Shinichiro Watanabe said he wanted to create
an animated film where "nobody died." Fans who are familiar with his
best-known commercial shows. Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, know
those series had an extensive body count, so you have to take this
director seriously when he speaks of taking a different direction in
the "Baby Blue" segment of Studio 4°C's "Genius Party." "It's not another Bebop,"
Watanabe said. "`Baby Blue is different from my old works, but my
feelings are the same feelings that I created for Bebop or Champloo --
not on the surface but at the bottom of it there are my feelings." The
main difference is that "Baby Blue" is a biographical short film, based
on Watanabe's experiences as a teenager. Something else different about
"Baby Blue," although there are elements of this in other Watanabe
animation, is the sense of "iki," a Japanese philosophy where a
storyteller doesn't reveal everything about his characters or plot. "I
do not like that I express something very obviously or outrageously,"
said Watanabe. "If you need to express ten different things, I do not
express all of those things. I express three out of ten and leave the
rest of it to the imagination of the audience." Think about how some of
the stories and characters in Watanabe's commercial series are left a
mystery which the audience must solve, and you can understand that
storytelling technique.
Watanabe wants to keep busy with his
filmmaking career. He had one live-action project fall apart, but is
working on another live-action film and has a plan for a feature-length
animated film that he will handle through Studio 4°C. Making that
project happen depends on the funding, and Watanabe worries that the
worldwide trend of people downloading anime for free through the
internet has harmed his business. "If you like the work but you don't
buy it because it's free on the internet, the creator doesn't get
paid," Watanabe said. "In the end, there's no money for new work. If
you like anime, you need to invest in the work by paying for it."
Watanabe also doesn't like the idea of internet downloads because many
of them degrade the quality of the image and sound. "When you see it on
the internet on a cheap monitor, you do not see what we get to see --
it's spoiled. When we create a work, we want people to see it on a high
quality DVD with all of the details and sound that we intended."
Shinichiro Watanabe said he wanted to create
an animated film where "nobody died." Fans who are familiar with his
best-known commercial shows. Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, know
those series had an extensive body count, so you have to take this
director seriously when he speaks of taking a different direction in
the "Baby Blue" segment of Studio 4°C's "Genius Party." "It's not another Bebop,"
Watanabe said. "`Baby Blue is different from my old works, but my
feelings are the same feelings that I created for Bebop or Champloo --
not on the surface but at the bottom of it there are my feelings." The
main difference is that "Baby Blue" is a biographical short film, based
on Watanabe's experiences as a teenager. Something else different about
"Baby Blue," although there are elements of this in other Watanabe
animation, is the sense of "iki," a Japanese philosophy where a
storyteller doesn't reveal everything about his characters or plot. "I
do not like that I express something very obviously or outrageously,"
said Watanabe. "If you need to express ten different things, I do not
express all of those things. I express three out of ten and leave the
rest of it to the imagination of the audience." Think about how some of
the stories and characters in Watanabe's commercial series are left a
mystery which the audience must solve, and you can understand that
storytelling technique.
Watanabe wants to keep busy with his
filmmaking career. He had one live-action project fall apart, but is
working on another live-action film and has a plan for a feature-length
animated film that he will handle through Studio 4°C. Making that
project happen depends on the funding, and Watanabe worries that the
worldwide trend of people downloading anime for free through the
internet has harmed his business. "If you like the work but you don't
buy it because it's free on the internet, the creator doesn't get
paid," Watanabe said. "In the end, there's no money for new work. If
you like anime, you need to invest in the work by paying for it."
Watanabe also doesn't like the idea of internet downloads because many
of them degrade the quality of the image and sound. "When you see it on
the internet on a cheap monitor, you do not see what we get to see --
it's spoiled. When we create a work, we want people to see it on a high
quality DVD with all of the details and sound that we intended."
