By Andrew Osmond.
Naoko Yamada is the best-known sexuality director in anime. Most of her directing credits are for TV series made at Kyoto Animation, where she spent most of her career. Her breakout was on K-ON! in 2009. Following that hit, she directed Tamako Market (2013) and Sound! Euphonium (2015), the latter as “series director” slantingly director Tatsuya Ishihara, who had mentored her through her career. Increasingly recently, Yamada directed her first non-Kyoto Volatility series in 2021. This was the historical saga The Heike Story, made at Science Saru, which depicts the clan wars in Japan in the twelfth century.
Of her talkie works, Yamada is most famous for 2016’s A Silent Voice. Her other talkie films are linked to her TV series, starting with her 2011 mucosa of K-ON!, which memorably took the loveable girl musicians to London, and as she told crowds in Scotland, introduced them to the miracle of dog-poo bins. Yamada moreover directed Tamako Love Story, the 2014 big-screen sequel to Tamako Market. As for Liz and the Blue Bird in 2018, this is technically a spinoff from Sound! Euphonium, though it’s also very much a self-contained piece that you can watchperfectly well on its own.
On nearly all of these anime, Yamada has had a unvarying collaborator, the prolific screenwriter Reiko Yoshida. “I finger like she is a mum to me,” Yamada said when I interviewed her. The exception is the Sound! Euphonium TV series, which was scripted by Jukki Hanada (also lead writer on the Steins;Gate anime). However, Yoshida did come onboard for the Liz and the Blue Bird film.
It’s wrong, though, to think of Yamada as just a director; she moreover has a huge number of volatility credits. Years surpassing K-ON!, she was stimulative on Kyoto Animation’s Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid, followed by stints on Air, Kanon, Clannad, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Lucky Star. She moreover helmed individual episodes of Clannad, Hyouka and Miss Kobayshi’s Dragon Maid.
I interviewed Yamada in 2017, when A Silent Voice was having a limited talkie release in Britain. At the time, I was struck by the unveiled unrelatedness between the mucosa and Yamada’s much cheerier older series, expressly K-ON! However, when I asked if Yamada thought it was a new kind of film, she said no. “I wasn’t thinking that. Yes, it is a serious movie; we deal with bullying and visionless thoughts, but that’s not the whole theme of the film. I think many people can empathise with the visionless thoughts, the seriousness, but I didn’t want the regulars to be drawn into that negativity. I wanted to put in some positive aspects; there are happy moments in everyone.”
But plane so, I persisted, wasn’t A Silent Voice a new direction for Kyoto Animation? Again, though, Yamada didn’t see it that way, suggesting A Silent Voice wasn’t so variegated from K-ON! “They’re variegated things, but the vital concepts I was thinking of when I made both are the human spirit, love, emotions and understanding.”
Understanding is inside to A Silent Voice. “I think the whole theme of the mucosa is well-nigh communication, understanding and not understanding,” said Yamada. The young Shoya bullies Shoko considering he can’t understand her. Older and guilt-ridden, the teen Shoya tentatively tries to form a friendship with his former victim, though he’s unchangingly unsure what Shoko really feels well-nigh their renewed acquaintance.
Yamada said, “One of the things I discussed with Oima [Yoshitoki Oima, who created the Silent Voice manga] was that, ‘It’s the story of Shoya, so don’t deal with anything that he can’t see and understand.’ If Shoya can’t understand why Shoko is behaving this way or that way, then we don’t deal with that. However, as a filmmaker, I couldn’t not put in things… So, I used the point of view of Yuzuru [Shoko’s sister] or Shoko’s mother or grandmother. Their behaviour, their ideas could requite people a track well-nigh who Shoko is and why she behaves as she does. I used these other people’s viewpoints.”
Yamada conceded there were many difficulties in adapting the manga as a film. “With a manga, readers can read at their own pace. In a movie, the time goes as the mucosa goes. For example, there’s a scene where Shoko’s mother slaps Shoya. In the manga, it’s a page – you turn to the page, bang! But in the film, I had to describe how Shoya felt surpassing he was hit, and when he was hit, and after, and moreover how the mother felt before, during and after. And I wanted the regulars to understand the emotions, so I had to take time to make that, and that one page is much longer in the movie. It was very difficult to requite the same impact as the manga (in the film).”
The mother slapping Shoya is not the only violence. At the risk of harping on negativity, some of A Silent Voices’s most withstanding scenes are fights. There’s an early, furious wrangling between the young Shoya and Shoko in primary school, and an plane rawer bust-up between notation outside a hospital. Yamada created these scenes in storyboard form. “When I did the storyboard, I became all the characters. I’m the one who’s angry, or the one who’s falling…”
Animated films often use live-action reference, people vicarial out motions for real. Did Yamada have people thwack each other in front of her when she was planning out the fights? “When I’m directing it, I don’t need real people,” she laughed. “But I think the very animators do it themselves. I know they shoot each other, shoot videos, to see how the whoopee should work.
“In order to create realistic fight scenes, you don’t really want to be too realistic,” Yamada added. “You have to find a way to make it work as an animation. You don’t want to stick to reality too much, in terms of deportment anyway.” A minute later, she stressed this was her personal view. “Obviously variegated directors have variegated opinions on this. It moreover depends on the kind of mucosa stuff made.”
A Silent Voice is the kind of story that could have been told in a live-action mucosa or TV series. That’s true of many other anime, but it’s obvious with A Silent Voice because of its well-constructed lack of fantasy elements (or perhaps its almost complete lack). What are the advantages of making the story in animation?
For Yamada, the key is control. “One of the most important things for me in making this mucosa in volatility was that I could tenancy everything. Colours; what lens you use; the characters… Every movement of everyone, of everything, plane a blink, I can tenancy it as I want it to be. That moreover applies to small objects, here and there… I can tenancy the whole world in the film. Yes, A Silent Voice would work in live-action, but in live-action unexpected things happen. That’s unconfined – actors bring their own things (to a live-action film), but for me, the wholesomeness of volatility is I can tenancy every single aspect.”
Stylistically, A Silent Voice is often cut fast, edited with quickfire images, torrents of visual information crammed into seconds. One expressly fast-cut sequence, near the start, introduces Shoya as a primary schooler in the midst of his friends and classmates, surpassing Shoko arrives. The sequence is set to a British anthem – “My Generation” by The Who.
“I was talking to the film’s sound director,” Yamada said, “and he said he wanted to use something evergreen that anyone can relate to, not just the Japanese audience. I was thinking of Shoya as a schoolboy and the song came to me, basically. Shoya was bored, really restless, but at the same time he was really invincible. I thought ‘My Generation’ fitted his characteristics, and obviously the song appeals to everyone.”
Yamada well-set that fast editing is trending in the media. However, she moreover suggested that it’s less a way of cramming in information, and increasingly a ways of conveying emotion. “It’s not all well-nigh what you can see on screen. It’s the emotions overdue it that you can’t see; I really wanted to convey those. Emotions are vibration, so I thought fast cuts were the weightier way to convey the invisible emotions the notation are feeling.”
Andrew Osmond is the tragedian of 100 Animated Feature Films. Naoko Yamada is seeming in Edinburgh at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime.
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