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 Why
is Death Note so popular? To the leaders of the animated Death Note
series, director Tetsuro Araki (left) and character designer and
animator Masaru Kitao (right), it's because the series is more than
just a horror show. Said Araki, "The biggest thing about Death Note is,
yes, it has elements of horror, but it also has many different kinds of
characters. It isn't confined to one genre, but it overlaps many
genres. Some episodes were comedy, some were horror, some were
intellectual - it brought many different kinds of tastes to Death Note.
Added Kitao, "There's the story, there's the characters and there's the
great balance of different aspects of morality - what's moral and
what's immoral. We've been able to visualize the animation in a unique,
beautiful way that can't be done in live action. Kitao's comment
reflected the fact that the Death Note anime is just one of the
adaptations of the manga created by artist Takeshi Obata and writer
Tsugumi Ohba; there are two live-action movies and a video game. "What
I tried when I created the animation was to recreate the excitement
that I felt when I read the original manga," Araki said. "The animation
has a different expression than the manga, but I wanted to portray the
same kind of excitement as the manga." On his reworking of the manga
art for the animation, Kitao said "I did want to stay true to the
original. Even if I tried to draw something like the originals it came
out different. That's how I work, and I hope the audience takes that
into account when they watch the animation." |
 The
animation's 37 episodes gave Araki the opportunity to carefully pace
the scenes and stories for the best dramatic impact. "Animating Death
Note was very difficult," said Araki. There were many things I tried
when I was working on the project, but some of the approaches were to
make things visually very dramatic - to make gaps between when
something's up or something's down...to have a difference between the
highs and the lows. That's what I focused on. Kitao said it's a mater
of not revealing everything at once, whether it's art or the story.
"Imagine that you're watching a beautiful lady's eyes." Kitao said. "Up
close, you have a difference between having a clear view of her eyes
and having hair over the eyes. Sometimes, people are more interested in
something that is hidden. In animation, that might happen for only a
split second, but it gets audiences interested in what's going on.
Those are the kind of things I watch out for." Death Note's premise,
that you can kill someone by writing their name in a notebook in a
certain way and at certain times, has made it one of the most popular
movie franchises in Japan, and it's also lead to stories about strange
things happening to people associated with the series. Araki downplayed
those stories,saying they were exaggerated, and Kitao said "The mass
media really wanted some cultish or supernatural things to happen, but
it was just humans making stories about a human group of people." |
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