One of the most successful directors of anime is that of Shinichiro Watanabe. Known for his work on the original and entirely peerless Cowboy Bebop, I was more than happy to catch up with him and discuss his long and eventful career.
Watanabe was originally interested in directing films, but his move into anime came when he was younger, as he explains.
“I was born in Kyoto, not yet in the city in the northern mountainous region. It’s very rural and the city is called Ayabe. Es a very rural area, so it’s not urban or urban at all. I like wild boys playing in the mountains. and fields. This meant that there were no buses or department stores around my house. I used to watch TV, but not all the time, I liked to play outside, in nature.
“When I started going to high school, I started watching videos and cartoons. Then, little by little, I had the impression that these were the things I was looking for in order to reach myself. I was also interested in live-action and animation, so when I graduated from high school, I wasn’t sure what direction I deserved to take. That year was 1984 and it was when 3 very vital anime were released; Nausicaä, Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer and Macross: Don’t You Forget Love?Watching those animated movies made me think that Japanese animation is much better than Japanese live-action. So I started creating anime.
“Out of those 3 animated films, Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer is my favorite. I felt that the film showed a lot of artistic freedom. A lot of crazy things happen in a very surreal way. I felt that anything could happen and it touched me.
“When I was in high school, I really liked watching things like Gundam and Ideon, both of which were Sunrise anime. Also, at the time, Sunrise was producing the most new and original titles each year. So when choosing an anime company to paint for, I thought that if I joined Sunrise, maybe one day I could create my own original anime.
“From the beginning, I sought to create my own original anime, not the movie or serial edition of a successful popular manga or novel. “
Ryosuke Takahashi and running at dawn
Upon moving to Tokyo, Watanabe went to paint at Sunrise and met Ryosuke Takahashi, who took a liking to him. However, I didn’t expect such a formal dress code for the exam.
I thought it was a pretty casual kind of industry, so I came here in a t-shirt and jeans. While everyone was wearing suits, which was a bit shocking. There weren’t many other people who took the test either, about 6 or 7 in total. The check was a paper check where you indexed your favorite videos and explained why. An in-person interview followed.
“I’m notoriously young and naïve about the world, so I’m fair and direct in my answers to other people who interviewed me. There were 3 in total, and two of them looked at me with frowns. However, the last interviewer seemed to Find Me very attractive and is Ryosuke Takahashi.
“Amazingly, Sunrise decided to hire me and I only found out later that Takahashi had vouched for me after the interview.
“It was amazing because I didn’t forget to answer one of their questions about what I thought of the recent animated series Sunrise and told them straight out that it wasn’t funny at all. In retrospect, I think that was a very bad thing to say.
‘Blue Comet SPT Layzner’ was one of the very first anime that Watanabe worked on.
“After that, I joined Sunrise and started racing at Blue Comet SPT Layzner. Naturally, I had enjoyed Takahashi’s anime before running in Layzner, just like I liked Armored Trooper VOTOMS.
“At Layzner, I’m basically in the business of task management, which is a bit like housework and general logistics. Things like driving cars and calling designers to send them out. It’s nothing artistic, so I wasn’t able to interact directly with Takahashi at the time.
“Because Takahashi’s personality is so sweet and friendly, his studio has had a very clever sense of humor. This was not the case with Yoshiyuki Tomino’s studio, as he was angry and yelling. The Layzner team, on the other hand, was very friendly and we all got along very well. From time to time we would go out drinking and they paid for me.
“Of course, Layzner’s schedule was very tight. Difficult paints were required. However, even when we were very busy, the team took the time to have a drink. In fact, I learned more by drinking with the team than in the studio itself.
“There were a lot of episode managers at Layzner, but they were all heavy drinkers who enjoyed sake. This meant that I hung out with them often, but in doing so, I discovered that they were cinephiles. So I enjoyed the conversations I had with those guys.
“Then one day, other people came to the team to tell us that Layzner would finish early. Being in my position was all I knew and I never knew why. It was pretty shocking when it happened.
Moving Into Episode Direction And Becoming A Director
Before Watanabe became a director, he worked on various anime as an episode director. This allowed him to be more creative but not without certain restrictions.
“After Layzner I worked on a very minor title called Batsu & Terry. I also worked on City Hunter, I was only the production manager for these titles, so I don’t think there is anything interesting to talk about.
“For around 10 titles I was involved as an episode director, and that had more creative input. I think the first was a Dirty Pair OVA, then Mellowlink and Wataru. As well as Obatarian.
