1. cool as a fool
2. the set-up
3. from the cast
4. emerging from the head of gainax
5. and so the pulp interview
|
|

At his Otakon 2001 panel, Kazuya Tsurumaki related that before he joined up with Gainax, he was an animator at a work-for-hire studio, a subcontractor—a job that illustrates an important structural limitation of anime that holds back its new directors from emerging at an age as young as a Darren Aronofsky, Kevin Smith, or Robert Rodriguez. These could make a π, a Clerks, an El Mariachi—a complete feature-length film—by themselves, with a small bunch of friends. From the perspective of an aspiring director of feature-length anime, those three all had the unfair advantage of being able to give instructions to "actors" who will caper about before the camera in front of "locations."
A small group of animators can get together and demonstrate their talent in a three- or four-minute film—indeed, that is exactly how Gainax began, in the early eighties Daicon opening anime, conjured in FLCL. But a feature-length film is going to require a staff of hundreds to draw, not to say ink and paint, the tens of thousands of "actions," and hundreds upon hundreds of "locations"—that is, background paintings. Computer techniques have not fundamentally altered this fact as yet; the staff requirements are beyond any single studio. Even if the studio was of sufficient size, it would not be considered cost-efficient to do everything in-house; scenes are broken down and fitted into a pyramid of complexity, with the most challenging scenes to draw done by the key animators or director at the top, descending from there into the gruntwork of "in-between" drawings. Somewhere down there, in the late 1980s, was Kazuya Tsurumaki.
If you're a fan of the Maison Ikkoku 1986-88 TV series (available from Viz), you have Tsurumaki to thank for many a piecework drawing on it here and there. Rather lesser-known in America are his spare sketches in the cause of the show F (as in F-1 racing), but a sparkle of recognition will return at word that his pencil marked Mamoru Oshii's first Patlabor video series (available here from Central Park Media) during 1989-90. It was during this same time that Tsurumaki's studio was assisting Gainax on their first popular hit, the six-episode direct-to-video series Aim for the Top! Gunbuster (U.S. release: Manga Entertainment). A friend of Tsurumaki's told him that the studio's next project would be an entire TV series: Nadia—Gainax's biggest success before Evangelion, and one now finally available here from ADV Films. Nadia would require many new hires, and so Tsurumaki jumped on board Gainax in 1990 at the rank of key animator, and never admitted to looking back.
It wasn't as propitious a time to join as it might seem. Gainax was headed for a spell in the wilderness following 1991's Otaku no Video, their last work for four years. Of their two directors, the business-mindful Hiroyuki Yamaga, whose one and only feature film Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise made anime, in Time magazine's judgement, "officially an art form," was frustrated over the perennial work-for-hire status of the studio. Despite Nadia giving even Sailor Moon a run for its money amongst TV audiences, Gainax never seemed to catch up with any of that aforesaid skrilla—an injury coming years later out of remission and into insult, when Disney's PR on Atlantis denied all knowledge of a show called Nadia. (For an instructive comparison, visit www.oldcrows.net/Atlantis/.)
Gainax itself was a subcontractor for their producers, and Yamaga maintained they made "not a red cent" on Nadia, or indeed, any of their previous professional works. He likes to tell the story of how he was so broke after Honneamise that he had to bicycle home to Niigata from Tokyo, over the mountain passes of central Japan. Today, after the co-owned Evangelion, he drives an NSX, in a sort of cel-paint teal unknown to science. Yamaga put aside a second feature film indefinitely until he could do it with some ownership, concentrating instead on developing something Gainax could do entirely in-house, and hence control: PC games and internet services, on both of which Gainax was considerably ahead of the rest of Japan.
Today, Gainax is mainly a software company, and Yamaga, whose first film tops many critics' polls, is still yet to make his second. In the back office, he has become Gainax's producer, putting the FLCL deal together with King Records' president Toshimichi Ohtsuki and Production I.G's president Mitsuhisa Ishikawa. Recently Yamaga has broken a fourteen-year absence as a director by helming the late-night TV show Mahoromatic, but as Yamaga is neither its creator or writer, his art seems almost entirely absent from it and would reflect Tsurumaki's view that Gainax's truly iconic work is that which the studio itself created and wrote (see interview, below). Tsurumaki also expressed the belief at Otakon that it is a good thing in of itself for Gainax to release more anime under its name (Gainax itself works as a subcontractor for other studios' projects), a goal impossible to achieve in the near term without adopting other people's works.
At the panel Tsurumaki discussed working with Gainax's other director of record, the supervising creator of Evangelion, Hideaki Anno. The process is not what one would call micromanaged.
"During pre-production, when we're brainstorming ideas, we have meeting among Gainax staff. Mr. Anno's basically sitting there and listening, but he doesn't give any feedback, comments, or reactions while we come up with ideas. At the end, he makes the final decisions. It would have been helpful if he said during the process that idea's good, that idea's bad…"
Tsurumaki noted that most of the time these discussions take place at restaurants, "but it's difficult to find an appropriate one, as Mr. Anno doesn't eat any meat…" Perhaps tellingly, Tsurumaki noted that, come to think of it, "there aren't a lot of vegetables he likes, either."
