Between Anime Interview

Eiichi Yamamoto

Anime is not the only kind of work that depicts human begins. It is also the inside, not just the surface.

Space Battleship Yamato reaches its final cruise, but this masterpiece by Mr. Yoshinobu Nishizaki (producer) was created and nurtured by Eiichi Yamamoto. Then Mr. Yamamoto gave his attention to the documentary The Known World (Nippon TV network) and continued on one blockbuster after another. This time, Mr. Eiichi Yamamoto is our guest.

I love haughty, cruel Desirees. But lately, there’s been a human revolution toward good guys.

Interviewer: First, please talk about how you came to meet Yoshinobu Nishizaki. And then about the building of Space Battleship Yamato.

Yamamoto: It was when I made Wansa-kun at Mushi Pro in 1973, just ten years ago. I was the chief director of that anime, and Nishizaki was the producer. There were just two directors at Mushi Pro. I became a freelance director in 1969, and I returned to staff of Mushi Pro for Wansa-kun.

[Translator’s note: Mushi Pro[ductions] was the studio founded and run by Osamu Tezuka.]

After Wansa-kun was over, Mr. Nishizaki and I had a relationship, and he said, “I’d like to do something else for TV, please give me your advice.” Aritsune Toyota joined us at the time, and after many questions and answers, the plan was made for Space Battleship Yamato.

Although I was supposed to be the chief director of Yamato at the beginning, even with all the planning I didn’t know when it would go to broadcast. Another job came up, so I wasn’t able to participate in the work of Yamato after all. Toshio Masuda was asked to step in and he was enthusiastic about it at first, but he suddenly started working on The Great Predictions of Nostradamus, so that was no good.

It went around and around until it finally settled on Leiji Matsumoto in the end. Mr. Matsumoto only took charge of the art design at the time, but the thought was, “Maybe he could be the director too?” and the staff was chosen.

Interviewer: When you had to take work on something other than Yamato, what kind of work was it?

Yamamoto: I was interested in documentaries at the time, and I started work on a professional visual recording production. I had to go abroad for the work, so I had to decline Yamato. But I also had a relationship with Mr. Nishizaki, so I couldn’t pull my hand out of it completely. I gave advice about production and took the role of a consultant.

Actually, my duties weren’t clear enough for me to be called a consultant. In short, it was something like, “If there’s something you need, I’ll give my advice.” In addition, I thought I might do a little script writing.

Although I was in on Yamato from the start, I only participated in half-finished form. In my head, I didn’t think of Yamato as my work. After all, I’m a producer and director, but what I did was different from directing…

Interviewer: So, how many scripts did you work on for the first series?

Yamamoto: I finished writing five or six of them on my own. I also added to and improved on things other people wrote, and there may have been quite a few of those.

Interviewer: Please tell me more about the kind of work you would do as a consultant, as you mentioned a moment ago.

Yamamoto: Usually I would go to the planning meetings. Scripts and storyboards would always be shown. What I’d be busy with would last through that stage. When the work began on the actual site, there’d be nothing left for me to do. Should I call it “shadow power?”

Toshio Masuda and Kazuo Kasahara were in some of those meetings, too [for Final Yamato], and people were in attendance who represented the Japanese movie world. Since my job was hard to explain and wouldn’t really impress the people in there, I was given the title of Associate Producer, which at least sounds cool.

Interviewer: In an interview with this magazine, Mr. Nishizaki said that without you, he couldn’t have created the characters of this story. He said…

Yamamoto: When I was at Mushi Pro, I didn’t think I was suited for “kid stuff” or “SF stuff.” Compared to the great master (Osamu Tezuka), there was a huge difference. It would have taken no small amount of study and effort to shrink that difference. Therefore, I didn’t intend to get involved in such genres.

However, when I watched the completed Yamato, it was both “kid stuff” and “SF stuff.” When I told Mr. Nishizaki, “I can’t do this,” he said, “Well, write the script, then.” If it was space opera, even I couldn’t write it. Not absurd things like an Octopus on Mars kidnapping a beautiful woman. Besides action and drama, you need a human story. You know, the falling-head-over-heels-in-love sort of thing. Then I could do it.