“Of course, everyone needs to be a leader. Thus, among all those who asked to direct, only the user who proved capable was selected to direct the episode. I said I was looking to direct, so I was given the role of the director of the episode as a kind of control. I also did a storyboard as a control, not for an actual production.
“When I was an episode director, I learned all the technical skills I could to make anime. For the creative side of things, I was always unhappy and unsatisfied because the episode director was just the support of the main director. So whenever I came up with a unique storyboard with a peculiar direction, the direction always corrected it. That meant the amount of creative freedom I had was very limited. That meant I spent the time focusing on learning as much as I could to polish my skills.
“While I was working on Iron Leaguer there was an action scene and I was in charge of the storyboard. As I like the movies of Sam Peckinpah, I wrote a storyboard in that style. However, the director didn’t like it at all and all of my work was thrown away. That said, looking back now, I agree with the director’s choice.
“When I started racing in Gundam 0083, I realized that my skills had been honed quite a bit and even improved a bit. It gave me more confidence. However, I wasn’t worried about the story, so I was frustrated, because I wanted to do things differently. Naturally, we all had a lot of questions about the finish. We didn’t understand why Kou would need someone like Nina, who had already betrayed him. Fans still complain about the finish of Gundam 0083, but I told them that I was only the director of the episode and worked until episode 12 and had nothing to do with episode 13.
“Gundam 0083” is one of the most spin-off OVAs.
“The first anime I worked on that I was in charge of general directing was Macross Plus. However, the director was actually Shoji Kawamori and I was more like a co-director. However, in the credits, Kawamori is listed as the supervising director, but he was the director. It was also completely different than running for episode director; I was much more guilty about a wider variety of things besides history. I was in complete control and learned to master the overall aspect of production.
“For Macross Plus, the global installation and global configuration was done through Kawamori, so in that sense, I was there more in all of that. The end result was an anime that was a combination of my and Kawamori’s tastes. I also didn’t plan to work on Macross Plus, the offer just came in and I accepted it. Also, at the time, Sunrise was not hiring managers as employees. This meant that when I became an episode director, I was well liberated. This meant that I later became independent.
“With Takahashi, he doesn’t take on responsibilities on his own, but is very smart about delegating responsibilities to other people and maximizing his roles to gain advantages from the overall production. He’s a very smart manager of other people. However, with Kawamori, it’s absolutely the opposite. You need to do everything on your own. This meant that racing with Kawamori was very different from racing with someone like Takahashi. Takahashi was very sweet, but on the other hand, Kawamori was quite eccentric. Very quiet but eccentric. He was very natural with eyes shining with fascination. Kawamori is a very attractive person.
Cowboy Bebop and Running with Yoko Kanno
For many, Cowboy Bebop is one of the most important anime ever created, but its origins were really precarious.
“Even though he was the director of Macross Plus, Kawamori was the main director. This meant that the stage didn’t allow me to do everything I wanted to do. This frustration turned into an enormous amount of power within me. It made me want to do my own original stuff. So Cowboy Bebop ended up being the first anime where I could do whatever I wanted. That means you don’t want to pay attention to what I worked on before Cowboy Bebop.
“The timing of Cowboy Bebop coincided with the return of Star Wars with The Phantom Menace. This meant that Bandai believed that it was most likely another Star Wars boom and that spaceships would be the key. That’s why they sought to sell new plastic models of original spacecraft. . This resulted in his order to create an anime featuring spaceships. So as long as there were spaceships, we could do whatever we wanted.
“However, once I did everything I wanted, Bandai came back saying that the plastic models from this anime wouldn’t sell. This led to Bandai canceling its plans to create spaceship-like plastic models and pulling out as a sponsor, which stalled Cowboy Bebop. .
“At the time, Bandai Visual was relatively new and they were looking for a new anime, which led us to reach out to Bandai Visual and give them the role of sponsor of the anime. Once this factor was resolved, Cowboy Bebop could continue. , but without Bandai Visual’s help, it most likely would have been cancelled. Therefore, seeing Cowboy Bebop achieving so much good fortune while continuing to make many models and toys is satisfying. It also shows that Bandai didn’t have the foresight to fund good lucky anime at the time.
“The models submitted were selected through a contest. Many prominent artists, including Kawamori and Hajime Katoki, attended the contest, but in the end we opted for Kimitoshi Yamane. In fact, Yaman’s designs seemed as realistic as possible, anything that might exist and that other people could just use. It wasn’t just about having attractive designs; they had to be believable and realistic.
