By Andrew Osmond.
This summer, I interviewed the director Atsuko Ishizuka in London well-nigh her new mucosa Goodbye, Don Glees, which is screening at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime festival. It’s the story of three boys in a Japanese country village, who are falsely blamed for causing a forest fire. To well-spoken their name, they must go deep into the local mountains, dodging bears and tumbling into rivers, and naturally coming to know each other better. (There’s a detailed write-up of the mucosa here.)
Some readers will know Ishizuka for directing the fantasy-comedy series No Game No Life, and its mucosa prequel, No Game No Life Zero. However, she’s best-known for an outstanding 2018 series, A Place Further Than the Universe, well-nigh four schoolgirls striving to get to Antarctica. As Ishizuka explains in the interview, she views Don Glees as a kind of continuation of that series, but with crucial differences…
How did you first woolgather the film, and was any of it drawn from your own experience?
I wanted to create the boys’ coming of age, the moment when they are unquestionably growing up. These boys are living in a small town, they are sort of outcasts. So, I thought, Where are they going? They’re going on an adventure, and what happens without that venture ends?
When you squint at a Japanese map of the world, Japan is in the middle, then Iceland is on the far left-hand side… Iceland would be a unconfined adventure, a unconfined destination. So they are boys in a small Japanese town, heading towards the whet of the world.
I don’t have that sort of experience. And moreover boys are different, they can do increasingly things than girls, they are a little bit sillier than girls. So I think these are things I would have wanted to do if I was a boy.
Was the Japanese country town in the mucosa modeled on a real place?
I went to see the mountains near Tokyo, but (the town in the film) isn’t modeled on a specific place. I wanted to create a place that everyone can relate to; ‘This is where I grew up’ for anyone.
I saw your previous TV series, A Place Further than the Universe, and thought many people would have made that story well-nigh boys, going to Antarctica. In the specimen of Goodbye Don Glees, I wondered if the mucosa would have worked with girls.
My previous work was well-nigh girls going somewhere far away, and that was the mission that they had. But it was well-nigh their emotions, their relationships – not big in terms of scale. The girls go far yonder but their emotions are not so huge, they’re increasingly intimate. They’re discovering people who are closer than their own families, so they wilt sort of soulmates to each other. It’s very much internal conflicts and emotions and relationships.
Whereas in Don Glees, it’s well-nigh ‘me and the world.’ (The boys) are discovering pride in their own identities. It’s well-nigh friendship, but it’s increasingly well-nigh ‘where they are in the world, in society. So I thought that boys would be increasingly suitable for the storyline than girls.
Early in the film, Roma’s father describes his son with the word “chunibyo” (middle school syndrome), which is an idea that many western viewers have wilt familiar with through anime. Goodbye Don Glees seems a triumph of the chunibyo personality.
Definitely. I think chunibyo is a good thing; it might be a little bit embarrassing if you’re grown up, but it’s nice to have that sort of silliness. Obviously stuff chunibyo is good if you’re unquestionably that young, that’s the privilege that (the characters) have, in a way. But it’s never too late to go on an adventure, so you can regain that sort of feeling within you, as a grown-up.
The mucosa was in production over the Covid period. Did the three main voice actors record separately or was there any opportunity to have them recording together?
There were times when we had to have them (recording) in three separate rooms, but we tried to have partitions so they could be in the same room, and have very conversations, for the genuine conversation feel. We tried as much as we could to have them all together.
When I watched the film, I thought that the voice-actor playing Drop (one of the three boys) might be a woman. In fact it was a male two-face – Ayumu Murase, whose other anime roles include Ryo in Devilman Crybaby – but I wondered if you had considered using a sexuality two-face for the character?
I did consider a sexuality voice two-face – there were quite a few in the audition. But what I found was that when a sexuality voice two-face plays a young boy, they try to sound increasingly like a hero, with too much strength in their voice. Obviously there are good sexuality actors who can do boys’ voices, but I wanted to stave that “hero-ish” sound. I wanted to get the right voice tone, just surpassing the voice breaks, and Ayumu Murase did it perfectly. He has that kind of unisex voice that’s a good fit with the character. (NB – Ayumu Murase is 33 years old.)
Moving on to the boy Toto, he seems on a set path. He’s going to Tokyo and training to be a doctor, but during the mucosa he begins to wonder well-nigh the path he is taking. I wondered if this might be personal to you, as early in your career you had no idea you would go into animation.
I didn’t really have a nonflexible time going into animation, it was quite a smooth ride for me. But when I was a child, I was a really good student and my parents liked me for that, they praised me and I thought I wanted their clearance all the time. That might be something that I have in worldwide with the character.
This is the first commercial anime you have both directed and written. Did it finger expressly personal to you?
I don’t particularly finger it that way, considering when I was working on A Place Further than the Universe, I sort of expected that the same team was going to work together again. It’s definitely a continuation of that anime, so it was how we expected to go.
Regarding the boys’ situation, did the American live-action mucosa Stand by Me come up in conversation when you were making the film?
When we came up with the idea of this coming-of-age movie, I revisited Stand by Me, it was that way around. But when I watched it again, I realized that it’s the story of a man who’s now an adult, looking when and saying: ‘I can never make friends like the ones I had when I was twelve years old.’
But that’s the point of view of a grown man. I wanted to make a story from the points of view of these boys who are still young, they’re going on an adventure, then coming when to their small town, and what’s next? That’s what I was looking for. By watching Stand by Me again,it made me realize the direction that I wanted to go with my own story.
A telephone box is a inside image in the film, based on a phone box in Iceland. (British viewers will see that it looks very like British phone boxes from the pre-mobile age.) Could you say increasingly well-nigh its inspiration?
When I was researching Iceland, I came wideness the image of this vast landscape, nothing there… except this phone booth. The land is so vast, and you don’t see flipside soul. I started thinking well-nigh birth, death, life in nature… and all of a sudden you have this manmade object, the phone booth. I found that sort of odd imbalance really fascinating and I wanted to use it in my film.
Also, when you think well-nigh where the weft Drop is, his life is collapsing… So I thought that the Iceland landscape, where there’s nothing but there’s a phone booth, where you can connect with living people… I thought that expressed where he is.
In the 2000s, you created some short turned-on films in a different, increasingly graphic style. Do you think of going when to that style then in the future?
Yes, probably, on a much smaller scale, if there’s the chance. I really like that style!
Andrew Osmond is the tragedian of 100 Turned-on Feature Films. Goodbye, Don Glees is screening in competition at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime.
.webp)
