(L) Denno Coil (TV Series!)

[RebootEDC]

Originally Posted by Cut-Tongue

My wife and myself enjoy the hell out of this show, especially Akira's Mincet. Its so cute!

Question for any Japanese r/w'ers out there: What is the kanji/kata/hiro for 'Boku Satchii!' I want to use it as my user title =)

I don't really know if it's Sacchii or Saacchii, but anyway, it should be written somehow like:
僕サアッチイ、宜しくね!
(boku Sacchii, yoroshiku ne!)

[Cut-Tongue]

Thanks, Reboot, putting it in now =)

[Shiroi Hane]

According to the conte books it is「ボクサッチー」

[RebootEDC]

Hmmm... yeah but, why using katanaka in "boku" when it's japanese?

[wao]

I think that's because

a. In normal Japanese they can use katakana for personal pronouns (is that the word? Stuff like atashi, boku, kimi) - especially for emphasis

b. Satchii's not human and katakana is frequently used to indicate "dead" speaking (robotic voices, sometimes used for sarcasm)

Or well, that's as far as I understand but then I'm not a translator or anything like that.

And it's definitely サッチー, you could find that out even from the official site I think...

[RebootEDC]

That's a great explanation, indeed.

[Shiroi Hane]

Apparently I missed a page.. didn't see RebootEDC's reply when I made mine, sorry.
I checked the source material specifically to check how they we're writing boku.
Here's the pages on Sacchi in the first DVD booklet:
http://picasaweb.google.com/shiroban...60990890009522
http://picasaweb.google.com/shiroban...61154098766834
I've only taken the odd sample shots from the conte booklets and I don't appear to have captured the line in question (if I'd thought I'd've taken a snap when I had the DVDs out earlier)

[flick]

Originally Posted by Onizuka-GTO

this series is indeed interesting, i like the background, the settings, the vision of cyber-technology in an almost realistic (if not exaggerated ) over its effects.


however for some unknown reason, i despise Okonogi-san, the main lead female lead. she really really really really REALLLLY pisses me off.

honestly, if it wasn't for Isako, i would be gritting my teeth in pain. At leased with dragonaut the characters were funny to watch as they flail about in the stupid story.

however the whining, the pleading the...i dunno how to describe it, the helplessness and ignorant innocences of Okonogi really wants me to pick her up, shake her abnout and dash her head against a wall or something.


i just don't understand WHY she makes me so anger. it's irrational. but she does.

so if i have to rate this series it has to be at leases a 7 or 8.

Remove Okonogi-san then it will be a 9, even a 10 i suppose.

Poor Okonogi I do like her (Yuuko) ~~ even if she was a little bit annoying at times, I think her presence really showed how cool some of the other people were as well.

[wao]

So it's been some time since I've been keeping up with Dennou Coil news, but I heard Iso Mitsuo attended a SF seminar in Japan recently to talk about Dennou Coil (more like an interview) and there were some interesting things being said.

All I've read is this one long report by a 2channer who went for the seminar, but damn I wish I could've gone just to hear him actually talk about stuff.

Anyway, here's a very very rough... excuse of a translation of the report - don't take it literally, it's second-hand information processed sloppily so... don't base your opinion on Iso entirely on this!

Spoiler for length - no spoilers for the show:

Is Dennou Coil Science Fiction?
Iso said he'd describe Coil as SF to people who enjoy it as that, but in reality he was a bit mixed about calling it SF - he actually doesn't like talking about whether a particular show can be considered SF or not, for example in middle school he used to wonder "why do people say that" when people argued that Gundam wasn't SF.

Iso feels that because the SF genre is a relative newcomer in literature, it's become rather "hardened up" (?) because of various people staking claims on things and so it's become difficult for newcomers to break in.

He notes that there are some anime that seem to be impenetrable to everyone except the most hardcore of SF otaku (allow me to cough loudly here) but with Coil he wanted to create something easier to get into; something even non-SF fans could easily feel attached to.

