Author: izumi/Anitama Cover Source: MEGALO BOX
As a project to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the start of the youth manga pyramid "Tomorrow's Father" serial, the original TV anime MEGALO BOX began broadcasting in April 2018. This is Hiroshi Moriyama's first time as a supervisor. Moriyama had previously made impression boards in works directed by Ken Koike ("Lupin III: The Tombstone of Daisuke the Second Dimension") and "Tetsuro Araki" ("Attack on Titan" series). Let's take a look at how this powerful creator of the limelight inherits the soul of the masterpiece and deduces a new work that combines the atmosphere of the times. Link to the original article
Hiroshi Moriyama was born in 1978. He worked at MADHOUSE in his early years and is now a free man. He has served as the visual designer of "Attack on Titan", the small prop design of "Lupin III ~ The Woman Named Feng Fujiko ~", "Lupin III: The Tombstone of Daisuke of the Dimension", "Lupin III: Ishikawa Goemon of Blood Smoke", and the conceptual art & design of "Cabanelli of Kotetsu Castle". In his supervising debut, MEGALO BOX, Moriyama will unleash his design talents that are rare in the world.
Producer Fujiyoshi mentioned the planning of the film to Moriyama about 3 to 4 years ago. The original title was not "MEGALO BOX", but only a project to re-animate the 50th anniversary of the "Tomorrow's Father", and I wanted to invite Moriyama to supervise the show. For the famous "Tomorrow's Father", Moriyama, who lacks directing experience, is afraid that he will be incompetent and mess things up, so he pushes away for a long time, but he thinks about it, how the success or failure is still unknown, let's first make a little bit of a deal for the establishment of the project, and then join in. It is said that the main creative members spent a lot of time on the theme of the derivative works of the original work, trying to find various entry points and exchanging views with each other.
As the project moved forward, the scripter Katsuhiko Mabe was invited to help, and according to Moriyama, at first, he had planned to use the past of the excavation force stone as a cutting point, but the line did not go well, and the plan was once stranded. After being beaten back to the original point, everyone discussed it, otherwise, a new version of "Tomorrow's Father" was re-compiled. So he proposed the idea of "transforming the stage into a near future", which slowly formed the prototype of "MEGALO BOX" after that. Of course, if you only change the stage, you can take the practice of "changing the soup without changing the medicine", but the crowd finally decided to simply boil a pot of new soup medicine and make original works.
The stage setting of the near future has some double-edged sword meaning for creation, but in Moriyama's view, it is still more beneficial than harmful. In the long process of script preparation, a variety of schemes have been born, and for these cases, the iron law of trade-offs implemented by the main creative team is: while paying tribute to "Tomorrow's Tomorrow", we must ensure that the content is interesting and watchable. Therefore, the setting of the near future is not just a curiosity gimmick for the eyeballs.
The work "Tomorrow's Father", as a symbol of a certain era, can be regarded as a work that comes into being in time, but the original work is extremely universal in terms of theme and plot, and has a universal cross-time and space compatibility. This provides feasible conditions for the "Tomorrow's Father" of a certain era to be born into the "MEGALO BOX" of the near future. Of course, it is difficult to build an era that no one knows out of thin air, but it also adds a "out of nothing" fun.
The "armor" worn by the boxers in the game is an extremely conspicuous visual cue to the near future. Although the original manga is said to be a boxing theme, strictly speaking, compared with realistic sports, it is more "comic sports" drawing method, so in addition to boxing matches, a large number of depictions of the lives and living conditions of the characters are interspersed in the play. This is much the same as what Moriyama wanted to convey in MEGALO BOX, so it is easy to degenerate into pure imitation. For the sake of differentiation, mechanical gadgets are deliberately added, and it is not a simple mechanical fight. As the production progressed, Moriyama became more and more convinced that the "armor" itself would also be one of the elements of weaving the plot.
The manga of "Tomorrow's Akira", Moriyama has read it since he was a student, and he firmly believes that there are definitely many fans of "Tomorrow's Akira" in this world who are more fanatical than himself. Although Moriyama himself praised the original work, he only regarded it as one of the interesting manga works. After that, when he was about 19 or 20 years old, Moriyama watched the animated version for the first time. Although Moriyama has not watched all kinds of cartoons, in fact, live-action movies are his true love, and naturally he has more experience with live-action movies. But even so, when enjoying the animated version of "Tomorrow's Father", Moriyama had a sense of live-action film, so he chased the plot all the way to watch. Rather than watching the anime, Moriyama is seeing the performance supervised by Saki and the style of the film, and he is deeply attracted by the unique charm contained in the original story.
Moriyama's admiration for Izusaki's supervision of the performance method did not have too much impact on "MEGALO BOX", he did not pay much attention to the past works, but put more energy into the original theme of the deep digging, and then, the conclusions reached from the discussion with the main creative members were concretely implemented in the works.
This drama accurately creates the same "rough and unruly" (mud stinks) as the original manga and the previous anime, and Moriyama attributes it to the pure fire of the screenwriter's wrist of Mabe Sensei. Here he clarified that this move was not originally out of the consideration of "nostalgia", but the script is based on the main line of excavating the emotions of the characters, and when it is reflected in the image, it somehow becomes "rough", anyway, it is not a tone at all with the current sense of trend, although Moriyama did not think of chasing the new trend.
