It’s very difficult to cover the career of someone like Yutaka Izubuchi. While he is a brilliant mecha designer, he is also a wonderfully talented artist and also a very capable director. So finally getting the chance to talk with him was fascinating and he had a lot to say.
“I was born in Tokyo. Around the time I was at nursery school, my father was working for Kawasaki Heavy Industries and we lived in the company accommodation. Following that my family moved to Saitama for about a year, maybe less than two years, anyway it was a short period of time. Then we ended up in Yokohama, again in company accommodation. Finally, my parents built a house when I was around 10 or 12, so third or fourth grade of elementary school. So that you could say that I was born in Tokyo but I actually grew up in Yokohama.
“My childhood I suppose was pretty standard from a Japanese standpoint, so nothing particularly different. However, because my father worked for Kawasaki Heavy Industries there was occasionally paperwork involving drawings of ships. This was because he was more involved in the shipbuilding side of things. That meant I used to play around with those drawings but apart from that when we moved to the company accommodation in Tokyo it was around the time Japanese television began to show anime series. Things like Tetsuwan Atom, Tetsujin 28-go and 8 Man. While I didn’t really enjoy Tetsuwan Atom, I loved Tetsujin 28-go and 8 Man and as a small boy, I really enjoyed watching those. In addition, within the company accommodation, there was another boy a year older than I and we used to play together. We were very good friends and his father was one of the first anime fans because as these anime series started to be broadcasted he would capture the images from the television show on a camera. So he basically photographed the scenes from anime like Tetsujin 28-go and 8 Man. In those days there were no such things as reruns or video recording, that meant these episodes would be broadcast once and never really repeated. However, my friend’s father was a big fan and he captured these images on a camera and he kept those photos in an album. Whenever I went to play with my friend, You-chan, I used to look at this anime photo album and I was really envious of my friend’s father because he did something so interesting.
“When it came to 8 Man, in particular, I liked that series because it felt so mature and that I was watching something an adult would enjoy. It wasn’t very comical, it felt very real. I think the original story was done by Jiro Kawata and it was pretty hardcore in terms of the narrative. It was a mixture of crime and suspense as well as science-fiction. I vaguely remember that the story had some bad guy kill a policeman and the memory of the sadness from that loss was transferred into an android, so he was the eighth policeman as it were. I suppose the premise is a bit similar to Robocop actually. Watching that made me feel like I was engaging with something quite grown up and I really enjoyed that. Following that, we ended up in Saitama and when I went to elementary school I was in Yokohama. Around the time I was in the second grade of elementary school, tokusatsu shows were blossoming. With series like Ultra Q, being the first in the Ultra series and the predecessor to Ultraman. I think this might have been aired before my birth but the series was repeated when I was in elementary school, so I watched it then. In the U.S. there were similar shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and I am pretty sure shows like Ultra Q were inspired by those in some way. What was interesting about Ultra Q though was that it featured kaiju and I was totally hooked by those. When Ultra Q evolved into Ultraman it was the peak period for these kinds of shows in Japan and I was completely taken by them. So during elementary school, I was proud to be one of those kinds of people and I was convinced that there was no-one who would beat me in terms of my kaiju related knowledge. I was quite proud to be the most knowledgeable guy about all this basically. So other animation and SFX related things were also booming around this time, so things like Godzilla were really popular too. Talking of Godzilla, that was definitely before my time but when I was a kid it had a big revival. That meant it was on television a lot and because there wasn’t much in terms of Japanese programming during those days, that meant there were a lot of foreign series shown as well. However, there were a lot of Toho tokusatsu shows and I loved those too, especially around the time I was in junior high school. I remember watching those very enthusiastically. This was also around the time of the first Kamen Rider and also stuff like Thunderbirds. Unfortunately, not long after that, probably due to money making reasons, all the tokusatsu shows began to focus on family-oriented and children’s entertainment. The result of that was these series became quite uninteresting and the structure was rather flimsy, with very simple storylines. Thankfully, animation almost took over from tokusatsu because people like Yoshiyuki Tomino, who would later do Mobile Suit Gundam, would produce anime with more complex stories that could hold the attention of an adult. Tomino also directed the anime Umi no Triton and it was quite dramatic, not to mention being visually appealing. In fact, it was by far one of the best animated shows of the period and it was a series that greatly influenced me I think. This was the point where anime began to take over from tokusatsu I think and a few years after this Space Battleship Yamato was shown on television, so the medium really developed and grew a lot around this time. In those days, the designs were also very attractive and tried their best to capture the technical reality as much as possible. Obviously, if you look back now it doesn’t have the detail you can depict in modern productions but back then it was trying to depict reality as the best it could. It was amazing really. This would end up shaping my life choices afterward I think.
