12 minute read
FLOATING AWAY
Writer-director Hiroyasu Ishida’s acclaimed feature Drifting Home celebrates the strange magic of everyday life.
- By Charles Solomon -
“W e tear down buildings and construct new ones at a very rapid pace in Japan, so there are many children who’ve had to leave the houses in which they were brought up,” says writer-director Hiroyasu Ishida. “I have a similar nostalgia for the house in which I was born. I think many people can understand what these characters are going through.” Drifting Home, which premiered on Netflix last month, centers on a search for a vanished home and the memories it embodies. Ishida came to international attention in 2018 with Penguin Highway, a charming fantasy-adventure based on the novel by Tomihiko Morimi. Drifting Home is an original work created by Ishida with co-writer Hayashi Mori. The director discussed his new feature in an interview conducted via email.
Heart of the Tale
Ishida discovered that creating a story was a very different process from adapting an already existing property. “The most challenging aspect of creating everything from scratch was trying to figure out the core of the story and the emotional core of the characters,” he explains. “Those elements are already present in a novel, so it’s just a matter of bringing them into the screenplay. But working from zero was really a process of asking myself, ‘What do I want to tell in this story?’” The idea for the film came from a vision Ishida had of an apartment building floating in the sea. He and Mori began to develop a story through a creative give-and-take. “Morisan would give me a few very interesting ideas that I would mull over and integrate into the story, like having the children use a Ferris wheel to pull the apartment building when it was about to sink or just the names of the secondary characters,” he adds.
Kosuke (voiced by Mutsumi Tamura) and Natsume (Asami Seto), who just completed sixth grade, have been friends since they were small. After her parents’ divorce, Natsume spent almost all her time in Kosuke’s home, rather than stay with her flighty mother. Kosuke and a group of friends sneak into the abandoned apartment complex where he, Natsume and his beloved grandfather Yasuji (Bin Shimada) once lived. Already slated for demolition, the building is rumored to be haunted. Just who is the mysterious boy Noppo (Ayumu Murase) people see there? “The kind of a residential complex we call a danchi is particular to a certain era in Japan and might feel very foreign to American audiences,” he cautions. “But it is only a symbol: You can project things that were very precious to you but no longer exist onto it.”
Despite Ishida’s concern, American anime fans will immediately recognize Kosuke’s danchi as one of the large apartment complexes built during the ‘60s economic boom. Countless anime adventures have taken place in them: The small rooms, long hallways and metal doors feel as familiar as the suburban houses in live-action sitcoms. Until something very strange occurs.
Kosuke and his friends discover the building has somehow begun floating through an empty sea with them as unwilling passengers. Natsume and Kosuke display the determination and resourcefulness that made them leaders of their class soccer team: They raid passing buildings for food and try to steer the apartment house toward shore. But the stress of their predicament brings out buried emo-
- Writer-director Hiroyasu Ishida
WASHED AWAY: A group of sixth graders float out to sea in a haunted apartment complex in Hiroyasu Ishida’s imaginative coming-of-age movie.
tional issues. Natsume blames herself for her parents’ separation; Kosuke’s family provided the only real home she’s ever known. Kosuke quarreled with her when his grandfather was hospitalized — he still feels guilt and anger over the incident.
Aoyama, the hero of Penguin Highway, was an extremely precocious aspiring scientist; Kosuke is a more everyday kid. Smart, but not brilliant; sensible and good-natured, but with a bit of a temper. Ishida comments, “In the novel Penguin Highway, Aoyama is depicted as an exceptional boy. In Drifting Home, I wanted to draw a contrast with Aoyama: I wanted a normal boy who reminds us adults of what it was like to be in grade school. Kosuke is just a regular boy you can empathize with. I really do like the character.”
Like the kids in Penguin Highway, Kosuke, Natsume and their classmates must extricate themselves from a dangerous situation without adult aid. “It makes the story more dramatic if it’s just the children trying to work together to solve their crisis on their own,” Ishida says. “As an adult looking into the story, you can’t help wanting them to figure this out — and wanting them to grow through that process.”
Although very different in tone, Penguin Highway and Drifting Home both suggest the everyday world may be richer — and stranger — than people realize. “Magic might exist just around the corner, if someone takes the trouble to seek it.”
Universal Magic
“The world in Drifting Home is a world grounded in reality, but there is a sense that there might be a magical world very nearby — all we have to do is turn around and look,” Ishida states. “I wanted to bring this sense to the visual design and to the way the story unfolds. A sense that there’s something we haven‘t seen and that if it were there, wouldn’t it be wonderful?”
Penguin Highway was nominated for Best Animation in the 42nd Japan Academy Film Prizes and won The Satoshi Kon Award for Excellence in Animation at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal. When asked about how he hopes international audiences will respond to Drifting Home, Ishida concludes, “When I was creating this story, I had in mind those who are very close to me and, by extension, a Japanese audience. It was very important to me to create a story that was within my territory, something that was very personal to me. But by telling a very personal story, I thought the film could cross cultural and national boundaries to become something universal.” ◆
Drifting Home is currently streaming on Netflix.
Oddball Gods and Monsters
Creator Daisuke Tsutsumi discusses the inspiration and artistry of Tonko House’s ONI: Thunder God’s Tale.
- By Jennifer Wolfe -
ONI: Thunder God’s Tale, the new limited series from Tonko House, the indie studio behind the 2014 Oscar-nominated short The Dam Keeper, is one of the much-anticipated highlights of the fall season. The stop-motion-inspired, CG-animated series features a lush and physically tangible world filled with the oddball gods and monsters of Japanese mythology, where the free-spirited Onari — a brave young girl caught between two worlds divided — is determined to find her unique power that will allow her to protect her peaceful village from the encroaching threat of the gods’ mysterious enemies, the “Oni.”