“Cowboy Bebop” is widely regarded as a version of the anime.
“I thought the names of the shipments related to Yamane’s fish were great, because we wanted the shipments to have their own nicknames. So we appreciate Yaman’s concepts on that.
“Cowboy Bebop’s luck is definitely bigger than I expected. This was because at the time anime wasn’t that popular outside of Japan. Maybe something like Akira was very popular, but that was the exception and not the rule. . So Cowboy Bebop’s good luck was unexpected and I still need to know why. I’ve loved Western movies since I was a kid, more American or European than Japanese. That’s because I found Japanese movies too sentimental. So things like over-the-top emotional music for a big climactic scene. In short, Japanese films sought to make audiences cry. So, on the other hand, I liked foreign technique and was looking to do something interesting. One of the reasons I didn’t really like Space Battleship Yamato was that it had too much melodrama.
“In the original plan, it was called Nagareboshi Bepop, or ‘shooting star’ Bebop, but in the end we may not use that call because of a trademark issue. So we tried the English edition of Shooting Star Bebop, and once we got back we had some other trademark conflict. So we thought about the story and focused on the bounty hunters, who you could just call “cowboys,” which is how we came up with the name Cowboy Bebop. Of course, it was Keiko Nobumoto who came up with the idea of calling bounty hunters “cowboys. “This is a concept that we used in the description of the anime. Nobumoto and I also share similar tastes and feelings, so we can speak very well, even without much explanation.
“As for the concept behind the episode ‘Toys in the Attic,’ it came out of Minami’s refrigerator. It goes back to when I was running at Layzner. Minami was also a production manager, older than me. One day, Minami asked me to help him move, and when I arrived, his refrigerator was outside and he told me he might never open it. This was because he had left it unattended for too long and had no idea what had happened to the food that was left. inside. It was wrapped very tightly with a lot of duct tape and we never opened it. So naturally, I wondered what was going on inside.
“As for the musical arrangements of this episode, I have been a music enthusiast for a long time. So I have listened to and enjoyed a lot of music over the years. Initially, I thought I would become a musician when I was young, but when I tried to make my own music or my own songs, it was terrible. The result was that I quit music and chose videos as anything I could do as a job, since music was just a hobby. I was a big fan of Yellow Magic Orchestra, so I tried to go for the synthesizer, but it may have just been a reasonable synthesizer. The most reasonable synthesizers had very few sounds, unlike the ones used in Yellow Magic Orchestra. So I stopped creating music with a synthesizer However, when I became a conductor, I have an idea of what my strengths would be. What sets me apart from other conductors? The answer for me was that I knew music and I enjoyed music. Maybe I can get the most out of it. music as a director.
“When I was running on Macross Plus, Yoko Kanno’s call came up among the applicants to compose the music. However, at the time, it wasn’t known at all. Kanno then sent a demo tape that included a wide variety of music. It was that a user could do all of this. It was very impressive, so I tried to work with her.
“Through the work on Macross Plus, I came to realize that Kanno is a real genius and she can do any type of music. So when we started working on Cowboy Bebop, the music genre was going to be totally different; I already knew that Kanno could do it. For Macross Plus the direction was for the music to depict something huge in scale, and you can imagine that you are flying around in the wide open sky. Whereas for Cowboy Bebop the music needed to be more like jazz and blues, but that might not fit with scenes in space or on a spaceship. As I wanted to intentionally mix jazz and blues with spaceships, I knew that Kanno could handle that.
“Macross Plus” Watanabe to composer Yoko Kanno.
“When I first met Kanno on Macross Plus, the person that showed up just looked like a cute girl. Everybody was surprised and wondered if she was really the person that had sent us all this amazing music. We were even skeptical and that there might even be some kind of ghostwriter involved. However, when we went to the recording she handled everything by herself, so we were hugely impressed, but at the same time, her personality was very cute and interesting. So when we worked on Cowboy Bebop we created a character based on Kanno’s personality, but we didn’t tell her this so I don’t know what she thought of it.”
Naturally, I wanted to know what Watanabe thought of the new live-action adaptation on Netflix, to which he had this to say.
“For the new Netflix live-action adaptation, they sent me a video to review and check. It started with a scene in a casino, which made it very tough for me to continue. I stopped there and so only saw that opening scene. It was clearly not Cowboy Bebop and I realized at that point that if I wasn’t involved, it would not be Cowboy Bebop. I felt that maybe I should have done this. Although the value of the original anime is somehow far higher now.”
