Happy Monday!  Well not so much, but this should cheer you up:  Amos Wong has done it again, scoring a cool interview with Sword of the Stranger Director Masahiro Ando.  Read on for more:

 

Sword of the Stranger marks Masahiro Ando's big screen directorial debut after two decades in the industry, and a CV that includes high profile titles Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (as Key Animator), as well as RahXephon and Fullmetal Alchemist (as Episode Director).

 

 

 

"I consider this movie my 20th anniversary project" Ando says of the samurai actioner. Fittingly, no expense was spared for the occasion. In addition to lavish visuals with a hand-crafted feel, Sword of the Stranger boasts superlative, edge-of-your-seat fight choreography, in a lean yet compelling narrative of a boy fleeing from Chinese warriors and a nameless ronin commissioned to protect him.

 

"Initially it wasn't decided whether it would be a theatrical film, OVA, or TV series," he remarks of the project. Nevertheless, Ando had envisaged an epic production at the outset. "I got the biggest impression when I was growing up with films like Nausicaä and [Urusei Yatsura 2] Beautiful Dreamer," the director explains. "I wanted to try a theatrical feature myself." Luckily everything fell into place, serendipitously yielding another milestone: "due to the work by the producers, it happened to become the first original [studio] BONES feature anime. That came as a result, and not the other way around."

 

Nausicaä and Beautiful Dreamer were also partly responsible for Ando joining the industry. "Looking at anime then, it was right at the time when the directors or creators who are now called ‘the masters' like [Hayao] Miyazaki or [Mamoru] Oshii were doing their first breakthrough projects." Although he also seriously considered a career in film, Ando got the impression that young, new-coming talent had more chance of being recognized sooner in animation. Taking into account Sword of the Stranger's release, however, he quips: "looking back, I was fooled. But I've enjoyed the process."

 

Q: What led to the choice of the chanbara (‘sword fight') genre for studio BONES' original theatrical work?

 

A: I wanted to try something in the chanbara or jidai-geki ('period drama') genre because I felt that as genres, they hadn't been tried very often in anime before. And when there were these kinds of anime, they tended to be projects that combined things like yokai or monsters. I wanted to do a jidai-geki that didn't involve those elements, and felt that with the means and technology available now there's a very good possibility to create something interesting.

 

Q: Besides the action element of the chanbara genre, what are some other elements that you found especially appealing?

 

A: Firstly, it's easy to make a jidai-geki story structure centre on life and death. It's like a Hollywood Western, where the characters are carrying weapons all the time. By that, it's easier to create life and death situations, and tie it into the story and characters. The second thing is about characters in a modern setting: they tend to brood. In a sense they think too much, but with jidai-geki it's easier to present characters in their actions-how they act.

 

Thirdly, I was also fascinated by the sword and sorcery genre. In Hollywood terms it's like The Chronicles of Narnia or The Lord of the Rings. By having a jidai-geki setting, I thought that it would be possible to create an Asian or Japanese version-of course with Stranger it was without the supernatural elements-but still, there aren't many films of this type from Japan other than [Akira] Kurosawa, so that's some of the things that attracted me to the genre.

 

Q: Did you pay homage to some of your favorite chanbara movies?

A: There was indeed quite a lot of thought about being a homage to films that I've seen and loved. So of course there were a lot of jidai-geki and elements that I put into the film.

 

But I also thought a lot about western films like Mad Max 2 or Terminator. There's Sergio Leone's Westerns. I'd think 'what if George Miller or James Cameron made a jidai-geki-how would they direct the action scenes?' I also had a lot in common with scriptwriter [Fumihiko] Takayama in the films that we liked, and in our approach to genre films. Japanese films nowadays tend to be very emotional and over dramatic, but we decided our film should be more objective and not get too sentimental.

 

Q: After creating an action-oriented pilot film that centers on the nameless character, how did you develop the final story and themes with Takayama?

 

A: The initial idea at the time of the pilot was to have a main character with no memory, like the Bourne series. But I realized that this is a strategy that works best if there's a big contrast between the ordinary and not so ordinary-for instance The Long Kiss Goodnight, where a regular housewife [played by Geena Davis] turns out to be a killer. But with a jidai-geki setting it was more difficult to create that contrast because it's already a partly fantasy world to begin with, so we had to ditch the idea.

 

But we did like the moniker 'No Name.' That stuck, and also the part about him being a foreigner. It follows the traditional patterns of Clint Eastwood Westerns, where many of them have nameless characters as the protagonist. In that sense it was following a tradition.

