Chapter 2: Ikebukuro Community College Lecture, Part 1

July 27, 2019

The lecture notes have been significantly expanded. While some of the content overlaps with the discussion at New Chitose Airport, please understand that it has been left intact due to the flow of the discussion.

What I Saw and Heard at the Production Site: the Impact of Space Battleship Yamato

Since Yamato is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its broadcast, I thought I’d commemorate it by providing commentary on every episode. However, rather than delving deeply into the story, I plan to talk about things only I would notice, things generally unknown, as they come to mind. I expect there will be a lot of trivia, but I hope you’ll bear with me.

Before getting into each episode, I’ll talk about the overall picture first.

I visited the Yamato production site around November 1974, during its broadcast. I was still a high school sophomore (16 years old). Much of what I saw and heard then came from Mr. Noboru Ishiguro, who was the Chief Director (credited as “Director” in the opening) at the time. Mr. Ishiguro’s visual techniques and directing approach contained many ideas reminiscent of tokusatsu work; they were stimulating and form the basis of most of my own foundation. He later also took on the title of “Technical Director,” and it’s clear his work was very close to that of a tokusatsu director. Of course, he also oversaw the entire filmmaking process, including character development.

I visited the studio in a multi-tenant building in Sakuradai, Nerima Ward, where a bakery called “Peter Pan” was on the first floor. When we first met in the production room, he introduced himself as “Ishiguro, the on-site supervisor.” This later became incredibly significant. Initially, I thought it was a joke comparing it to construction work, but I learned later how profound the word “site” truly was.

Nowadays, security is tighter, and even those writing about anime have fewer chances to get on site, talk to people, or learn specific procedures and ways of thinking. But animation can’t be created without a production site, and visuals don’t just happen on their own. Unless you control every detail frame by frame, you can’t make something good.

The key is how to leverage specific techniques to control the production. To judge “what is possible” and “what is impossible” within limited time. Even if “unprecedented imagination” is achieved, a director must know how to integrate it into solid image creation in a system of weekly anime production involving many people.

Regarding the first Yamato series, I believe Noboru Ishiguro’s contribution was significant. It’s not just assisting creation. The process itself is creation.

“The idea is tokusatsu” means “a technical mindset in image creation.” Eiji Tsuburaya also called himself a “tokusatsu director,” emphasizing technology. I always say that “within anime and tokusatsu culture, technology has played a crucial role.” I’ve worked hard for over twenty years to pinpoint why this culture developed so significantly only in Japan, and to understand its uniqueness. That is one of the answers I’ve found. And from that perspective, “anime and tokusatsu” are inseparable.

We want to know the true nature of what we see. If it were just about story or characters, then novels or manga would suffice. Therefore, something important must lie hidden within the “image creation” of anime and tokusatsu. Specifically, I want to understand the essence of things like “surprise” or “longing for the unseen.” That motivation was also given to me by Yamato.

The Keyword is “Sense of Wonder”

The term “sense of wonder” from science-fiction serves as a helpful reference. This “wonder” is closer to “thrill” or “excitement” than mere “surprise” – a tingling sensation. It’s that shiver you get when the membrane of fixed notions that has confined you suddenly breaks, revealing something new. It’s different from simple excitement; it’s akin to “seeing the light.”

Anime is an art form where something “wonderful” is packed into the change from frame to frame, into the void between those frames. If this is formatted well, couldn’t it build a “wonderful” story on a higher layer, one impossible with text or static images?

A close Japanese equivalent is ‘tamageru’ (“soul vanishes”). It’s old-fashioned, but the sensation of your soul being sucked into the fiction and vanishing is close to a “sense of wonder.” Even knowing it’s fiction, you can’t look away. When reality and unreality swap places, a chemical reaction occurs in the “real” on the next higher layer, making it shine. “The membrane between reality and illusion” is also an old phrase, but I feel the Japanese truly grasped its essence.

Thinking along these lines, I believe we can position Space Battleship Yamato as a work that achieved a “sense of wonder” by thoroughly harnessing and applying the “magic of film” inherent to anime, thereby breaking free from the constraints of TV anime.

This magic hinges on shifts in perspective, on leaps in viewpoint and vision. This aligns closely with the crucial phrase attributed to Masahiro Noda: “SF is art.” Though he cited it as “a phrase I heard from a friend,” it seems he was modestly concealing that it was actually his own. The accumulated depictions build up, then suddenly jump. It’s in that pulled-back perspective that the “art” becomes visible.

For me, Yamato is the animation that realized this phenomenon, this sensation cultivated through SF. It’s not “SF because it depicts space”; the methodology and the sensations it evokes are what make it SF. That sensation of the “worldview” – in its original meaning – leaping, soaring to a different dimension, was truly irreplaceable.

