With this film, the “Macross F” project has reached a stage where you can stop to catch your breath. Until now, how long have you been involved in this project?
It started as a project for the “25th Anniversary of Macross”, and it was 2006 when we had a tangible project. But if we’re talking about plot ideas, I’ve been working on it since “Macross Zero”. We’d originally planned for the series to start in October 2007, but with all the work [that we had], it kept being postponed. We managed to barely make it for the 25th anniversary by broadcasting the Deculture Edition in December 2007. Thinking about it in this way, I guess I’ve been working on it for five years now.
Are there any differences between what you originally planned and the series that aired on TV in 2008?
The outline has largely remained the same, but in the original plan, Michel’s death occurred in the first half of the series – we made organizational changes like that. What was important about this series, “Macross F”, was the notion of “a school-based story with double heroines”, which we’d never done before. Yoshino Hiroyuki, who was responsible for Series Composition, used to be a school teacher, so ‘school-based stories’ are his specialty. On the music front, building on the past and present, we decided to make one an already established star, the Galactic Fairy, with the other a new girl being promoted.
At that stage, had you confirmed that Kanno Youko would be doing the music?
At first, we’d just talked about the possibility of her writing a few songs for us. I never thought she’d end up being this intertwined and writing such [wonderfully fitting] music for us. Certainly, [we’ve been happily blessed with her ability to write songs worthy of the star divas of the galaxy].
Had there been plans for the movies when you were planning the TV series?
Since it’s set in space, I’ve always thought that I wanted to bring it to the big screen. However, once it started on TV, [that possibility disappeared into the background]. I thought I’d better concentrate on the TV series first.
With each Macross series, you’ve ambitiously brought in CG here and there, but now, with “Macross Frontier”, you’ve boldly used full CG for the battle scenes, haven’t you?
Since the time of “Macross Zero”, it’s been possible to use something known as ‘
Toon Shading’. However, in order to differentiate it from other CG works at the time, I ended up asking Tenjin (Hidetaka) to add texture. With hand-drawn texture, they don’t look like film or photography, nor do they look like CEL-based animation. We produced graphics that looked like ‘package art’. From a technical perspective, it’s easier to gloss over and hide things with CEL-work. I ventured to set the following challenge: [that if we can manipulate this hybrid CG to make it fly, then we can depict dogfights even with the time restrictions of a TV series, and some of the OVA was produced in that way]. Following that, in “Genesis of Aquarion”, some of the actions of the man-made robot ‘Kerenmi’ were made with CG. We spent many long years preparing to be able to realise another Macross TV series.
And that’s why “Macross Frontier” is the first TV series in 13 years.
Technology has also advanced, and the staff have also been honing their skills, so I felt that it would be unsatisfactory if we didn’t just make something better than “Do You Remember Love?” or “Macross Zero”. As a result, the staff gave it their all, and with “Macross F”, we managed to produce [a series with CG that you would never have expected for TV].