Testing the hue of Naoyoshi Shiotani

Written by A. H. on 04 Nov 2016

At October 2016's MCM London Comic Con, we sat down with Psycho-Pass director Naoyoshi Shiotani to talk about his career and experiences.

While the current apple of Mr. Shiontani's eye might be a dark and pessimistic take on society for the most part, the demeanour of the director himself couldn't be much more different - upbeat, passionate and thoughtful throughout, he proved to be an engaging and entertaining subject for our questions.

Read on as we follow his career from his earliest anime memories through to work on FLCL and Ghost in the Shell all the way through to Psycho-Pass itself.

UK Anime: First of all, welcome back to the UK and thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us!

Naoyoshi Shiotani: You're welcome, I'm looking forward to it.

Let's start right at the beginning - what's your earliest memory of watching anime?

I think if we're talking about when I was very, very small, it would have been watching Snoopy when I was about four!

Is there any particular moment that stands out as one that made you think "I want to work in anime"?

I loved drawing as a child, and when it came to thinking about what I was going to do for a job I thought about being a manga artist or designing games. But, as I watched a lot of Studio Ghibli's work and the work of Hayao Miyazaki, I enjoyed watching them and I gradually started thinking "maybe I could make these". I think that's why I wanted to work in anime.

How and where did you get your start in the anime industry?

After I graduated from animation school, I started working for Production I.G. and that's where it started. When I joined as an animator I started off working on things like FLCL, Blood and Ghost in the Shell 2.

Was FLCL the first project you worked on as an animator, and do you have any specific memories of what it was like working on that first project?

Yes that was the first, in my first year. It had me in tears! I'll never forget it, it was my first anime and I just ended up having to draw the same thing over and over again - there were so many retakes and it was so demanding. If I drew ten pictures, all ten of them would come back to be done again!

There's one thing I really remember, and that's that there were just a couple of cuts that Hideaki Anno, the Evangelion director, drew - he drew the key animation for those cuts. It was a scene with the earth exploding, and I did the in-betweens for that - I really remember that.

As an animator, did you have anything that you'd say you specialised in, or perhaps something you particular enjoy animating?

I liked action - real action, and I preferred sword fights to guns. That's why it was great for me to work on Blood, with the girls with the swords!

Even from those early days, was moving into working as a director always your ultimate goal, or did that come later?

At first I only wanted to be an animator or character designer - I liked drawing buildings and backgrounds as well. But it was other people who said to me "why don't you try directing?" There was a producer around the same age as me who said that I wasn't bad at drawing, but maybe I'd be better suited to directing as I always came up with ideas and suggestions for the story.

What lessons do you feel you learned while working as an animator that helped you when it came to stepping up to directorial work?

Everything really - everything I do now is based upon what I've done in the past. I'm the kind of director who corrects the pictures that animators hand into me - not in great detail, but that's something that I learned as an animator. Just from having worked on previous I.G. productions and having experienced them and the tone of those productions, that all feeds into my work now.

What did you initially find was the hardest part of making the move into directing?

This actually goes back to your previous questions I think. I'd always wanted to draw and to animate for myself, but as a director you can't always do that - sometimes you can get more involved than others, but you need to work with everyone; to delegate and leave certain things to other people. Sometimes I wish that I could do certain cuts of animation myself, but you need to learn to be able to let other people do things. That's a nice problem to have though.