“Actually, I think Ultra Q wasn’t a tokusatsu series as such and it was Ultraman that was the first of that type. In addition, while I mentioned Thunderbirds, I was much more of a fan of UFO. I also think the Toho Revival was shown as Toho Champion Matsuri or something like that. So in summary, I was born around the time when I would be most sensitive to the blossoming of Japanese television. I think this was very fortunate because if I hadn’t grown up around that time, I wouldn’t have been sensitive to the big changes occurring around then. It’s not that modern day television isn’t very good, or that young people now are lacking in any way, I am not saying that. I just think I was very lucky to be born at that time and to grow up with these kinds of things being shown on television here.”
From Kaiju To Designing Villainous Mecha
It was here Izubuchi went into more detail about his love of kaiju and how they would go on to influence his work in later life.
“In those days, when kaiju stuff was during its boom years all the kids used to draw them. In that regard, I didn’t really stand out particularly among them all but I was obviously enthusiastic and liked it. As a kid, you often got asked what you wanted to be in the future and I used to answer that with being a tokusatsu director but over time I realized that probably wasn’t all that suitable for me and I abandoned that. However, that shows I had a great deal of adoration for that kind of thing. So in the kaiju related dramas, you would have the main hero and those had the main design but there were always villains that needed to be killed and they had to be obviously numerous as well. That meant you often had a huge variety of villains being made for those kaiju series. So when it came to the budgets of those shows, let’s say with something like Kamen Rider, it would obviously be quite limited. The team would then have to make up for that with new ideas. I think the art for these was done by Akira Takahashi and I respect him a great deal. Same goes for Narita Toru when it came to Ultraman. In short, I really loved the world of imaginary creatures and I loved them all. However, the need for a wide array of villainous monsters that needed to be slaughtered meant I was more interested in them than the heroes. While most kids loved the heroes, emotionally I felt more of a connection to all the monsters that ended up getting killed. That made me maybe a little different from the rest of the kids at that time. Around the time I was at junior high school, there were the Shocker Kaijin and loved those but I didn’t think designing those would one day become my job. In fact, I thought I would go to university and become some kind of salaryman.
“What changed was when I was in high school, I still liked the visual appeal of tokusatsu and I greatly enjoyed science-fiction as well as fantasy. So much so that I used to buy S-F Magazine. In that magazine, there was a section where I could send in my opinions. It was a bit like a forum. So I applied to become a member and be able to voice my opinion but the result of that was that I got to know various likeminded people. To the extent that once a month I used to meet up with a lot of them in cafes, exchanging various opinions over a few hours or so. I really enjoyed that. However, at high school to like something such as tokusatsu was considered to be a little bit childish. To the extent that you were almost expected to graduate from that kind of thing but I refused. Though the science-fiction side was considered more acceptable because it is an established part of literature I suppose. Yet for tokusatsu, being a fan of that felt like you had no civil rights. That meant I had to keep it as my secret hobby, just for myself. Almost something shameful. Eventually, after meeting with all my S-F Magazine friends, I decided to write to the anime studio Sunrise because they wanted to see people who were interested in the industry and to introduce them to how things like anime were actually made.
