Masahiro Noda’s Sense of Wonderland ⑮
Last fall, I saw a Sense of Wonderland — in the depths of hell, that is
Illustration: Naoyuki Katoh (Studio Nue)
After returning from searching for the Battleship Yamato, I went to the office for the first time in two weeks and found a pile of letters on the executive desk. The first thing that caught my eye was a telex. I opened it with excitement and found a message from the Director of Public Affairs at NASA (America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration)! Ta-dah!
“We welcome your visit to NASA. All space centers are waiting for your visit. Please send the following information to the public relations officers at each center as soon as possible…”
Here we go! Here we go! It’s finally happening!
If it was just a NASA tour, it would be easy, but I want to ride the space shuttle (on the ground), meet the cute female astronaut Anna Fisher, sit in the control room at the Houston flight control center, and eat space food…so things aren’t going to go so smoothly. After all that, after six months, I finally got the OK.
And the result of this interview — Whew! I’ll tell you, the editor-in-chief will be angry, but he’s also a friend who ate space food — was compiled into a picture book called NASA, This is the American Aeronautics and Space Administration (CBS/Sony Publishing, 1200 yen – please buy it!) But that’s for later.
Anyway, this is what it means to feel like you’re in heaven. I couldn’t concentrate on my work anymore. I didn’t care about the rest of the letters. My dreams ran wild through the cape…it would have been better if Werner Von Braun had been alive…and I immediately started to feel greedy.
Then, the phone rang. It was T from the programming department. Of course, he’s our most important client. “Hey, hey, thank you for your continued support.”
In this industry, the pecking order is: samurai, farmers, engineers, merchants, TV stations, agencies, dogs and production companies. I immediately started to show my best side and be as polite as possible.
Then, the request: to make a 90-minute special program, The World of Leiji Matsumoto, in November, in conjunction with Queen Millennia, scheduled to air next year (April 1981).
“Okay, okay, I’ll think about it at Cape Canaveral, in front of the Saturn rocket…” I replied in a very good mood, and set off for America in high spirits.
Two weeks later, the day after I returned with a mountain of research material, I got a phone call.
“Hey, what’s going on? Have you completed the structure?”
“Oh, of course,” I answered quickly, wondering what we were talking about.
The World of Leiji Matsumoto…
Toei Animation is making a 15-minute image trailer for Queen Millennia, and we’re going to insert scenes from the TV and movie versions of Yamato and 999, so the question is how do we make the rest of the program?
The first thing that comes to mind is a technique often used by NHK and other organizations, where they gather around 200 children in a studio and have a mature-looking reporter with a hand mic ask them boring questions one after another.
“Everyone, do you know Leiji Matsumoto?”
“YESSSS.”
“That’s a good answer…! I’m surprised! Now, which friend should I ask (I don’t want to)…(smiles as he steps between the kids…) Hey, do you know Galaxy Express Nine Nine Nine?”
“…” (kids are bored)
“You don’t know? You don’t know? Well, how about you ask me here? You–”
“That’s…three-nine”
“Eh? Well, I made a mistake, sorry! So, what’s interesting about Space Battleship Yamato? Can you tell me? ”
I would never want to do something this lame. But what should I do…?
Then, a sudden idea struck me. A long time ago, I had Mighty Atom appear on The Night of a Thousand and One Stars and had him talk with Osamu Tezuka. This caused a huge reaction and was rebroadcast five or six times. Yes, this was back when you were in kindergarten and TV was in black and white. Let’s do that!
I was so excited. The 999 arrives at platform one at Tokyo Station in the early morning. Then Maetel and Tetsuro disappear somewhere in a taxi. Next, Yamato enters the South Pier at Port Yokohama. And Yuki Mori, Sasha, and Starsha…this will be great! All of Leiji Matsumoto’s beautiful characters flock to Matsumoto’s house and make advances on him. Bring Queen Emeraldas to the top of Matsumoto’s house…with a rope ladder…the plan was decided.
To give you the conclusion first, it was a miserable failure. In terms of the ratings, well, considering the situation, it was a good fight, but the content is already enough to make me break out in a cold sweat when I think about it now. As soon as I started, I began to panic that this was no good. Has anyone seen it? Please forget about it, I beg of you. (Though there’s a very cute cell of Starsha!)
