Animators Gone GONZO! (continued)

As president of GONZO, Murahama Shoji has a daunting job. He must strive to meet the rigorous scheduling and budgetary demands of the current anime industry all while trying to give the creative staff the maximum amount of time and freedom to do their best work. It's not an enviable job, or an easy one, but it is one that Mr. Murahama tackles with great relish.
Having worked at GAINAX, Mr. Murahama is very familiar with what it's like to be the "underdog" in the anime production world. And, after leaving GAINAX, he and some fellow anime professionals decided to start up a new studio and subject themselves to the rigors of creating a new company all over again.
When we spoke with Mr. Murahama in Japan earlier this year, he was very optimistic and confident. The final installment of BLUE SUBMARINE NO. 6 had just been released in Japan, and the studio was greatly relieved to see the project finally completed. However, they were in the middle of production for their then-brand new series GATEKEEPERS. And since they had never done a television production before, Mr. Murahama knew that there would be a lot to learn.
Nevertheless, he, and the rest of the staff at GONZO are determined to put their best foot forward and continue to bring revolutionary new anime to eager fans. Mr. Murahama took time out of his busy schedule to speak with us earlier this year, and the interview below is the highlight of our two-hour conversation with the president of GONZO.

EX: How was GONZO created?

Murahama Shoji: Before I was here, I was at GAINAX with some other people. All of the management left around the same time. Later, some of us got together with the idea of starting a company, and the creative people wanted someone to manage it. So GONZO was formed in 1992.
We did some work on ULTRAMAN POWERED and the monster design for the new GAMERA movie; that was our first work, really. We had a studio, but no projects that everyone worked on together. Then, we started getting calls from Sony and Sega about developing digital contents for video games. I thought: "this is the new future!" It was clear to mean that digital contents were the way to go. It seemed like common sense.
So we started a digital CD Studio called Denki Gonzo. We did the animation for LUNAR: SILVER STAR STORY and the new CG scenes for the Sega Saturn game MACROSS: DO YOU REMEMBER LOVE? We had a lot of success in this format, but with so many creative people, of course, we wanted to do our own story.

EX: So why did you choose BLUE SUBMARINE NO. 6?

MS: There was just something about the story. And Toshiba wanted to make it into an anime, co-produced by Bandai Visual. Bandai Visual said it would be good if Maeda-san directed it.

EX: What was the biggest challenge in adopting this older manga into a cutting-edge anime format?

MS: I'd say the characters and their personalities. The original manga was over twenty years old, and targeted at children. So in a way, the characters were very stereotypical. When we were trying to update it for the present time, the characters personalities and looks were the most difficult part to adapt.
Four people: Director Maeda, and character designers Murata, Kobayashi, and Kusanagi, had meetings and talked about it. It took almost half a year to decide! And Murata is a very detail-oriented artist. He needs to know the personality of the characters; if he doesn't he says he really can't draw them.
During these discussions, since the characters are integral to the story, the discussions evolved into thoughts about the story and what happened at the end to the antagonists. The "world view" was developed through this highly unusual process.
When he's doing illustrations, Murata will often ask about the necessity of something. "Why does this character have this expression?" He always asks Maeda, "What is the character thinking?" He can't draw unless he knows the reason they look they way they are. For example, when he's drawing someone looking back, he'll ask. "Who called this person?" It matters if they are supposed to be surprised, pleased, angry, etc. He needs that to draw a good illustration. He really needs to understand the characters, and so it takes him a while to draw.

EX: Here's a slightly more off-topic question: What is "Full Digital Animation"?

MS: It means it's fully digital from beginning to end. When people use "digital animation" now, it means that a little part of it is digital. But with BLUE SUBMARINE NO. 6, it's all done digitally. There's no film, no negative, no cels.
Animators still do the drawing on paper, of course, but it's colored in a computer. The backgrounds are CG. So the pictures and the sound are digital. The music is done by authentic instruments and recorded digitally.
We used a digital mixing system, so we could do things we'd never done before. To overlap 3D and 2D is too expensive for anime studios, and it's impossible to outsource and subcontract this to an editing room. But the applications we used can be bought in any store. We used Macintoshs and Windows NT stations to do it.
Up until the pencils are done, the process is very traditional. After that, it's done on computers using applications. So "Full Digital Animation" is Japanese English for "Full Digital Process Animation."

EX: What about the sound?

MS: The sound and effects were done at one of the best sound studios in New York. The music was also tracked down in New York. The sound effects were created in Japan, by the same person who mixed SPRIGGAN.

EX: What about BLUE SUB being "optimized for DVD"?

MS: Well, everyone thought it was suitable for DVD, so they knew they wanted to make a production geared toward really using that medium. We knew that DVD was going to be the next big thing.

EX: GATEKEEPERS is your first television series. What new challenges come with working on a TV series?

MS: The production management is very different. The story and characters are based on the original game GONZO did last year. The staff is very talented, including character designer Gotoh Keiji (NADESICO), and Maeda (BLUE SUBMARINE NO. 6), as well as a lot of other talented people. And since the staff is the best, it's going to be hard work because we're shooting for very high quality, but the schedule is very tight.
I have to make the production run smoothly and comfortably while maintaining the quality and the schedule. I have to oversee the look and feel of it all.