He says that works like that were quite common in the early days of SF [from the blog post: Karel Čapek, C.S. Lewis, Kenji Miyazawa], where for example Venus would be all Earth-like and populated with Ve...Venusians?, and that that sort of thing would get ripped to shreds nowadays, but he personally there's no harm in having SF like that too.

People say SF stands for "Science Fiction", or alternatively "Sukoshi Fushigi" (A little mysterious), "Science Fantasy" and so on but he proposes "Science Fetish" - if it can make those who love science pant in excitement, then couldn't it be counted as SF? (Okay, I'm sure he worded it differently when actually talking.)

In the first place, he says, "science" and "fiction" seem to contradict each other - if you take your scientific background research too far it stops being much of "fiction". Iso says when he was designing the guns in the original GitS movie, he was told by a professional in firearms that his designs just wouldn't happen in real life; Iso kinda felt that if it's set in the future it would have to be something that can't be quite done now, but drew a copy of modern existing guns anyway and finally got an OK.


Megane etc
Unsurprisingly Iso had written a LOT of details about the cyberglasses and his plans/designs etc had turned into a thick stack, and he felt it was a pretty good job shortly after having finished it; but after he calmed down and read through it again he felt it wasn't quite something he'd easily show to other people (heh).

The wristband doesn't just transmit the location of the arm but something about muscles (sorry didn't quite get it) including the movement of the fingers, allowing for greater accuracy during typing on the virtual keyboard.

Paint and similar material have got nanomachines mixed in them that allow them to regenerate after being sprayed upon etc, and allow for the reception and transmission of electromagnetic waves. Daichi was able to extract a flake of texture in the goldfish episode where he hit the wall in the border between two spaces because of the nanomachines. Causing bugs through physical force impacts the circuits of the nanomachines attached to the surface (or something like that)

In the original script, Daichi was going to explain about the nanomachines after taking out the texture but it ended up being a lengthy diatribe about 1 minute long so Iso cut it out.

The expansion of cyberspace went like this: home domains -> "on road" domains -> other domains.
Some cyberpets were meant to be for home use only because they were developed when cyberspace was still limited to home domains. In fact, in the original script, when Yasako called the support center in episode 1 there was going to be an explanation that Densuke was meant for home use only and outside use was not covered by the guarantee but you can get a new pet blah blah,... but that also turned into a long piece over 1 minute long, so he axed that bit too.

Augmented Reality research
Since Dennou Coil (if I'm understanding this right) Iso has been receiving many calls from current AR researchers and they've had so much to talk about that sometimes it troubles him a bit.

He says he's an entertainer, not a speculator of the future, so he only talks after making it clear that "I'm only looking at this as someone who creates fiction".

When Iso was making Dennou Coil, his line of thinking was: if he came across something he wanted to happen but knew would run into some contradictions/inconsistencies/hiccups, he'd turn those problems into material for an interesting story - so it feels rather uncomfortable talking to people who deal with these things in real life.

Iso first started conceiving the Dennou Coil project around the time when Windows 2000 was coming out. At that time when he used a strange driver his graphic card would have all sorts of bugs, for example if he moved his mouse fast there seemed to be fragments of the cursor left behind in the path it made on the screen. He imagined them as occurring in space and about how cool it would be if you could actually pick them up.

He also knew that as long as the cyberglasses existed, there would be somebody who'd come and use it in all the wrong ways, and felt that kids would be the first somebodies to do that. He finds the irregularities and bugs that arise from improper use as pretty fascinating.

On expression in anime
Iso feels that portraying humans and imaginary robots are the same in the sense that they are both about "expressing mental images". He made a disclaimer that he'd get the wrong kind of attention by saying that in some ways animation surpasses live-action; but explains that he means it in a way that like girls in your mind look better than the ones out there, mental images tend to go past reality. At one time, he says, anime used to be heading in the direction of reproducing actual (visual?) reality as closely as possible, but he thinks one ought to aim at reproducing the images inside your brain that are better than live-action. [Another report mentions how he does strive for a sense of reality, but not necessarily the kind you find in live-action... how to explain it in words, urgh]

Once when he was animating he was asked by Hiroyuki Kitakubo something like "What lens (angle) are you doing that in? A wide-angle lens? Telescopic?", but Iso says (going out on a limb) his answer would be "the anatomical lens". Actually it was an image of his imagination altered inside his brain.