Therefore, if I did the script, I would just write those parts. However, the parts with various human characteristics were part of the pattern with Yamato. So as it happened, I wrote a considerable number of scripts for Yamato Part 1, and since we treated it carefully, it was said that the human drama element was stronger than usual for SF. It was like that from the start, so it couldn’t be changed later. That might be what Mr. Nishizaki meant when he said “Yamamoto made the story and characters, blah blah blah…”

Anyway, rather than make it like some sort of Superman thing, with slam-bang action and beating the enemy with a mighty “Yarg!”, it would be about regular people. Well, people with some talent who’d pit their lives and brains in their struggle. I thought writing something like that would be more interesting to me. I could only write it if it included something like that.

There was one more reason that I tried to help out on Yamato. Shortly before Mushi Pro collapsed, I made an anime called Belladonna of Sadness. It was a feature film. With this, Mushi Pro took a literary arts route similar to A Thousand and One Nights or Cleopatra, and it was made along those lines.

From the beginning, I didn’t think it would be much of a hit, and the results were exactly as I expected. (Laughs) After that, people began to say, “That guy just wastes money, he just makes stuff that doesn’t sell at all, he’s the guy who killed Mushi Pro.” I’m sorry to give such an unpleasant evaluation, but that’s the way it is. (Laughs) Since it was that sort of production, it was made in that manner. By all rights, I can brag that I’m the type of person who makes the productions that the world hands to him.

Therefore, even if it was just to make up lost ground, I really wanted to help out on Yamato regardless of whether or not I was on the staff. That was my original standing, and I wanted to prove it to myself as well as others. If they would say, “Yamato‘s a hit because he was involved,” then I could take satisfaction. Not that I’d say that. (Laughs)

Interviewer: By the way, which character in Yamato do you like?

Yamamoto: It’s Dessler. The one from Part 1. He’s aristocratic with a unique aesthetic. You could say it’s the same as Hitler. A person who wants to unify the world under his own aesthetic. He might resemble Oda Nobunaga in Japan. His thoroughness is good, as well.

From the perspective of humanism, that person would be “evil.” But going by his own self-justification, everything he does is “good.” When judged by conventional sensibilities, he is “evil,” but on the other hand, couldn’t we say he overflows with a very human appeal? Isn’t that how he was perceived in Part 1? After all, if Dessler gradually becomes a “good guy,” he becomes conventional, and I wouldn’t like that.

The movie called a big hit was initially a TV series!?

Interviewer: In the case of Yamato, the story was made by discussing it in meetings. Did it (the story) start entirely from scratch?

Yamamoto: Even at the time of the TV series, I did an outline of the whole thing. In the meetings we discussed how to divide it up into 52 episodes.

Interviewer: That’s how Yamato started out, but it was cut down along the way.

Yamamoto: 7:30 pm on Saturday was a time slot on Japan TV in which the ratings would never go up, no matter what. So, under the theory that having a title with “giants” in it might do something, they tried hitting it with a show called Samurai Giants, but got nothing. In this context, the Yamato pitch was made, and they figured, “Maybe this garbage will get the ratings up.” (Laughs) So we starting while thinking, “if this doesn’t work, it’s all over.” (Laughs) And, as expected, the numbers didn’t come. (Laughs)

So after that, I did a program called The Known World. If it had turned out to be bad, we could try to make a good show.

Interviewer: Well, it was doom and gloom on TV, but when the movie adaptation came out later, it caused a serious ruckus.

Yamamoto: Although the world was newly created, it was really done by re-editing the TV series. There were some newly-drawn parts, but this was only a small fraction. Toshio Masuda and I began the editing work separately, and along the way I looked at Mr. Masuda’s part and it was great. So we decided, “Let’s make it like Masuda did,” Yamato has to be about boy soldiers fighting gallantly. Mr. Masuda’s depiction of that was very good.

I think there’s a difference in that area between people who went to war and those who didn’t. That feeling was not intended in the script, but something more subtle oozed out. That part never came out from my direction.

Interviewer: Why do you think it became such a hit?

Yamamoto: It didn’t become a hit overnight. I think there were a lot of potential fans during the airing of the TV series. The number of such fans grew gradually. It was underground and invisible, like a grass-roots movement. People lobbied their TV stations for reruns, and that expanded the circle of popularity even further. I think that’s what lead to it becoming such a big hit as a movie. It was the same with Gundam.

Among the anime called hit series, there are many works that didn’t do very well at the time of their first broadcast. This was even true of Manga Tales of Old Japan and Doreamon. And Yamato, of course.

