On January 27 (Sun), February 9 (Sat) and 10 (Sun), the event “Anime Studio Meeting (Anista)” was held with WIT STUDIO as the main sponsor and studios CloverWorks, MAPPA and CoMix Wave Films as the guest companies. On the final day, February 10, various talk events were held at the two venues, Akihabara Entas, and Belsalle Akihabara, entitled as Meeting Day.
One of the events, “Zombie Land Saga” staff talk, studio MAPPA‘s CEO and producer Manabu Otsuka, Cygames producer Nobuhiro Takenaka, the director Munehisa Sakai, series composer and screenwriter Shigeru Murakoshi and the character designer Kasumi Fukagawa were on stage, WIT studio’s producer and managing director of the event George Wada was the moderator for the talk.
The first theme was “The secret planning of the project”
Originally this project started from when Takenaka-san consulted Otsuka-san with the idea: “I want to do a show with idol zombies”. The first title that was decided at the time “Idol Zombie”. After those two decided the general direction of the story, it was Sakai-san that presented the next step for the project to Otsuka-san. “I got to know Sakai-san as a director who has been on long series so far, and I wanted to ask him this task to direct my first original work,” said Otsuka-san. Sakai-san, on the other hand, said, “I thought it was a very interesting project, and I wanted to hear more from it very soon.”
In addition, it was decided that Fukagawa-san would participate at an early stage by Sakai-san, but it took time until Murakoshi-san joined. Takenaka-san commented, “Because it was a plan that was originally shaped at a meeting to take some drinks, it was possible to share it with everyone, but it wasn’t done that properly”. Murakoshi-san looked back on that time and said, “The first title I heard for the story was [Zombie Land Saga], then it returned to [Idol Zombie] and finally settle with [Zombie Land Saga]”. (laughs)
The title was changed around because we were trying to set Saga prefecture as the location. It is said that the staff also visited Saga many times for location, Takenaka-san said, “Our president was also involved in the localization process. The most difficult thing was when I went to Mount Kinryu, (laughs) that was a fairly harsh climbing experience. It is a really deep mountain.” However, that made the drive-in tori scene possible and those western-style buildings actually helped, commented Sakai-san who accompanied him.
Next, when we moved to the next talk theme “What if you made a sequel?”, Murakoshi-san appealed to drawing “I want to draw for fun every day, for example, how far can I go in a balloon?” (laughs). Fukagawa-san also said, “This time we basically work in 3D, so I everyone would have the same costume form, so I would like to put some more variations on the costume if there’s a sequel,” said the designer with hope.
Meanwhile, the event had a Q&A session with the present visitors. When a question about the characters flew from the audience, saying that he was a big fan of Fukagawa’s drawings, Fukagawa-san said, “The characters were almost completed when it were sent out for the draft. It is a work that I thought once again that I should think carefully about what to draw.” Also, there was a scene in which Takenaka-san answered with a “lucky” to the difficult question “What is the condition for making animation hit?”
In this way, the talk event which was lasting for a 1 hour was close to its end, it ended with the staff thanking all the visitors who came. It was a fulfilling session where the fans were able to hear almost everything they wanted to know, and the crowd was full of satisfaction with the event.
Kakegurui talk on page 2. 👇
Pages: 1 2