Furthermore, writing scripts is the same to him in the sense of considering how to express scenes in the mind, and feels he's using the same part of the brain (as drawing) when doing it. [The other report mentions something about how Iso said he doesn't feel like he compartmentalizes his brain; he uses the same areas when drawing things from missile trajectories to tree branches - he mentioned this to Yasushi Muraki who said he didn't get it]

During Coil he was told by Oshiyama* "Couldn't you please return to being an animator and draw new effects", to which he replied "This (the script) is my new effect".

*(Kiyotaka Oshiyama, key animation for most eps, AD on 5 [debut AD], 13, 19, 22, 24)

The future of Science Fiction
Iso says that it does feel a bit as if SF has possibly gone past its prime, but if one considers SF as a "Science Fetish" then when SF was most active it wasn't the golden years but the... um... "mating season".

It might be in a low point right now but he thinks it'll come back to life again.

The next instalment of Iso?
Something like "he has a project/pitch but he can't talk about it yet".

Wow! Fastest translation I've ever done for anything this length -_-

EDIT: Additional stuff from a blog post, forgive me if I've missed out anything, my eyes will die if I read any more for today. It is much more detailed but focuses mainly on the SF stuff, not Coil: ttp://d.hatena.ne.jp/lain06/20080504 Again, really rough.

Spoiler for length:

Dennou Coil originally started off as fragments of various things, like a real counterpart to magical girl stories, a girl version of (Gegege no) Kitaro, etc... The cyber part of it all wasn't actually the fundamental idea - technology and AR wasn't the premise of the story. During the planning stage cyberglasses were described as "spectacles that can see specters" (specter-cles? ) The kids would use the tools without any particular reason, finding fun in discovering alternative ways of using them while playing pranks. There would be digital beings in unsynchronized gaps and only kids could access those spaces. Iso himself dealt with the actual script-writing and fine-tuning of this part of the story (or something like that; recall that he was sole scriptwriter for the first half of the show).

Iso himself doesn't read SF that much, but the names of Shinichi Hoshi and Kazumasa Hirai were mentioned. When pointed out similarities between his work and stuff like Edmond Hamilton's "Fessenden's World" and Ray Bradbury's "The Fog Horn", it was only after the pointing out that he thought back and concluded that maybe he might have read them before. As for Fujio Fujiko, he says there isn't anyone in his generation taht hasn't been influenced by the great F.

He obviously loves thinking about technical situations in detail, but wasn't too strict about having it absolutely realistic. He did buy one book on UNIX at the time and that helped him. He intended the technical words to be like magic incantations, meaning that even if you didn't really understand what they meant it wouldn't make the show less interesting. He also insisted that he thought of the dennou maps before Google Maps came out.

He had thought of a lot of SF-like ideas during the production of Evangelion, RahXephon etc but felt that rather than being conscious of SF elements, his consciousness of creating movements as an animator was stronger.

And I think I vaguely remember there being a Coil special in February's Animage or something and it included an interview, but that's so long ago I don't have any way of getting it and... well... bleah, my fault for not keeping up
I ended up not translating the few other Coil materials I have, and I haven't been able to get the DVDs since the second one dammit, I'm sure by the time I can the limited ed ones would be totally sold out... some fan I am I want to see more storyboards, whimper.

[Kirarakim]

Hmm the whole science fiction aspect interested me. I personally think Dennou Coil can be considered science fiction. The genre is a lot more broad than a lot of people might assume. And the idea behind the Dennou world could possibly be seen in the future. I always felt science fiction was fictional but in the realm of being possible. Whether that possibility is closer to now or an unknown future should not be an issue.

But if someone doesn't like the term science fiction than how about speculative fiction? Which basically tells stories of "what if?"