Samurai Champloo, Space Dandy and looking for something new
Following Cowboy Bebop, it seems that Watanabe received a lot of requests to do something similar. Thankfully, he really didn’t want to do that and ventured into creative pastures new.
“Once you have a successful name, you get a lot of requests to do something similar and, in this case, something like Cowboy Bebop. I’ve been getting those kinds of requests for more than 20 years. I understand the reasoning behind those requests, but if I went in that direction I would end up doing the same thing over and over again. Over time, other people got tired and lost interest in my work. I also feel like I have more variety to offer in myself. It is with this in the brain that I have avoided seeking to do similar things.
“In order to make something great or cool, I need to try something new and make something from scratch. I believe this is very important for creativity and if I only imitate what I have done before, I will not be able to make anything great. So I always place great importance on making something new. David Bowie used to say the same thing and he is someone who I greatly respect. He always tried to change his style and try something new.
“I’ve been a big fan of Chambara’s films, with the Zatoichi series being one of my favorites. However, he didn’t need to do anything old-fashioned but rather take a new approach. I also conceive that hip-hop and samurai might have some similarities. In this, the vital essence of hip-hop is its sampling. A musician can rescue old pieces of music and use them as new. So, the concept of being able to use anything old, like portions of a Chambara movie, in a new way, was the starting point for Samurai Champloo. Also, rappers can only imagine themselves one at a time with their microphone and samurai are the same in that they can only constitute themselves with their swords. Mugen’s character design is therefore encouraged through rap musicians. With those concepts, I felt like I was going to be able to create a new kind of chambara anime.
“For Space Dandy, I wanted to do a stupid, crazy comedy with music from the ’80s or disco music in space. I’d never done this genre before, that’s why I sought to do it. However, when I was doing Space Dandy, Guardians of the Galaxy came along and did pretty much the same kind of thing, which surprised me a lot. Things like using cassette tapes long-term seemed like a far-fetched idea to me and no one else would think of it. Still, it was an important component of Guardians of the Galaxy story.
“Another thing is that the user we hired to do the narration in Space Dandy was the Japanese voice of Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek. Therefore, all Japanese enthusiasts can recognize him just by hearing his voice. For the English version, I don’t know if they did anything similar.
The Issues With Hollywood Producers And The Future
It turns out that the production procedure for The Animatrix is not simple. Although unpleasant, it allowed Watanabe to learn anything new.
“Now I am working on a new and original title. Most of the offers I receive these days tend to be from America and the budgets tend to be almost double compared to what I get in Japan.
“Back on The Animatrix, I first got to work with people in Hollywood. Working with those kinds of people is always difficult. This is because at the beginning they promised me that I could do whatever I want, but that’s just lip service.
“I really had a big altercation with a Hollywood producer on The Animatrix. He came up with those stupid requests, just so he could identify his own contribution. Since the requests were stupid and pointless, I turned them all down. Unfortunately, I may just not win in that situation, so I had to concede some of those things. However, I learned from this bitter experience. For later projects, I became smarter at managing other people who wanted to step in. . In this, I would submit very small corrections or changes just before the deadline. It used to work.
“In Japan, there are manufacturers that look like the Americans. There are also smart manufacturers in the United States.
“The original producer of Animatrix was a smart guy. He understood my job and didn’t make stupid demands of me. However, he had to leave due to family problems, but his successor, Spencer Lamm, was awful. So many requests. Change this, replace that. It was very frustrating and if the requests came here from the Wachowskis, I would at least respect them when they created The Matrix. So who was the new manufacturer in relation to that?He explained that he was the Wachowskis’ caretaker and that if I couldn’t convince him, I wouldn’t bring my paintings to them.
“So when I went to L. A. for the recording sessions, I told the crew that if I saw this manufacturer, I would punch them in the face. The manufacturer ended up coming to the recordings, which is unheard of.
“For one of the other episodes by Peter Chung, I heard a story after we finished on The Animatrix. Apparently, this producer had come up with more than a hundred requests to Chung. Chung obviously got upset and said he would resign. The producer then freaked out, as he was meant to be responsible for finishing the whole production within the deadline and budget. The result was that the producer conceded on all his requests to Chung. When I heard that I thought that he had cheated, but I learned from that as well. In short, if you work with a Hollywood producer you have to fight. Otherwise, you will be unable to represent what you want to do.”
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