For those who are accustomed to recent animation production, the way megalo BOX is drawn in the film alone is very impactful, but there are certainly audiences who do not buy it, but even so, Moriyama still wants to bring a variety of painting styles to today's animation fans. It can be seen that the tracing of "MEGALO BOX" has a clear sense of stroke on the paper drawn by the painter during the celluloid animation period, which fully shows the friction between the pen tip and the paper, as well as the contrast between the weight of the pen pressure. Moriyama admits that this is intentional, and it also aggravates the "roughness" of the picture. In addition, the same is true for the drawing of the background, and the supervision is to seek the special texture of "hand-drawn", so it is specially concerned about the background group to highlight it.
From Moriyama's personal resume, it can be seen that the brush stroke technique he values is directly related to the style of painting. In this regard, Moriyama explained that he was influenced by the supervision of Ken Koike, who had previously been involved in the "Lupin III: Tombstone of Daisuke of the Dimension". It is said that Koike supervision can be regarded as a veritable "line control", and the supervision's almost paranoid demands on lines are difficult to express clearly in three words and two words, and it is necessary to write it yourself to understand.
The impression board drawn by Moriyama supervisor himself Image source
In terms of pictures, Moriyama has largely implemented his own ideas, because it is an original work, and the original case is the well-known "Tomorrow's Father", just to claim the original plan, it seems too illusory, therefore, Moriyama has prepared a large number of impression boards from the beginning, as well as character image pictures, just to facilitate the instructions to staff, what kind of work "MEGALO BOX" is, what kind of painting style, and overall direction.
The finished image effect is still quite satisfactory to Moriyama Supervisor, close to his pursuit of the 1990s OVA perception. Moriyama not only wants a "celluloid feeling", but also wants to achieve a visual presentation similar to that reflected by the old-fashioned TV picture tube, and the picture processing also borrows the slightly oozing and blurry picture quality from the early video tapes.
From a practical point of view, it is to make the image slightly rougher, in today's trend of delicate beauty as the mainstream, Moriyama should do the opposite, "dirty" the picture, add "noise" to it, of course, on the basis of working with photographers in advance to develop just the right sense of balance. According to Moriyama, when the magic filter developed for the entire film was added, all the pictures suddenly reached the best state.
In terms of casting, because Moriyama supervisor is not familiar with the process of selecting voice actors, he left the rough selection matters to the sound supervisor Keiichiro Miyoshi to handle. Because, in addition to animation, Miyoshi sensei is usually responsible for the blowing and recording of many overseas translations and productions. It is said that Miyoshi-sensei has produced a detailed "Actor Adaptation Guide" by himself, such as "If a character is filmed as a live-action film, the actor should be enabled", and also cut out various information from film magazines to make detailed reference materials. As a result, Inspector Moriyama also had an exchange with Miyoshi Sensei about "which actor should be found to do the blowing substitute". The supervision found that the casting strategy of the three good teachers was accurate and efficient, so he arranged an on-the-spot audition for the candidates selected by the teacher, and found that each voice actor was very suitable, and in the end, the best of the best was finalized as the current cast.
Audiences who have seen this film should be able to feel the fit of the worldview of music and the work. Did Moriyama supervise whether there was a "fake public welfare for private" when selecting songs? Moriyama confessed that it was half public and half private. On the one hand, Mr. Mabanua's style is in line with his personal preferences, but more importantly, when considering what type of music to choose for the world of MEGALO BOX, the supervisor naturally has hip-hop and black music in mind. Moriyama wanted to use the high degree of synchronization between the picture and the music to trigger the audience's reflexive recall of "MEGALO BOX". Therefore, compared with the folk songs and blues tracks played in the animated version of "Tomorrow's Father", the supervision selected his favorite black music, fortunately, his proposal was approved by the main creative team headed by Makoto Sensei, and everything went smoothly.
When the music sounds in the ears, the "dust feeling" that permeates the play seems to be about to come out, which shows the power contained in Mabanua's music. Moreover, this time it is an original work, to outline an unknown world that no one has a concept of, especially, the near future, the overhead world needs to reserve space to explain the background. However, compared with the stage background and world view, Moriyama wants to use the limited space of "MEGALO BOX" to make a more in-depth portrayal of human nature. Thinking about it, I decided to throw the matter of explaining the worldview to rap to make up for it, so I inserted a rap scene in the main play, which is not perfect, but through the rap that people in the play casually sing, it can more or less highlight the atmosphere of the city. Not pure BGM, but rap to supplement the deficiencies.
So in the minds of the supervisors, what kind of target audience is MEGALO BOX aimed at? Moriyama said that in Japan, "Tomorrow's Father" is a well-known work in Japan, and people who watch the anime have at least heard of its title. The supervision does not deny it, and the production cannot help but take more care of the feelings of the generation that grew up watching "Tomorrow's Father". In addition, if the younger generation who have not yet touched "Tomorrow's Father" has a sense of achievement after watching "MEGALO BOX", they will be curious about "Tomorrow's Father". Although the new and old generations of audiences are divided into two extremes, Moriyama still hopes that the more viewers, the better.
Finally, Moriyama said that he is not very good at telling stories that go with the trend, but from the Internet, he can still receive information from all sides, and he does not buy less books, newspapers and magazines, and Moriyama admits that he enjoys the era when he can freely choose according to his own preferences. In contrast, tv media, although they can't turn on the power supply to see their personal mood, but in general, they still belong to the category of passive choice. However, in case you occasionally catch a glimpse of the "rugged style" of "MEGALO BOX" that you usually do not watch on your own in the variety of animation options, I believe you should be able to experience a different feeling than usual. The world depicted in the partial door type works often exceeds most people's imagination, but it is likely to happen to meet the appetite of the audience. Moriyama would like to provide a new generation of audiences with one more option, and I hope that this film can achieve such a wish for him.
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Original: m.anitama.cn/article/c449aa513c95e667?utm_source=toutiao