“Around that time anime like Raideen, Combattler V and Voltes V were being shown, with anime with mecha becoming quite dramatic. So that was the backdrop to me writing to Sunrise. Also, it is worth pointing out that in those days you had to correspond with people via letters, so one of these people was a creator I admired called Tadao Nagahama and he was working on Voltes V at that time. We meet at one of the cafes and talked for a few hours, so I showed my enthusiasm for all of this. Nagahama-san was one of those guys that were very open-minded to the fans and seemed to enjoy that passion. To the extent that he took onboard some of the opinions from the fans themselves. So as a young kid I liked to feel I was involved and if one of my ideas was taken onboard then that was exciting. That meant I was always very enthused to talk with Nagahama-san about my thoughts and I explained to him that I liked to draw. In fact, I had a lot of drawings in a sort of portfolio I had amassed because I was wondering whether I could make an anime all on my own. So I really wanted to show my work to a professional and get their opinion. In fact, when I met with Nagahama-san I did so with Ryusuke Hikawa, who is now a very well-known anime critic, and I showed them my portfolio. This resulted in me doing various small part-time jobs for Nagahama-san, to the extent that I was asked if I would like to do some designs for anime. This was because in my portfolio I had plenty of baddies. Apparently, they had even asked a manga artist to come up with some villains but they didn’t look all that convincing. Whereas I already had a wealth of ideas on that kind of thing. So they asked me to come up with something for them. The issue was that during this period I was preparing for the entrance exams for university but I said I would do the design work. So I took this part-time work on, never expecting that it would become a full-time job. Along with this work, Sunrise was making Daltanious on the first floor and the ground floor there was Mobile Suit Gundam. So while I was involved on the Daltanious side, I looked on the Gundam production quite enviously because as an enthusiast I knew of Tomino-san and Yasuhiko-san. I really wanted to get involved with that. The following year, the project after Gundam, Trider G7, was starting up and in general, my work at Sunrise became more serious, all while I was trying to do my second year of preparation for university. Eventually, I felt the situation was quite unfair and I spoke with my parents about it, that I probably wouldn’t want to go to university and become a salaryman. In fact, I told them that I wanted to continue more with my design work and they agreed. So I am really grateful to my parents for their understanding of this.”
Working On Gundam And The History Behind Char’s Counterattack
One of the most important and influential series Izubuchi worked on was that of Gundam during Yoshiyuki Tomino’s era. Starting out on Gundam ZZ, he later went on to work on the movie Char’s Counterattack and ended up designing one of the most popular mecha in the series, the RX-93 Nu Gundam. However, the path to how that came about was a complex and winding one, as he explains.
“With Char’s Counterattack, another person was originally dealing with both projects. Specifically, Mamoru Nagano, nicknamed Chris, was working on those. I believe that Tomino-san really wanted to work with Nagano-san on these. However, I think there was a problem on the sponsor side. It’s difficult to be sure, as I wasn’t involved in the project at that stage. Though the comments I heard were that sponsor thought the anime would not be popular with Nagano-san’s designs. He was then taken off the project. As a result, as the production had already started, they had to find a mecha design replacement in a short period of time. I have a vague recollection of some kind of competition and I ended up on the project.
“When it comes to Gundam ZZ, I only really did the enemy or Neo Zeon designs and Makoto Kobayashi did the MSZ-010 ZZ Gundam itself. In addition, the design studio Shindosha was responsible for cleaning up all the designs and making them production ready. So they helped both of us out a lot because without their assistance we simply would not have been able to manage it in such a short period of time.
“Back to Char’s Counterattack, I worked on both the Federation and Neo Zeon mobile suit designs, again we had help on cleaning up the designs on that production too.
“Looking back on it with the memory I have now, I am not sure how short the time was on having to design the mobile suits for Char’s Counterattack. All I do remember is that I had very little time. It felt like I didn’t have a full one month on it but my memory on this is a bit sketchy. It was also the same with Panzer World Galient, which I worked on previously to Char’s Counterattack.