If you start scrutinizing the concepts for scientific accuracy and debating whether it’s truly SF, then of course, the work has many shortcomings. But when you find something unique and build upon it, you discover clear, dramatic advantages throughout the work. Despite its immense popularity, there’s a frustrating lack of people discussing it from this perspective, which is why I decided to speak up myself.

The Effects and Animation that Color Yamato

The origins of the work are detailed in the book The Madness of Yoshinobu Nishizaki, the Man Who Created Space Battleship Yamato (Kodansha), co-authored by non-fiction writer Yasumasa Makimura and producer Tetsuhisa Yamada. An expanded edition is also available as an e-book, so please read it.

Back in 1975, I heard from staff that “Yamato was made with money from selling calendars,” but I remained skeptical, wondering, “Could they really be that profitable?” However, this meticulously researched book confirmed it. Beyond that, it clarified many other points – whether things “were really true,” “were that extreme,” or “were even more incredible” – making it incredibly valuable.

At the core of Yamato‘s “sense of wonder,” that thrilling sensation, lies the presence of “effects and animation.” This has also become a lifelong research theme for me, but I first learned about it from Mr. Ishiguro. About ten years ago, when we celebrated his recovery [from illness], I told him, “Everything I’ve done is just passing on what I learned from you, Mr. Ishiguro.” It was wonderful.

Let’s go back to 1975. Director Noboru Ishiguro once told me what inspired him to pursue animation. He asked, “Do you know about effects animation?” When I replied, “No,” he explained, “It’s so important that it’s been listed as a specialized profession at Disney for a very long time.”

When I went to the US in 1987, I found a Disney book called The Illusion of Life. Its first edition was published in 1981, but it seems Mr. Ishiguro had been researching similar works even earlier. It’s said that Katsuhiro Otomo referenced it when drawing key animation for his directorial debut, Labyrinth Stories / Stop the Construction Order. In 2002, under the leadership of director Isao Takahata, it was translated into Japanese and published by Tokuma Shoten as Disney Animation: The Magic of Bringing Life to Characters. It’s a book like a bible.

That book devotes an enormous amount of space to effects animation; things like fire, water, and lightning. Disney apparently recognized early on that character animation requires a different sensibility, establishing a specialized team to research it. The American DVD of Fantasia includes a making-of feature (a re-enactment) showing them breaking glass, sketching bubbles by forcing compressed air through mud instead of lava, and using high-speed cameras. This demonstrates that they created animation based on scientific analysis.

Mr. Ishiguro mentioned that his favorite Disney film was Sleeping Beauty. Created just before the adoption of Xerox technology to reproduce the rough lines of the original drawings, it features stunningly beautiful hand-traced artwork. Furthermore, it was produced in 70mm, making it truly magnificent. Its climax is the effects animation of the dragon breathing fire. I still vividly recall him saying with a smile, “I entered the anime industry because I wanted to make works like that.”

This period coincided perfectly with my own deepening fascination with kaiju films. My interest began with line-drawn compositing (animation within tokusatsu) like King Ghidorah’s gravitational ray animated by Sadao Hoshikawa, and the underlying consciousness in Yamato that “obsessing over effects is fundamental.” I believe it was fateful.

When it comes to anime and tokusatsu, most people typically discuss them through the lens of literary criticism, focusing on story, drama, historical context, or themes. Placing them on the same level as novels or manga certainly has its value. But even so, is that truly enough? Aren’t we overlooking something crucial? I’ve always questioned why effects and tokusatsu are treated almost like mere toppings on a dish. For me, the visuals themselves are the source of the emotion.

In recent years, concepts like “representation” and “narrative” have developed further. Does my own interest fit within that framework? That’s an area I’m still studying.

The Challenge of Spectacle-Oriented Visuals

I recently learned that producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki came from a prestigious family and had a taste for extravagant, spectacular blockbusters. He favored films like Gone with the Wind, Ben Hur, and The Wizard of Oz, often referencing them musically too. The opening of Farewell to Yamato, where the White Comet approaches at an unimaginable scale, clearly draws from Lawrence of Arabia.

I also heard from Yoshikazu Yasuhiko that he favored flashy, impactful visuals. When joining the project, Nishizaki reportedly boasted right off the bat, “Check this out — we’re using an optical printer!” showing off visuals that were impossible to achieve with standard cameras. According to Ishiguro’s recollection, the massive operating cost nearly got him fired (Laughs), but he actually loved it.

When Mr. Yasuhiko submitted storyboards featuring high-difficulty shots like Yamato making a 180-degree turn, the upper management reportedly praised it enthusiastically: “Great! Great!” However, when those storyboards reached the production site, chaos ensued. (Laughs) The schedule was already tight enough, and a Yamato turn meant drawing each frame, which was a huge undertaking. That said, this tendency must have been advantageous for Mr. Ishiguro’s visual experiments.

