also had a rough idea of which part of the original story would be the final episode of the anime.
However, since the second half of the story was being developed at the same time as the manga serialization in the magazine, we tried to fill in the missing parts of the story with the original story.
The part A of episode 24 was supposed to be a complete original by Imaishi.
That was eventually gone. So Part A was made into a compilation, and Part B was left as is, with the script, storyboard and direction by Shoji Saeki, which is what is known as the final episode of the GAINAX version.
Episode 26, which was written and storyboarded by Anno, is exactly the same as the original story.
The B part of episode 24 is an original story.
It's like he looks at her this way and she looks at him that way. This is the first episode in which Saeki's lyrical world blossoms. I think he has created a kind of final episode of that kind of adolescence in his own way.
After that, I worked with Saeki on several animations, including "This Ugly Yet Beautiful World."
I feel that the starting point of his way of depicting relationships between men and women and the worries of adolescents about their future lives can be found in the B part of episode 24 of "Kare Kano".
At the time, it was still very rough though.
It was pointed out that the previous animations were different from the original work, so our goal for episode 26 was to really make it as the original work.
We received a copy of the manga manuscript that had just been finished and used it as the basis for a storyboard that would be precisely matched to the manga.
The timing of the lines and the timing of the picture frames all had to be matched.
Anno once again took this very difficult task with great enthusiasm (laughs).
For example, when the panels of the manga were vertically oriented, we shot with the camera swinging vertically.
Where characters were not depicted in the manga, he added some parts and placed the speech bubbles and voices at the perfect timing.
This is the ultimate TV manga (gekimeation?).
I have received questions from various sources as to whether there is any point in airing the manga as it is on TV.
Wrong. It is not exactly the same as the manga.
If you look closely, you can see that we have redrawn it.
That's what I told them.
Many people misunderstood us, but we are not shooting the manga as it is.
We are redrawing it on paper and celluloid based on the manga.
The onomatopoeic characters are also sized and moved along with the timing and movement of the characters.
We have made efforts only possible with anime.
I once saw a part in some live-action film (back in the day) that showed a manga.
There was a film that used a similar technique.
But even more than that work, Anno used shooting techniques and animation drawing to move things around a bit at the right time, stop them again, and challenge how to visualize the panel layout of the manga with good feeling.
Moreover, he uses analog shooting, using celluloid materials for all of his work.
Nowadays, the work can be done rather quickly using the same technique because it is digital.
In the end, it's a lot of work to shoot but the schedule for coloring can be kept to a minimum, can't it?
I would say that this was Anno's invention, and as a result of seeking the maximum efficiency possible within a short schedule, he eliminated the process of colorizing the manga into animation by utilizing the black and white panels that are unique to manga.
However, we did create the color settings for the black-and-white panels.
That's why the final episode also has "Anno Hideaki's true spirit".
I don't know if he thought it was a new means of expression, or if he just wanted to do his best because it was the last episode...
I think he said something nuanced like, "The last episode is a return to the original work, which is a manga."
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