Chapter 5: Adventure
Interview with Hiroyuki Imaishi, Animation director / storyboard
I applied for the "cadet" program, so to speak.
About a year ago, I received a text message from Anno.
He wrote like this: "I'm watching 'Kare Kano' now. I am very grateful to you again," and "Now I realize how interesting it is."
I was thinking, "Wait, 'Kare Kano' was absurdly interesting even back then..." (laughs).
In "Kare Kano," Hiramatsu and you worked as a kind of two-top*.
How did that happen?
I was working on "Eva" as an inbetweener, and "Kare Kano" was the first time I worked as a storyboard artist and animation director.
When starting "Kare Kano," Anno wanted to train the young staff, so he asked for "cadets" (those who wished to become directors).
I quickly ran for the position and started storyboarding episode 3.
Anno saw my storyboard and asked me to help with the storyboard for the B part of the first episode, which was already in progress.
*A soccer formation with two FWs in the front line (first row).
Your ideas and sense were key to "Kare Kano".
What do you think is the symbolic part?
It could be the part where I draw panels like in manga and then shoot with the camera along the panels…
The concept was to do manga as it is in anime. I used to draw manga, so it's not hard for me to draw manga. But when I draw it, it becomes a Shōnen manga (laughs).
This was also applied to the next "FLCL" project.
When you suddenly become a main staff member at a young age, you must be very enthusiastic.
I may have been feeling too excited (laughs).
You were in charge of the storyboard for episode 1, storyboard and animation director for episode 3, storyboard for episode 10, and animation director for episodes 11 and 19.
In particular, episode 19 has a unique style called "gekimation".
Was this something that was decided from the beginning?
At the time, Anno told me to make "Yokai Den Nekome Kozo" and he showed it to me for the first time on laserdisc or VHS. But it was no longer an anime.
It was like a Kamishibai*, not even a stop motion animation.
Anyway, at that time Anno was in the mood of "let's try something new."
In episode 6, he said, "I'm going to try to minimize the number of drawings!" and he made it with only a few hundred pictures (697 sheets) and was happy and said, "I've set a record!"
Then, in episode 11, he said, "I've done the smallest number of pictures, now I'll do the largest number of pictures" (laughs).
He said something like "Let's shoot each frame **of the episode" (usually 3 frames for 1 second).
*a form of Japanese street theater and storytelling .
**a full animation. The traditional full animation with 24 changing frames per second. The most famous full animation film is "Snow White" (1937) produced by Walt Disney.
Episode 11 has 3,337 drawings.
In the first half of the project, that is the maximum (from episode 14, compilation data).
It may have already been storyboarded up when he told us to go for the maximum number of sheets, but I wonder if we couldn't have changed the way we drew it.
Since "Kare Kano" had more still pictures, there was no way to increase the number of drawings of the still pictures parts. So, I took the method of showing 24 frames per second between the key frames of the moving parts and moved them around for no reason (laughs).
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