I believe Yamato‘s true achievement lies in its uncompromising dedication to creating visually beautiful animation. Until then, the benchmark for “beautiful anime visuals” in SF works was Tatsunoko’s Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. That is, “artistically excellent” works centered on color and effects (finishing). But Yamato represents a “dirty aesthetic,” creating a stark contrast.

It’s a strange way to put it, but to ground the military depictions in realism, every minute detail — the sequence of actions, how bullets are loaded, the specific situations where weapons are used — was meticulously reflected in the work. As a result, the artwork might look messy, and animating complex mecha with many lines over multiple frames increased the risk of mistakes. In fact, the familiar “flyby” sequence suffered from mis-assigned cell numbers, causing a noticeable “jerk” every week for a while. The Yamato in the opening also has colors flickering here and there. But in reality, things rarely go smoothly, and these flaws often contribute to a sense of grandeur. They were committed to that overall realism.

In that environment, Mr. Ishiguro handled the realism through animation techniques or concepts closer to tokusatsu, essentially fulfilling the role of a “tokusatsu director” in a live-action film. From 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam to 1982’s Macross, Japanese animation, especially SF works, underwent major changes. The origin of that influence can be traced back to Space Battleship Yamato.

This three-part lecture series, covering all 26 episodes, aims to highlight what made it so remarkable, focusing primarily on its visual aspects.

Advanced Masking Techniques and Screen Compositing

Before diving into each episode, I’d like to explain some fundamental information I’ve analyzed from interviews and materials I received at the time.

Director Noboru Ishiguro’s specialty was with the “optical printer” mentioned earlier. It is a device that achieves compositing on film that can only be exposed once, and is usually installed in a processing lab. It is a machine that “burns light,” and therefore requires a “mask,” a black covering material to prevent exposure. The well-known blue and green screens are techniques for automatically creating that mask during processing in a lab.

Most of the shots in Yamato were composited by cutting masks on celluloid. On the other hand, sometimes the mask is created using special filming techniques and then applied optically. This was called “skip photography,” a technique unlike any other. It was used only three times in Yamato.

The camera stand limits the number of materials that can be moved in any direction, and because the camera is positioned vertically to the plane, it is not possible to shoot the subject and background together while moving them closer or farther away on different axes. Optical compositing breaks through that limitation.

In the case of Yamato, the technique involves processing a background behind the camera work or ripple glass to create motion, then embedding separate animated cels with distinct movements within that background.

The first instance of this was in Episode 1, during the shot where the Gamilas fleet approaches while the spacecraft tracks through space. By luck, I obtained just one of these cel materials, revealing something astonishing. When I flipped the cel over, it was completely painted black. This is called “backing,” meaning the cel itself becomes the material for the compositing mask.

You light the surface of the cel and shoot one frame. For the next frame, you shoot the same cel with the camera lights off, using backlighting. This way, only the blackened mask appears against the white background. You shoot each frame like this, alternating. That’s why it’s called “skip photography.” This master film is separated for use in the optical printer; the mask frames and the material frames are extracted and made into separate films. For the masks, high-contrast film (the type used for creating captions or subtitles) is employed, and masks with inverted negatives/positives are also created.

When these are run through the optical printer, the frame shot under normal lighting and the separately shot background are composited. This allows elements with different axes, trajectories, or shooting processes to be combined into a single scene. Mr. Ishiguro wrote in his autobiography Anime Frontline (co-authored with Noriko Obara) that this single filming process resulted in a bill of about two million yen, nearly costing him his job.

Optical effects scenes appear in only three places across all 26 episodes of Yamato. One is where the Gamilas fleet approaches against the backdrop of Pluto. It’s a shame the starry sky superimposition is doubled and obscures the planet, but it shows the vastness of space before the fleet advances.

The second is the scene where Captain Okita’s ship frames in on Mars. This composites tracking footage where the ship’s pass and camera work are synchronized. These two are from Episode 1, but the third is the famous shot at the end of Episode 3 where Yamato slowly departs Earth.

The background shows a massive explosion from a direct hit by a giant missile, with a ripple glass technique. Through this shimmering air, Yamato, finished with effects brushwork, approaches slowly and quietly toward the viewer. Overcoming such a catastrophe, it advances calmly toward the foreground, creating a sense of emotion. It even conveys the feeling that “Space Battleship Yamato is now setting off for a ‘world without air’.”

I’m ashamed to say that this is a feeling I wouldn’t have appreciated had I not seen it in the theater. The slow zoom is so deliberate that you’re moved when you suddenly realize it’s right in front of you. This delicate sensation connects to the emotion. Even the slightly misaligned mask makes it incredibly clear that “this is not ordinary.” (Laughs)

In such cases, Toei Animation would typically handle it with Xerox enlargement/reduction, but the imagery here conveys something entirely different. Therefore, the choice of technique itself imbues the visuals with an aesthetic consciousness. It’s something worth deciphering.

Now, let’s move into specific episode commentary. This time, I’ll prioritize improvisation, proceeding on the fly without detailed slides or preparation.

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