Playing for the first time in 2 years: Anime Be Forever Yamato
Space Battleship Yamato is back, and it will “sail” through the summer movie district with a new look. The new work is Be Forever Yamato, by the same animation company. The previous boom is also going on, and it looks like it will make the young go crazy again. I visited the production site, which is in a rush to pitch, and got a glimpse of the “revival.”
(Hiroshi Shiraishi)
50,000 hand-drawn pictures
Continuous all-nighters for “summer vacation mission”
A look at the production site
At the production site of Toei Animation studio (Tokyo), the artists are currently working all night. In the main room, the floor is strewn with folders. Sketches and papers are piled high on desks, and the walls are covered with drawings of ships and characters. Among them, some people are silently drawing, some are in meetings, and some rush in clutching artwork. It’s quiet, but the atmosphere is tense.
A sketch is copied onto a cel (transparent film), which is then colored with a paintbrush. In other words, it’s a coloring book. Several people, including women, work in this room, but this work is also outsourced, so the actual number of workers is said to be as many as 3,000. In the next room, the special effects are created. Nebulae and flames are sprayed onto a cel with an airbrush.
New video technology
The colored cels are collected in a camera room and taken up one frame at a time for filming. Even though it’s just one frame, several cels are always needed, for example, a cel with the face of the main character, Susumu Kodai, superimposed on a cel for the background.
There are also cels with only the eyes drawn, with closed and open eyes. In a scene where Susumu Kodai blinks, these cels are layered on his face one frame at a time. There are about 50,000 of these cels.
“In terms of the time and effort required, this one is a lot of work. For example, Yamato‘s anchor mark is a new addition, and it takes a lot of work to add to it,” said a member of the on-site staff.
The number of colors has also increased by 10 to about 160. In addition, scanimation, which makes full use of video technology, is also being used. Pictures are videotaped and then combined with separately-shot anime. This technology is said to have created the sense of speed and three-dimensionality in the warp scenes that transcends time and space. It is a mind-bogglingly complicated handmade work that requires patience.
This new work tells the story of Yamato confronting the Dark Nebula, which attacks the peaceful Earth. A gigantic object called a Hyperon Bomb soft-lands on Earth, threatening the annihilation of humanity. To disable it, Yamato flies to its home planet in a dark nebula 400,000 light years away, and experiences an unknown adventure.
This time, Yamato is modified and powered up, with familiar faces such as Susumu Kodai, Yuki Mori, Daisuke Shima, and Shiro Sanada playing active roles. Overall setting: Leiji Matsumoto, script by Toshio Masuda, and others.
Costs over 1 billion yen
Yamato was actually supposed to have “disappeared” in Farewell to Yamato (1978), which followed Space Battleship Yamato (1977). Producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki, president of Office Academy, said the following about “reviving” it:
“With Yamato, I always thought that each film would be the last. I think that killing off Yamato and the other main characters in the second film was a natural cinematic expression. To be honest, it’s painful to ‘revive’ it this time. I was criticized a lot here and there. However, two years have passed since the previous film, and the audience of preteens has changed, so I want to depict a new “love story” theme ,that loving each other means believing in each other. I wanted to make it in 70mm, but it didn’t go well, and that’s my regret.”
The production cost is over 1 billion yen. The previous film cost about 600 million yen, but “the price of materials has skyrocketed in the last two years,” he said. It looks like the production was more difficult than the “revival” part.
The film is due to be released on August 2nd.