“As for Nagano-san’s original designs, I have never directly seen them but I did ask Kenji Uchida, who was the producer for the movie, to show me the designs but he said “maybe one day” and then never did.
“While I had very little time on Char’s Counterattack to design the mobile suits, if I had had more time I would have probably overthought the designs and they probably would have turned out differently or not as good. It was almost like an adrenaline rush to get it all done. With Gundam ZZ, I was told that the series was finishing up and I started work on another project, somehow the series ended up continuing on and because of that my project was ditched. I was very angry about that but I channeled that anger into the remaining mobile suit designs I had to do, which resulted in another burst of work.
“When it comes to Beltorchika’s Children, that is fundamentally the same story as Char’s Counterattack but just told from another worldview. Like a parallel world even. So in the novel version, the storyline is basically the same but the characters are a bit different. For instance, Amuro’s girlfriend is called Chan in Char’s Counterattack but in the novel, it is Beltorchika, who was from Zeta Gundam. I obviously did the mobile suit designs for this novel version too. With the Nightingale and Sazabi, because the names were different I felt I had to produce different designs for each, as I felt they shouldn’t be identical machines. However, for the Sazabi in Char’s Counterattack, I did see something of Nagano-san’s original design, though not directly but in Tomino-san’s storyboards. I didn’t refer to that at all in my own designs though. I think the original name for the Sazabi was something like Zanac but due to trademark rights, they couldn’t use that name. That meant it had to be changed to something else, so they picked Sazabi. That said, there was already an apparel company called Sazabi and I joked that this would probably be a bigger issue. In the original Mobile Suit Gundam there is a mobile armor called the Elmeth, but when they did the first gunpla kits of that they couldn’t just use that name on its own. So this was all to do with naming and trademark rights.
“In terms of timing, I designed the Sazabi first. The reason for this was because I had to finish all my work before the animation production commenced. Whereas all the novels were done to coincide with the film release, so those designs, like the Nightingale and Hi-Nu Gundam, were done much later. For the novel versions of Char’s Counterattack, there are two; High Streamer and Beltorchika’s Children. These were focused on getting released around the time of the film. High Streamer was serialized in Animage and involved Yukinobu Hoshino, so all the mobile suits from the Animage version were done by him.”
“When it came to Gundam 0080, Uchida-san was the producer again and he brought me the proposal early on. I was involved from the beginning. So it wasn’t like I was some kind of pinch replacement, there was time. In addition, I was asked to supervise the overall design direction. However, the big challenge here was that we had to do one episode per month. Nowadays, because quality has to be good we tend to do one episode in a few months. Although they wanted to maintain a degree of quality the schedule was pretty tight.
“With Gundam ZZ I felt that the mecha had too many details, too ornate as it were. As a result, I wanted to simplify my designs more but I couldn’t simplify things to the extent of the original Mobile Suit Gundam because that would conflict with the timeline. So I had this idea of “simple beauty” when I worked on Gundam 0080. However, it was quite hard to do because it was almost like trying to approach like my first work on Gundam in my head but at the same time, I couldn’t go that far. So that was tough. In Mobile Suit Gundam, the mecha were thought to be quite realistic at the time, even though there was still this hero element to the designs. It was intended for kids, up to a degree. These days, with super robots or completely imaginary hero type mecha, you have to strike somewhere in the middle. It’s not really science fiction as it were, so something that couldn’t quite exist. I was thinking about all of that when trying to achieve something that felt right.”
Aura Battler Dunbine And The Influence Of British Fantasy Art
Along with Izubuchi’s work on more industrial type mecha designs, he is also renowned for his more fantasy type designs. I was very curious about his inspirations here, as I have often thought his fantasy illustration work had a touch of art nouveau about it but it turns out the real influence is far more interesting.