[Shiroi Hane]

Originally Posted by Shiroi Hane

Arrgh! If you find anywhere still selling it, let us known please!

[edit]

COSPA also make it in white, and a bag, and also have Daikoku Hacker's club T-Shirts and pencil cases.

http://www.cospa.com/itemlist/id/00519/mode/series

[edit2]
HLJ have various sizes and colours of both T-Shirts but all are unavailable:
http://www.hlj.com/hljlist2/?SeriTxt1=coil

Just to let you know, since you guys tipped me off to their existence in the first place, some of the t-shirts are back in stock at HLJ (follow the last link above).

[manuloz]

Shiroi Hane> Oh! Thx for the pics taken from the Denno Coil storyboards, they are really cool :)

Wao> Don't you remember ^^' We spoke of the February Animage like 2 pages back :

http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost...&postcount=960

Denno Coil will finally get is Anime Style Event :
http://www.gainax.co.jp/company/news/0085.html

If you wonder why it's on Gainax HP it's because Tadashi Hiramatsu will be there !! (with Mitsuo Iso & Toshiyuki Inoue)

[Shiroi Hane]

sometimes web translations produce something that possibly exceeds the original

Masterpiece animation which made many fans roar "a cyber- coil."

[SeijiSensei]

I happened to be browsing the latest installment of ratings from Siegel Clyne and came across this surprising tidbit:

*3.3% (**.*%) 05/24 (Sat) *6:25pm-*6:50pm NHK-ETV Dennou Coil (Rerun)

Dennou Coil is garnering a 3.3 rating in reruns! That puts it well ahead of most new shows in Siegel Clyne's list. Is this a prime timeslot for anime programs that might attract a broader family audience?

Sadly Seirei no Moribito is floundering around under two in its rerun showing on Sunday mornings.

DVD sales for Dennou Coil don't seem reflective of the ratings. The DVD sales thread reports sales figures in the 2-3,000 range per disc. That's again a lot better than poor Seirei, but still on the low end of the sales spectrum compared to other series in that thread.

[wao]

That's great news! I can't clearly remember the ratings it got during its initial airing, but I think it's doing better in the reruns... that's really nice to know. Well, it might be a very long shot but one can hope it follows the example of the original Gundam and Eva that got popular only during reruns (what am I saying, it won't end up that popular...)

I think 6:25-6:50pm is quite a good timeslot though - if I'm not wrong earlier it aired at 6:30-7:00pm with the very popular MAJOR before it from 6:00-6:30pm (I think - too lazy to check) And it's on NHK Educational which airs all over Japan unlike NHK BS2, a satellite channel which Moribito is airing on.

Apparently people say that you shouldn't expect NHK shows to sell that many dvds though - because a greater amount of the viewers are casual, non-otaku types who are not likely to buy anime DVDs especially if it's a recent show that they just watched and is likely to get rerun. Apparently.

[wao]

Epic bump of justice!

Some days back (...more than a week by now?) there was a 4-hour Coil Night event (EDIT: I think ti's the same one as mentioned by manuloz up there) held where Iso and a bunch of the other staff came and talked (they showed a bit of ep 10 too). According to the blog of Tadashi Hiramatsu (the guy responsible for the OP and ep 10), there was a 10-year-old kid and a deaf-mute, all sorts of people (have you ever really thought about deaf-mute anime fans?)

There was Iso, Inoue, Nomura, Hiramatsu and the special guest was none other than Gisaburou Sugii (best known for the animated Night on the Galactic Railroad movie?).

To be honest I kind of forgot about it entirely after reading about it on Hiramatsu's blog, but today I kinda remembered about it again so unless some kind soul would like to do it faster and better than me, wait for it. I think there's little about it in English yet...

My real reason for posting here however is that...

