How big is Madhouse? The anime studio that produced Trigun,
Card Captor Sakura and new fan favorite Chobits needs around 800 people,
working directly for the studio and as contractors, to pump out the movies
and TV series they create. Madhouse producer Masao Maruyama (left) and
character designer Yoshinori Kanemori (right) showed fans a demo reel of
their newest series, and spoke about their projects. "We're working on
three features and we have three features in planning," Maruyama said.
Included in that group are "Tokyo Godfather," by Satoshi Kon, the director
of "Millennium Actress" and "Summer of Andalusia" by Masashi Ando, the
animation director of "Spirited Away." The "Ninja Scroll" TV series and
movie discussed previously at Otakon also are Madhouse projects. Add four
Madhouse TV shows in production (Chobits concluded shortly before Sugoi
Con was held) and you can see the studio has a full plate, despite any
flaws in the Japanese economy. Those projects won't include any more Trigun,
said Maruyama, but they will include "Gungrave," a TV series based on the
video game which has character designs by Yasuhiro Nightow, Trigun's manga
creator.
Madhouse's biggest project in the U.S. in 2002 was "Metropolis," the
movie drawn from the stories of Osamu Tezuka. The film was a labor of love
and homage for Maruyama and director Rintaro, both who worked at Tezuka's
animation studio. "It was like we've been planning Metropolis for the last
30 years," Maruyama said. "We're looking at animating more Tezuka works
although we can't talk about that now." "Metropolis" uses 1920's jazz for
its sound track, but the movie's climactic scene drew on a 1962 tune: "I
Can't Stop Loving You," written by Don Gibson and sung by Ray Charles,
from Charles' album "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music." Why use
a song written by a white man and sung by a black man in a Japanese animated
film? "That's the kind of music the director Rintaro likes," replied Maruyama.
We also literally meant what the lyrics meant when it said "you can't stop
loving," referring to Osamu Tezuka and Tima the character. You can also
consider that it means "you can't stop loving anime."
Anime's vitality comes from the cinematic quality of its
animation, with a point of view that never seems to stand still. However,
anime has come up short in one technical area: it's "shot on threes" with
one frame for every three frames of film, or an effective rate of eight
frames per second. American animation usually has been "shot on twos" or
has a new drawing for each frame of film. "The ideal we live up to is the
Disney style of full animation," said character designer Kanemori,
"but the Japanese style of limited animation came about from the reality
of making TV shows. When you're working on a TV show you don't have the
budget or the time to do full animation. Initially I was sure that the
American audience didn't think our animation was as fluid - I'm hoping
that the more recent TV viewers aren't as offended by it. When he asked
the Sugoi Con fans what they thought of the limited frame rate, the fans
replied that they didn't mind.