“For me, the mecha in Dunbine are inspired by insects with hard shells. So the story setting was done by Kazutaka Miyatake of Studio Nue, who was a huge influence on me. Anyway, I wanted to help him plan it out but by the time I joined the concept was already done. However, Miyatake had to step down and work on another project, Orguss I think, so I was called in later on. I took the work on but the main concept for the mecha had already been planned out, so it was easier to make the designs work. In that, it was a hard shell machine with hybrid features, so I just intended to work around Miyatake’s concept but both Tomino and Kogawa thought differently. That meant I didn’t necessarily have to follow the plan laid out by Miyatake. This put me in a difficult position. So I followed Miyatake’s ideas through in some ways, as in the insect type designs, and I adopted that into the fantasy warrior approach. In that way, I suppose the mecha in Dunbine are a bit “monstrous”.
“It was clear from the beginning that insect wings would feature quite prominently in Miyatake’s designs. In addition, the way the lines would be used in designing was a big thing. All the designs used this black lining. So these elements I followed through on. I felt I was good at this type of design, so it wasn’t difficult.
“However, in my head, the design approach for kaiju and mecha are completely different. In that sense, it is not difficult to work on kaiju and mecha design project simultaneously. That said, if I had to work on something like Dunbine and Galient at the same time, then that would have been a challenge. This is because the design approaches would be pulled to each other. With differentiation between the two types being an issue.
“So with Patlabor and Char’s Counterattack, those were both industrial mecha type designs. Working on these together was quite hard to separate them out.
“I felt that with the Galient designs, at the beginning it was meant to be something different and that project was ditched. Based on what was left over, we had to re-adopt it into Galient. So again it was quite a hard timeline. Kunio Okawara was working on the fantasy side of things for this canceled project and the fantasy element is what we kept for Galient. There was also a rough design by Mitsuki Nakamura, that then had to be re-arranged to fit into what Galient would be. So it didn’t become the huge fantasy armor it was intended to be but instead was more robotic but also not quite that either. This made it hard to make the designs work and structure them properly.
“That said, I felt that the Crest of Iron OVA was some of the best work I had done while having to work within a set timeframe. Incorporating armor elements and organic related elements together.
“When it comes to the art nouveau approach, my designs aren’t influenced by this. However, when I do some kind of package illustration I do use that technique from that era. This is because anime has to move, so you can’t really have that ornate type of lining. So in order to strengthen the fantasy element for the illustration, I adopted some of the art nouveau style. If I am honest, for me these are not really art nouveau. In fact, it’s more openly inspired by the work of two British artists, namely Brian Froud and Alan Lee. Their designs influenced creature design and they did the drawings for The Lord of the Rings series and also The Dark Crystal. What’s more, Froud and Lee co-authored a book called Faeries. The Japanese version of that book was translated and published by Sanrio and I read it when I was at junior high school, or maybe even high school. That was a big influence and I thought this approach would be the ultimate one to take with anything fantasy related creature or that kind of general depiction.
“So with the aura battler designs, to emphasize the fantasy elements for the laserdisc jackets for Dunbine I did use something like art nouveau but other than that it is definitely more Froud and Lee there.”
On RahXephon And Sitting In The Director’s Chair
Despite Izubuchi’s impressive array of credits, he came to the director’s chair quite late. That said, what became of that was the amazing anime RahXephon but like with all things, how that came about wasn’t all that straightforward.
“The beginning of RahXephon was down to Masahiko Minami at Bones. He is from Sunrise originally but he wanted to set up Bones. We were longtime drink buddies but we had never really worked together. So as Minami was setting up his studio, he suggested that we should together on something. Minami also suggested I should direct and not just do the designs. This was a big thing for me because I had never directed anything at that point and I had heard from all my other friends, including Shoji Kawamori, that anime direction is pretty hard work. Someone like Kawamori started out directing at the tender age of 23 and at that time I was around 40. So I was worried whether I was up to it or not. However, to make a film or work as a designer they both have something in common; which is to create the worldview. So to create a world that doesn’t exist. From a design standpoint, I was creating mecha that don’t speak but somehow dominate that kind of fantasy world. That made me think “Hmmm, maybe I can do this?”. It’s also quite natural for a designer to want to create that kind of world under their own direction. Not everyone admittedly, but clearly Kawamori did, Aramaki as well. I also felt that if at the age of 40 that I didn’t do this, I probably never would. So that was when I started to work on a new original project with Minami.