They're making what sounds like a real Dennou Coil artbook!!11!1one
Dennou Coil Visual Collection.
Amazon link.
The Animage site (currently) has this announcement of it: It features a genga collection, handpicked by Toshiyuki Inoue, and will reveal most of the designs and materials drawn by Iso himself. Usually you can't trust anime magazines when they say it will be a "ve~ry thick book", but here's the details...
Size: A4 (!)
Pages: expected to be 288 (!!... of course, how much is actual content remains to be seen)
Price: 3500 yen (hello everybody, my birthday is next Tuesday*)

Animage says it's expected to go on sale 30th June (oh wow, that's just six days aft- *ahem* sorry) but Amazon says 11 July. Which one to believe? The official site is as unhelpful as ever, doesn't have a peep on this topic.


* - this is actually true.

[Shiroi Hane]

I failed to find it on Yes Asia, but they do have a Roman Album I was unaware of (protip: if you switch to the beta site you can search using kanji). Otaku have more pictures of it, but also do not have this new "visual collection" book.

http://www.yesasia.com/global/dennou...0-en/info.html
http://www.otaku.com/cgi-bin/itemview.asp?itemid=74570q

[wao]

Yeah, that one came out sometime back and focused a bit more on the 2nd half of teh series as opposed to the first book that came out halfway through the show.

Right, now for some Kwality translation work from yours truly:

Dennou Coil Night

Spoiler for prelude/description of event:

It was held from 6:30pm to about 10:30pm at LOFT/PLUS ONE (it's mentioned by TIME here), a "talk performance pub" - where people might give talks or hold events, and everyone can have a drink and relax at the same time. The atmosphere of Coil Night was quite fun, not just because of the cool location but the entertaining, casual banter between the 4 main speakers (particularly Iso and Inoue). There were all sorts of people there (from your usual sakuga otaku to a 10-year-old girl with her mom to a deaf-mute person who had a sign-language interpreter for 4 hours straight!); a few might have been talking among themselves a bit too much, but there was nobody who really ruined the atmosphere.


The drinks available were:
600 yen - Dennou Cocktail (black gin tonic with soda with a big label saying ILLEGAL DRINK)
500 yen - Dennou Juice (Pocari Sweat)
500 yen -Yasako (orange juice with lime)
500 yen - Isako (sold out immediately, melon + a slice of lemon)
image: http://blog-imgs-23.fc2.com/y/u/s/yu...coilbug191.jpg

The table where the speakers were had plushies and drawings on it like this

The event was in 3 parts:
Part 1a - Iso, Inoue, Hiramatsu do a live audio commentary of the last episode
Part 1b - After the commentary, the even'ts special guest, veteran director Gisaburo Sugii (Kanashimi no Belladonna AD, Night on the Galactic Railroad, Touch director) talks to Iso

Part 2 - Professional critic and university professor (among other things) Hiroki Azuma and Hiroshi Yamaguchi talk to Iso about Dennou Coil.

Part 3 - Rest of the staff joined in, with some commentary on Hiramatsu's episode 10 + OP and other things. (casual izakaya atmosphere)

Spoiler for Part 1a:

First of all, the staff introduced themselves and did an audio commentary of episode 26, commemorating the airing of that episode on the very same day (on NHK's rerun of Dennou Coil).

-The schedule for the last episode was extremely tight
-If it wasn't for animators Kiyotaka Oshiyama and Kenichi Yoshida they would have had serious problems
-Oshiyama did the part where Gramps picks up and hugs Yasako
-Yoshida did the part where 4423 and Yasako are talking

-At about 3:19 there is like a SPLIT SECOND where Yasako and Densuke are parodying Shiro and Shinnosuke from Crayon Shin-chan. This was not Iso's idea, but Inoue-san had scribbled it on Iso's storyboards (since Kyouko's seiyuu Akiko Yajima voices Shinnosuke) and Oshiyama thought it was part of the directions.