The four-episode series was created by showrunner and Tonko House co-founder Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi, who grew up on tales of Japanese mythology in his native Japan. It was produced by Sara K. Sampson (Sonder), and executive produced by Tsutsumi alongside Tonko House co-founder Robert Kondo, who also served as production designer, and Tonko’s head of content, Kane Lee (Crow: The Legend, Namoo).
Inspired by a painting Tsutsumi created for an exhibition in Japan, ONI, he says, is his most personal project yet. “The painting I did was of characters from folklore I grew up with in Japan,” he explains. “At the time, there wasn’t much of a story just yet, but I felt like I would love to share my childhood memories and the things I was excited about growing up — the stories that I loved — through my lens, through my perspective. Of course, it was just a painting. Who knew that it would turn into a 150-minute story?”
Fearing the Outsider
While Japanese folklore may have served as inspiration for ONI, the story is completely his own, says Tsutsumi, who was honored in 2021 with the June Foray Award at the 48th Annie Awards. Known as monsters or devils in Japanese mythology, oni are typically portrayed as villains. But these monsters from ancient Japan, he notes, may have actually been outsiders — either foreigners or indigenous communities with people who looked very different from the mainstream Japanese population.
“That concept really inspired me,” he recalls. “I felt like, ‘Yeah, that idea of humans fearing people who are different from themselves, that’s the same today.’ We live in a world where we still are afraid of people who look different or speak different languages or have different cultures.”
Initially conceived as a stop-motion production using puppets, ONI continued to evolve until it became apparent the studio would never be able to complete the series on time using painstaking stop-motion techniques, and it would have to be done in CG.
“One of the reasons why it turned into a CG animation is that the story became much bigger and deeper than when I first started the project,” says Tsutsumi, recounting how once he started working with Japanese anime writer and filmmaker Mari Okada (Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms, Anohana, The Anthem of the Heart, A Whisker Away), the project “turned into something that I was a lot more excited about and a lot more personally connected with.”
No stranger to CG pipelines, the Tonko House co-founders originally met at Pixar, where they both worked as art directors on Monsters University. Building a solid foundation in the studio production system they later carried to their new endeavor, Tsutsumi handled lighting design and character shading on the 2013 BAFTA-winning feature, while Kondo did set design and shading. “We knew how CG animation production works, so we felt like, okay, if this is going to be our big stage, we have to execute it in the best way possible,” Tsutsumi says. “But be-
— Creator/EP Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS:
According to exec producer Dice Tsutsumi, the four-part series ONI: Thunder God’s Tale tells a story that is personal for him and for the creative team involved.
cause we’re very familiar with CG, we also knew how difficult it is to make it look the way we wanted with the limited schedule and budget we had.”
Tonko House had originally partnered with Megalis VFX to handle effects for the stop-motion version of ONI, a relationship that expanded following the decision to move to CG. The Tokyo-based studio, responsible for the overall look of the series, handled the bulk of the CG work, with additional animation provided by CG studios Anima and Marza. With Tsutsumi responsible for character design and Kondo handling production design, the duo employed lighting to convey atmosphere and emotional story beats. “From the beginning, my production designer Robert Kondo’s biggest goal was, can we make it feel warm and touchable, tactile? That’s the keywords we used,” Tsutsumi says.
“Stop motion, which I really enjoy, is so much like live action when it comes to lighting, and we applied those ideas to our CG production,” he continues. “We asked, ‘how can we learn from the stop-motion medium and apply that to a CG so that we can still make it feel tactile, make it feel believable, and use the light to tell the story?’”
Inspired by the work of classic Japanese filmmakers such as Yasujirō Ozu, Tsutsumi took a cinematic approach to crafting ONI. Ozu’s camerawork and pacing “are not necessarily welcome in regular Western filmmaking,” he said, but “Ozu’s sense of quietness, I wanted to bring that in.” Tonko House also employed a feature film pipeline for ONI. “We had a producer, a director, a production designer,” Tsutsumi points out, noting that he functioned more as director rather than the typical showrunner overseeing a writer’s room.
As a character designer, Tsutsumi feels that stories should be through the perspective of characters’ personalities. “Character design is a little bit strange,” he laughs. “I can’t quite ask somebody else to design characters, but I might ask somebody else to make my design better. We had excellent designers, but they had to be my characters.”
Dare to be Different
Tonko House’s trademark “dot eyes,” as Tsutsumi calls them, are a crucial element of his designs, evoking his Japanese heritage in contrast to the large, rounded eyes of many Western animated projects. “I really had to fight for that,” he reveals. “I promised Netflix, ‘Hey, I understand your concern. I assure you, we can convey emotion.’ I know they’re worried about how the dot eyes can convey acting and emotions. I’m like, ‘I can guarantee you, we can do it, but you have to trust us.’ “I’m like, let the audience fill in the gaps. You don’t have to make all the characters look the same,” he says. “It’s very similar to, ‘Hey, Japanese people, your eyes are not the same as Caucasian people’s eyes.’ Animated characters should have a diversity in design. It doesn’t have to be the same.”
Like many independent animation studios, Tonko House has had its struggles, Tsutsumi acknowledges. “It’s a very difficult world. This industry is not very easy for independent studios, but I think our passion of wanting to tell our own stories just kept us going. Despite some of the dark days and difficult times we had, ONI has brought us to the stage we can be most proud of, and hopefully that leads to the next thing. We have many other dreams that we want to pursue, and ONI is the first step towards that. ONI wasn’t easy and we are still struggling to this day, but at least we can share that journey with everybody, hopefully soon, through Netflix.” ◆