“We both agreed that it would be a mecha related project because Sunrise has always done this kind of anime, not to mention that this was also Minami’s background and mine as well. As for Raideen, I really liked Raideen right from the beginning and although Tomino got involved in the earlier part of Raideen’s direction I even said to Tomino directly that he should make something like Raideen again. So I really loved that show. From that, I felt I should do my own Raideen and that started the project.
“All of this filmmaking work is about collaborating with other people, it’s never just one person doing that unless you are someone like Hayao Miyazaki. Many people cannot do everything. With that in mind, I started choosing people to work with that I could trust but Minami did say to me that although I would direct, the main protagonist’s mecha had to be also designed by me.
“Around that same time, I also started work on another project with Tomino called Brain Powerd. I was called in around the planning stage and I submitted rough designs at that point. The original idea for the mecha in Brain Powerd were called dolem, which were the enemy mecha, and these had wings on their head. I even submitted the name Xephon but the name on its own was not able to be used because someone else had already registered it. Tomino really liked the name though, so he even wrote to me to tell me that he had checked the registration and that we couldn’t use it, what a shame that was.
“Eventually, what happened with Brain Powerd is that Tomino was still looking for people to work with. Mutsumi Inomata was involved with the Cyber Formula series for Sunrise in terms of the character design, so Tomino went to see her. Asking her with his usual bluntness, asking lots of questions. To the extent that it was meant to overwhelm the other party. His tactic, I know, is to ask something shocking to make things awkward and then get under your skin, to extract the truth and so on and so forth. Inomata found this whole process deeply amusing and she really liked Tomino, so they started to work together.
“However, Inomata and Nagano, also known as Chris, were gamer friends together. The result was that Inomata brought Nagano onboard for Brain Powerd. The result of this was that Nagano insisted that he design all the mecha in the series. I said that if that is the case then okay but so long as I can take back all the designs I did for Brain Powerd and use them on my own project. So with that done, I started to incorporate my Brain Powerd designs into my project.
“The funny thing was that shortly after this and as I was progressing with my project, I checked the name usage and trademark registration for RahXephon. It came up and someone had tried to register “Mobile Something Xephon” and that was Tomino. So he clearly really liked the name. Overall, I think it was a good thing that I didn’t get involved with Brain Powerd.”
The Dream Project Of Remaking Space Battleship Yamato
Following his direction of RahXephon, Izubuchi took the director’s chair again on the reboot of Space Battleship Yamato, that of Yamato 2199. This was a project that Makoto Kobayashi also worked on and it seems that both Kobayashi and Izubuchi have a profound mutual respect for one another.
“For Yamato 2199, Makoto Kobayashi helped me a lot in terms of the art and also the background creation. However, I just had to take on the project because the original Space Battleship Yamato really was a life-changing program when I was young. Without this series, I really wouldn’t be in this industry. I have to say, to be called in for this project was extremely lucky and I felt very honored. This project was in some ways doomed before my involvement, in a sense that the rights negotiations to remake it was extremely difficult. The rights owner was a very strong-willed person full of character, so we just had to wait very patiently. After all that, it finally came around to being re-made. I felt that I just had to take it on but the responsibility was enormous. The original Yamato was an epoch-making program, particularly the first series. However, because it was such a pioneering work in Japan at the time, there were quite a few illogical points that even failed with my teenage mind. In those days, I was having discussions with slightly senior people, you know the big brother type of science fiction fans. They would point out illogical parts of the original Yamato as well, though I would often end up arguing in defense of the series. That with science-fiction there is often some kind of riddle you need to solve and make sense of it. Even with that young mind of mine, there were parts that were completely illogical.