I called Studio Nue to ask about something, and Miyatake Kazutaka answered, so I cautiously asked him about it and he said, “Ah, that masterpiece that rivals 2001.” As for Haruka Takachiho, “Don’t make things like that, it’s boring.”
I can’t even write a report because I’m so stunned that I haven’t even received any replies from the people who asked for a screener…?
Having said that, I’m not particularly discouraged because I’ve had many setbacks in my TV career. This sort of thing is a regular occurrence for me. I spent two and a half days working without sleeping at all — my own personal Guinness Book of Records (!) — and then, when I left the entrance of the Toyo Laboratory with the completed master, it was already early winter outside. People were walking around in coats, and, of all things, the President of the United States had changed…! But for those two weeks, I was in the middle of the “Sense of Wonderland.”
It was in 1963 or 1964 that I had Atom appear in The Night of a Thousand and One Stars. When Miki Ayuro, facing Tezuka in Studio 5 of Fuji TV, calls Atom on the transceiver, suddenly a night view of Tokyo appears! Then, the familiar theme resounds, and Atom comes flying from the sky on a glowing jet of flame, and soars into the Fuji TV building through the entrance. Atom knocks down a soba delivery person walking down the hallway, makes a passing female talent faint, and flies into Studio 5 in one go. He soars up to the ceiling, lands vertically on the floor, and walks slowly to the interview set…
This was a composite of live VTR [Video Tape Recording] footage, anime, and film. The interview between Miki Ayuro and Tezuka was recorded on VTR without Atom (with Atom’s voice included), and anime and film were made to go with it and layered on top of it.
It’s easy to say that it was layering, but the reason this project came to fruition was because the layering technique – Chromakey – was just beginning to become reality around that time. A few years ago, one of the winning entries in the SFM contest was Chromakey Blue, and when I looked up the artist, I found out that he was a TV station employee in Osaka.
These days, techniques like Chromakey have become commonplace. To put it simply, it’s this technique that causes a freshly snow-covered Mount Fuji to suddenly appear on the wall behind a seated anchor during a news program. But it was Chromakey that first made me feel a sense of wonder in TV footage.
When a pretty girl standing in the studio opens her handbag, it is pitch black and the moon (the real moon) is floating inside. The camera goes into the bag and it is Shinjuku Gyoen on a moonlit night (of course it’s the real thing, live). And if you look down into the pond, ants seen under a scanning microscope are crawling around in the darkness.
Looking up at the sky, electrons are circling around atomic nuclei. Inside a birdhouse attached to a tree, the Mediterranean Sea spreads out. Yes, for example, the world of Sakyo Komatsu’s BS6005 can be made in real time. Of course, this is nothing for a special effects movie, but now it can be done with raw, real-time footage.
If we connect with JPL in Pasadena via satellite, we can bring live footage of Saturn to the ceiling of Komatsu’s Ginza club – what was it called? – and now that Voyager is near Saturn, we can do it properly. Anyway, the excitement I felt when the technology called Chromakey was developed is indescribable.
A dozen years have passed since then, and Chromakey has become very popular. Its performance has improved, and various limitations have been resolved. But there was another reason besides Chromakey that made me think of Atom at the meeting: the emergence of the one-inch VTR.
I will go into the history of VTRs in Japan in more detail at some point, but the mainstream broadcasting world, which began with the two-inch VTR developed by Ampex twenty-odd years ago, is now in the process of transitioning to VTRs that use the much more compact one-inch (25mm) tape. There are countless merits to this 1-inch VTR, but the reason why it came to mind at that time is that, thanks to this 1-inch VTR, we TV people were able to see TV images frame by frame for the first time (I repeat, for the first time)!
We were taught from the time of our training, before Fuji TV opened, that TV pictures are made up of 30 frames per second. However, it was not until 20 years later that we were able to actually see each frame of the picture – thanks to the digital control of the VTR – you know, Akira-kun.
What can you accomplish when you can manipulate each frame of a TV image? Anime. Hirake! Ponkikki is the only program in Japan that broadcasts animation using this VTR (as is the case with the well-known “Kung Fu Lady”).
I later realized that my hasty decision to jump to conclusions without considering the circumstances was a mistake…