It was a really wasteful thing when it was discontinued after two blocks. [Translator’s note: a “block” in this case is a 13-episode segment. Two blocks added up to 26.] But if you’re a TV station, you have no choice but to cut its throat if the ratings don’t rise with two blocks. To tell the truth, it should have endured and continued to at least one year. But on that point there were all sorts of circumstances that prevented it…

From now on, I have to manage computers and video

Interviewer: You said earlier that your first interest was in documentaries. Do you think there can be a meeting point between documentaries and animation?

Yamamoto: This runs into the issue of animation being representative, and anime is usually about fantasy. The visual expression that comes out in the picture can be referred to as a deform. Disney movies, too, are mainly fairy tales. It could be said that this is the opposite of a documentary. The reason for this is that documentaries chase after facts. But anime has the power to replenish the parts you can’t chase after with a camera.

The human subconscious, for example. No camera can depict this. But it is often said that when a person with a mental disorder draws a picture, it can be quite good. Through such things, you can explore the person’s internal world. You could also say that this is a documentary. A world of inner reality depicted with a picture.

When you think of it that way, there is something new that animation could bring to the picture world of documentaries. I get the feeling that it would be fun to come up with ways to combine documentaries and anime. That’s the sort of thing that attracted my interest in documentaries.

The theme of Belladonna of Sadness was about the driving forces of the French Revolution. It was written by a historian named Jules Michelet about farmers who were terribly oppressed in medieval times. You could say the farmers were slaves.

When you drive a human being to the very limits in a repressed state, they’ll become deranged, right? At such a time, the true character of a person comes out. It’s like they say, “This is no joke” and turn serious. It’s especially common in women. I think such a thing is a kind of documentary. Of course, you can’t capture this with a camera. But you can with anime. My orientation toward documentaries came out of such things.

This kind of work depicts human beings. Right now it feelings like anime is in full bloom, but I’m not satisfied with it. It feels more like quantity than quality. Just how much you can mold people is a moving point. I want to depict this from the inside as well as the surface. Animation is one of the means to do that.

I’ve done a lot of work for TV recently. What’s attractive about it is that TV has a chance to be a point of contact with more people. Compared to TV, I think a movie feels like nothing more than mini-communication. If a million people see one, it gets hailed as a big hit, but if a million people watch a TV show, the ratings for that show are just 1%.

Interviewer: What do you think the future of anime will be?

Yamamoto: I have a feeling that people working in animation from now on will have to know computers and video. Of course, it’s TV also. When you say TV, I think “the future of anime” is impossible without a knowledge of electronics.

You can’t understand movie animation if you don’t know about film and developing technology, just as you can’t draw manga if you don’t have any knowledge of printing. Because pencils and paint have a wide range of possibilities, you have to learn about the technology for it. In times to come, animation will gradually spread out into new fields. That said, you can’t ignore the techniques of conventional anime. The techniques developed up to now have a flavor all their own. I hope that those who value them will use those techniques.

But I would say the one thing more important than that is what you choose to express with old and new techniques. That may be the number one question. How do you make anime connect with the general public? If it becomes a culture that widens the means of communication, it can enrich the life of the public. I think that anime has reached a big turning point now. You could say the same thing about both its technical aspects and its content.

Interviewer: By the way, what are the highlights of Yamato this time?

Yamamoto: In the end, it would have to be the climax where Yamato explodes. You may be interested to know, why does it explode? What happens to the crew? But on that note, you’ll have to enjoy waiting to see it in detail. (Laughs)

Interviewer: In the case of this Yamato, everyone says this is it, this is it, this is the end, but it doesn’t seem like the end. (Laughs) It’s clearly called The Final Chapter, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to believe it. (Laughs) What’s the truth in this area? This is the last question of the interview. (Laughs)

Yamamoto: Well. Even if it was said that Yamato doesn’t go off in a huge explosion, the plan is still in place. If I decide to make it, it’ll happen some day. But since it’s called The Final Chapter this time, wouldn’t all my struggles be for nothing if it wasn’t the end?

Left: Mushi Pro employees travel around the establishment. Mr. Yamamoto is at left.

Center: Scenery from the creation period of Mushi Pro.

Right: Jungle Emperor is broadcast in the United States!

Left: A Jungle Emperor meeting.

Center: This is no time to work.

Right: “Yes, who agrees with this plan?” “. . .”

---