“For instance, the deck where fighters take off and if you check the visuals, the fighters after they fly off it sinks down slightly and then picks up again. That is actually emulating what happens when an airplane flies within our own atmosphere. Whereas in space, it should not happen that way. It should just float and fly straight. That sort of illogical stuff, even though I defended it to my friends, I still wanted to correct it.
“That said, I believe that the purpose of science-fiction is to make an unreal world feel real. That’s what makes science-fiction interesting. So using those illogical aspects to make it logical and the realistic parts made believable, that’s what I wanted to do for Yamato 2199.
“Since my teenage days, for over 30 years, I have been thinking about how I would do it. So I had 30 years worth of mental simulations, it could all be used on this project.
“When it came to the designs, I felt they were still valid. If you brushed it up slightly, then it still fits with what people would expect today. That slightly old-fashioned atmosphere that in itself added some depth to the designs. So for the mecha design, I only felt I had to brush it up a little. For those that already knew the original Yamato they would feel satisfied with the new designs but those newer fans would find the designs still appealing.
“So yes, it was hard but I tried to enjoy the challenge all the way through. The hardest bit probably was the time it took to get the rights. However, once it started I just gathered all the people whose life was changed by the original Yamato and who wanted to work on the project. That meant we were all ready to give our best.
“In terms of the timeframe, again it was hard but everyone was so prepared to give it their all. So yes, I might have given people a very tough time but my understanding was that it really was a once in a lifetime opportunity.
“The common belief was that to be involved with Yamato was somehow tainted because the rights were so complicated. Not to mention that after the first series, many of the ideas were just repeated. It felt routine and deteriorated as a result. That meant after years of deterioration we had to correct that with this remake. That was the challenge, as people might think “Oh, not Yamato again!”, so this type of weariness had to be fought off.
“The industry here is full of people inspired by Yamato and for a second I thought about giving the project to a much younger generation but I felt that at the age of 50, to restart the latter part of my life that this was something I had to do. Almost like a rebirth through rebooting this.
“I told this to Shigeru Morita, who was the scenario writer from Studio Nue, and he was quite reticent to get involved at the beginning because the rights issues were so notoriously difficult. He eventually decided to join in with the idea of restarting by clarifying all the doubts we’d all had over the years.
“This kind of thing is not something you can do when you are busy with other projects. You have to give it your all.
“What was sad about all this, after we’d made all this effort and created something I thought was decent, that Noboru Ishiguro, who had directed the original Yamato, he passed away. I really wanted him to watch this, as he had been involved in the reboot process. So that’s one thing I really regret that didn’t happen.
“There was this blog online run by an amateur that was called Yamato Mechanics. It basically lists and catalogs all the illustrations from Yamato, with all the mechanical design from the Earth side and others, and the guy was living in Okinawa when we came across this. The former designer from Studio Nue, Yasushi Ishizu, knew of this site and he was working on the Gamilas designs. In fact, Ishizu had moved over to games and had decided to come back to anime. Mainly because I thought he was one of the best at design alien baddies. Anyway, Ishizu thought this Yamato Mechanics site was rather amazing and he thought we should involve this guy in the production and now he is a professional artist. I feel quite responsible for what happened to this Yamato Mechanics guy, as he has now left his day job to work on this. So a guy like that can get involved based on his enthusiasm.
“When it came to correcting all the odd and illogical point from the original Yamato series, towards the end of the series Iscandar was meant to help Yamato. So the premise has a sort of ambassador bring the plan to make the engine to enable Yamato to warp. In the original series, a couple of days after delivering the plan the engine is already made. Even in the Yamato setting, this was pretty unrealistic. So I changed this in Yamato 2199, that the plan was delivered beforehand and then the ambassador arrives, with the engine going online three days after that. I made these kinds of adjustments basically.