It seems no more than par for the industry that The End of Evangelion, which was released in Japan in the summer of 1997, has had to wait five years for its issue in America. Tsurumaki's work on The End has a wide reputation among American fans. It may say something about the film that this article's author, viewing it days after its premiere on an ultra-boot Hong Kong VCD camcorded from a theater screen, actually shut up for its last fifteen minutes. Fans here can expect the official release from Manga Entertainment this summer. At his panel, Tsurumaki gamely answered questions on Evangelion as specific as whose soul was in the Eva Unit-03 ("I'm not sure, but I think it may have been the first clone of Rei Ayanami") and was delighted to hear that American fans had created a CG satire of Evangelion based on the opening credits of the innovative anime Kodomo no Omocha, the manga of which has just been released from TokyoPop.
When asked whether the apocalyptic The End of Evangelion reflected Gainax's bitterness towards fan reaction to the highly unorthodox fashion in which they had ended the previous TV series, there was a suspicion of irony in Tsurumaki's reply: "It wasn't a bitterness towards the fans. A lot of people think that anime should have sweet, effortless, coincidental happy endings. But we wanted to let people know that's not necessarily the case. We wanted to educate the fans that an anime series can also end in bitterness and violence."
None of the Evangelion production staff are themselves of a Western religious background. Tsurumaki, for his own part as assistant director, said at Otakon that he always envisioned the extensive use of Judeo-Christian iconography in Evangelion to be more of a way for the show to distinguish itself visually in the mecha field. Evangelion's eschatology is in fact too well-developed to be regarded as a mere motif, however if it is a syncretic, symbolic and esoteric approach, it is not an ignorant one. Tsurumaki remarked that Eva, being a show only meant for Japan, allowed Gainax to creative freedom in the use of Western elements, removing any concern about how their interpretation might cause offense. By the same token, Yamaga has expressed a sense of relief that Gainax couldn't be easily smeared with the media hysteria over Aum Shinri Kyo, since Evangelion's own high-tech cultists used Western, not Buddhist, revelations. It should be obvious that if this is viewed as an armor for Evangelion to comment on contemporary Japanese events, it is an effective one—an applicability many Japanese critics in fact accepted.
After Evangelion, Gainax had the idea to follow up with a new series created by Tsurumaki and directed by Anno, but Anno decided he wanted instead to adapt Masami Tsuda's manga Kareshi Kanojo no Jijo (which TokyoPop has announced they intend to publish in the U.S.), putting Tsurumaki in the director's seat for the first time, on FLCL. The so-nicknamed KareKano anime, also slated for release here this year from The Right Stuf International, saw many among FLCL's staff assisting, including Tsurumaki, who fielded questions on the well-regarded series. At Otakon 2001 there was even an inquiry about Gainax's adaptation of the million-selling gag manga Ebichu Minds the House, a sort of Hamtaro for adults, where a cute little talking hamster innocently spouts in public the filthy details of her marginally smarter owner's love life. Even among hardcore fans, it's a cult show, although Yamaga proudly brought every episode on his last visit to the United States.
Some of the jokes, gags, and elements in FLCL are subcultural, and if it was very difficult for him to explain some of the elements to the staff, it may be even more so to Americans—or so is his assumption. Tsurumaki told the Otakon panel, "Honestly speaking, I'm very happy that Americans like my work, but the Eva TV series and movies, KareKano, and FLCL are basically made for the Japanese audiences. So when I hear that they are being well received by American audiences, I feel very happy; but at the same time I feel a little awkward."
When PULP asked him what he meant by that, Tsurumaki said, "For example, in Eva, I thought Shinji's character would only be understood by Japanese fans of this generation. But I was very happy—or actually, shocked—to find out that his kind of character is also understood by Americans." I appreciated the director's implied vote of confidence in us, but wondered whether the oft-remarked-upon Japanese sense of cultural singularism was strong enough to cancel out the universal fact of youth disaffection, let alone the worldwide reporting on incidents such as the murders at Columbine.
Another person at Tsurumaki's press conference took up that question. Tsurumaki averred that Shinji's character was based personally on that of Hideaki Anno. Tsurumaki's version of the metaphor was that Shinji being summoned by his father to pilot the Evangelion stood for Anno being "summoned" by Gainax to direct their first anime in four years, and his in five—he traced Anno's ambiguous feelings about his craft back to Nadia. At the same time, said Tsurumaki, Anno felt, "But maybe by doing Eva I can change, I can grow."
Most of the Gainax shows are also targeted, Tsurumaki said, for an audience "that tends to be rather weak and has problems with their family"—and the directors at Gainax are those kind of people. "A lot of families in Japan a generation ago—and perhaps even now—had fathers that were workaholics and never home. They were out of their children's' lives. My own father was like that, and I hardly ever got to associate with him until quite recently. I'm the same sort of person as Hideaki Anno. That probably influences the type of anime I create."
Nevertheless, if Tsurumaki feels that he will never be safe, he will never be sane, he wanted to express that frantic inside in a comedic mode, rather than with the violent convulsions of Evangelion. Simply put, he personally was ready for a contrast to that apocalyptic darkness. Tsurumaki compares the bizarre robots popping forth from Naota's head to stir up the town in FLCL to the bizarre ideas popping forth from his head during its production, stirring up the post-Eva Gainax. For someone involved with such a talked-about film, Tsurumaki hardly ever watches movies himself, telling the panel he receives influences instead from Japanese TV dramas and manga, his favorite being those of Leiji Matsumoto.
"I don't really read ‘otaku' manga, but ones with more delinquent characters."
BACK TO THE TOP : BACK TO THE COVER PAGE
|