 

One request from a producer came about the plot, which was to not make it into a revenge story. I could understand in this day and age why we shouldn't go that route. [SPOILER AHEAD] One thing was to try to come up with the impetus for the main character. That's how the backstory came about-in the past he had to slay a child, and by saving this child [Kotaro] his own soul is also being saved. With this backstory also comes the setting of having sealed one's sword, and that created an interesting approach to creating action scenes.

 

Q: How did you select Tsunenori Saito for the character designs, and what were some important points you discussed?

 

A: I really wanted the film to have a 'BONES look.' Saito is the new generation of creators that worked under [studio co-founders Toshihiro] Kawamoto or [Hiroshi] Osaka, and has the BONES style ingrained. Plus, he'd worked with me before, and I noticed that his animation and design has a sensuousness to them. Since Stranger won't have any monsters or fantastical elements and would tend to be subdued in terms of design, to have a designer and creator such as Saito who can bring out a sensuousness in character design would be a big asset.

 

A request I made was to have the characters recognizable and stand out even in silhouette, because it's mainly action-centered and each character won't have that much screen time individually. Making them impressionable with just a silhouette or shape was something that I felt was very important. That's why the designs are not strictly realistic in the sense of something like Jin-Roh, but tend to be more like manga designs. Some of the enemy assassins have animal motifs tied in to their names like a monkey, a cow, a dragon, and the samurai character would have a hairstyle with a recognizable shape.

 

Q: Speaking of characters, not a lot is revealed about the antagonist Luo-Lang's past. Did you create a backstory for him for your own reference?

 

A: Actually there wasn't a lot of backstory. There's of course the foreigner angle, and the intention was to make him almost like another No Name; he'd be another side of the character. There is one setting which is indirectly revealed when he catches the sword with his hands: what's implied is that his master was Japanese, and that master taught Luo-Lang the technique. Also, he must have slain his own master afterwards, so he now he comes looking for a worthy opponent in the country where his master came from. But the central point of the character was to make him into a very different entity or presence from those around him, and it was deliberately decided not to make him too tied down by a concrete backstory.

 

He's almost like a symbolic character. It's more suggestive, like the antagonist in The Hitcher [played by Rutger Hauer]. Takayama's idea was to have the character like Robert Shaw in Battle of the Bulge. My idea was of Russell Crowe in Gladiator, but the script has a line that describes him as almost like a cyborg, and that immediately conjures up [Blade Runner's] Roy Batty. When I mentioned that, the color setting person even made his skin color close to that image. Previously it was just blonde and blue eyes. It's another of the homages in the film.

 

Q: The fight scenes are amazing. What are some areas you pay attention to when creating thrilling action animation?

 

A: First of all, going in I knew that the climactic action scene would be handled by the same key animator [Yutaka] Nakamura who did the Cowboy Bebop movie's action scenes. So even from when I was doing the storyboards, I would make them loosely. He would then photograph some of his ideas into a sequence and we would discuss whether certain shots needed to be trimmed, extended, and so forth. What I requested was to make the action very close-to-death for No Name. From the point of view of their skills Luo-Lang was probably better. Plus, No Name had the disadvantage of having to run all the way to the compound.

 

One of the things that I thought was not to make the action overtly spectacular like in Hollywood films, where the explosions are huge and things like that, but rather to correlate the action with the character's emotion. That's how even if it's just a scene of samurai running, it's enough to create some kind of excitement or emotion in the viewer.

 

Another thing was to make the setting as varied as possible in the different fight sequences. The opening fight is one person versus many. Another scene takes place in narrow quarters, and other on horseback. There's in fact no outright sword-to-sword fight until the climax. It builds, like an anticipation for the sword scenes, and this is because compared to live-action, anime sword fights have a disadvantage in that it's difficult to sustain the excitement by just animation. The climactic sword fight is sort of the cathartic moment; it was possible to build up to that moment by setting up the scenes earlier. Another aspect was not just to cut with the sword, but to almost crush or to really push or rip apart with the sword-different kinds of textures in the sword action.

 

Q: Is there is something about the approach that BONES takes to making animation that is unique compared to the other studios you've been involved with?

 

A: I've always felt that there's a sense of 'heat' emanating from each title; there's that very individual texture on seeing BONES' works. I think it comes from how the top staff of each section constantly strives for higher results. For instance, even when as director I thought the result was good enough, the top staff would still try to improve it and make something better. That, and the sense of challenging different or new works, is very much unique to BONES.

 

In other studios I'm certain that this film would not have been green-lit. Doing an original jidai-geki in the theatrical format is itself quite unthinkable, and it's a small miracle that it did get made. BONES is after something that lasts, and isn't too swayed about what's popular now. Even if I was asked to do it again it may not be possible, so I'm very happy to have been able to make a film of this quality.

 

Amos Wong