“Hobby Japan covers plastic models and they were doing the characters and some of the mechanical elements from the series. For this, they did a special and Ryusuke Hikawa, who I mentioned previously, and when he was younger he hosted the Yamato Association and I was a member of that too. I remember applying for a competition hosted by this Yamato Association and HobbyJapan, where I built this model kit. I remembered being interviewed about it and I had my photo taken. I also remember talking about the character Dessler, whose skin was pale orange in the original series despite being one of the bad guys. However, halfway through the series, his skin color changes to blue. I think it originally came about because it would emphasize the alien nature of Dessler but this was a really odd thing to happen. So I was trying to make sense of it in my old interview and providing my own reason why. mainly because he had to go to all these outer territories and appropriating the enemy forces to be part of his own army. I thought the facial color change occurred due to that. In a funny sort of way, I was already thinking about this during high school.”
Making Original Works And The Future
As we came to the end of the interview, Izubuchi summarized his career and his feelings on it but all the while emphasizing the fact he wants to do more original work. For me, I really hope that happens, as I really do feel that Izubuchi has a unique creative mind and the skill of a real artist.
“As a kid, I not only liked anime but also creatures. Recently I also got to work on Kamen Rider the First, which was a reboot. That was a live-action movie and was great to do. So it’s just wonderful that all those things that I loved as a child, all those titles that I admired, even adored, I was able to get involved with them creatively at a later age. I consider this to be extremely lucky. Maybe all that is left is Godzilla and Ultraman. I joked with Hideaki Anno about that and he gave me a small project, which was to design an emblem. While it’s not very visible on screen, that’s something I did in the new Godzilla movie. In my teenage years, it was also good that I was able to work with that many directors. That really helped.
“As a designer, there are currently quite a few people who are at the same sort of age group as me, such as Kawamori, Yamane, Tomino and Oshii. I have been able to work with all those people and that has been extremely fortunate I think.
“With series like Gundam 0080, that was the first anime directed by Fumihiko Takayama and I completely and totally admire him. When it comes to making things, I was very influenced by him. While he hasn’t produced many works, his attitude, his viewpoint, his approach to things, so just be talking to him I really understand and then accept his stance. Currently, I think he is working on some scenarios, writing some scripts. He’s also doing some episodes of the project. I also asked him to direct episode 19 of RahXephon, called Blue Friend. It’s a really sad story but it’s definitely one of the key episodes of the series I think. I really want him to do more films and he did WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3. With a spin-off to that, I would like to invite him to do overall direction but talking of Patlabor, it’s a project that myself and four other people have authorship rights over. I want to expand on this and for Takayama to do another film.
“When it comes to general authorship rights, over the years I have been able to do some original work. So things like RahXephon and Patlabor, though the latter with other people but these were original works. Particularly in the case of Patlabor, I did it as a test case to see if that kind of rights security works. So I was glad that I could present that to my industry, showing that it is possible to retain those kinds of creative rights. I think it is good to have your own original work because as a designer, I am a recipient of the project rather than necessarily the generator of that work. Even as a director, yes RahXephon is my own original work but with Yamato 2199 I was an employed director. Whereas Patlabor is something we did ourselves. I am really satisfied that happened in my career.
“I also managed to do a lot of illustration work during my twenties, one of the projects I was involved in was The Record of Lodoss War and after all this time it is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It has such longevity. When I was involved originally, I thought maybe it would last around ten years or so. Now though, it has already been thirty years. Patlabor is also continuing on as well in a similar way. So I feel fortunate to have worked on things that have endured like this.
“The image of elves in Japan, they really have exaggerated ears. Originally, it was quite subtle but because of the work I did on things like Lodoss, it’s quite over the top. Maybe I have been blamed for that a bit as well.
“Going back to art nouveau, with Lodoss I was conscious of that art style actually. However, the influence of Brian Froud and Alan Lee again is important but in the case of Lodoss, it was also combined with Japanese manga culture I think.
“From now on, I want to challenge myself and make things that will leave a long-lasting impression on people, as well as do more original work in the future.”
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