-There were some parts where Yasako's face looked a bit "boyish" (manly? o_O) but it was already like that in the storyboard so it wasn't fixed

-The sparkling digital visual effects where Isako confesses talks to Yasako on the steps impressed Iso enough to OK it immediately (he didn't do it)

-Iso also drew about 10 cuts himself
-He did half of the part where Isako's hair come's undone, the other half was by Inoue
-The part where Yasako calls out to Isako (after kid!Yasako runs away from the black mass?), Iso didn't even have the layout drawings but he just drew it all as in-betweens straight away (I think this means that without layout or KA, he just drew all of it)
-The staff had no idea what was going on since the process was out of order. Eventually a lot of the animators ended up doing some in-between work themselves
-Iso joked (?) that he's going to add "In-between animation: Mitsuo Iso, Toshiyuki Inoue" to the credits in the DVD version, Inoue says it'd be 26 years since he last got that credit

-Sushio did 2nd KA for the part where Megabaa is fighting in the room (and yells Sousuke!) as well as the lazers from Nekome's codes. Apparently he was looking forward to the last episode so they gave him a non-spoilery shot?
-He insisted he would be credited as no more than 2nd KA and didn't want to stand out, but in the end couldn't have his cake and eat it as his name was very obvious in the staff roll, being the only 2nd KA in the whole episode...
-Since red and blue were already taken they made Nekome's codes purple to show his character

-Isako and Yasako's bed scene (where Yasako calls Isako an idiot etc.) was by Itatsu, originally supposed to be Hiramatsu but he had gone for a Gurren-Lagann onsen meeting ("kono yarou!"), Hiramatsu desparately tries to explain that it's a misunderstanding.

-The characters in the last scene with the sakura were drawn by ex-Ghibli staff Andou (no wonder), the sakura was hand-drawn by Iso and then processed with AfterEffects.
-The "Kanazawa City" in the background when Isako is talking was supposed to be blurred out but they left it out for a bit. This is fixed in the DVD.

Spoiler for Part 1b (Sugii):

Animating hair and running
-Sugii introduced himself as "having come from the old space" (he really is a veteran animator/director). He ordered fried potatoes while Inoue got some cold tofu.
-He was impressed by Dennou Coil, by how kids are running around even though it's a digital world. He particularly liked the lifelike acting in the show - Inoue notes that it sticks out when it's bad, but nobody notices when it's all good
-Sugii notes that hair has to be animated properly to bring out these movements (or characters look like dolls).
-Inoue says the pigtails helped [ever noticed how nice it feels when Isako runs?] and special attention was paid to animation of characters running. -Particularly episode 1 and 2, that was largely thanks to Takeshi Honda (Inoue had to pick up where he left off as Honda dropped off the project to go work on Eva.)
-It's not strange that it became a running theme [no pun intended] throughout Dennou Coil, as Honda has always been good at this even in Millenium Actress
-He has a habit of drawing everything in the genga (leaving very little to in-betweeners) - partly cos he wants to avoid cases like "Shanghai Hashiri" (Shanghai-running), an industry term referring to in-betweens returned from a certain animation company in Shangahai where running characters don't move up and down.
-Nowadays in-betweeners have to fill a lot of gaps in the KA with their own imagination but are not trained to do so [or something like that]
-Sugii says that it's usually more successful to write storyboards according to a (set?) pattern because even if you include nuanced acting it doesn't come out in the final product [thanks to incompetent staff?]

-Iso says he didn't particularly aim for the kids to be portrayed as very lively, he just had certain concrete things he wanted to do and the lifelike acting served his purposes
-Sugii's daughter watched Dennou Coil with him and said "It feels like it's not an anime" - the feeling conveyed by the realistic movements and acting of the kids is very different from most other anime.
One can feel there is an emphasis placed on animation, separately from the interesting world of Dennou Coil

Original projects: how they survive in the anime industry
-Iso is very humble about the praises; he says he hasn't watched all of Sugii's works but he doesn't know how people can keep a healthy distance when creating things [so you don't overinvest yourself in one show, for example] - he always needs a complete break after doing one show
-Sugii says that veteran anime directors like himself, Rintarou and Miyazaki think of themselves as artisans rather than artists (作家というより職人 - perhaps auteur is a better translation) Sugii thinks he is perhaps more like an entertainer/actor. If he can perform in Night on the Galactic Railroad then he can perform in Gokuu no Daibouken.
-He says in the long history of anime, nearly 90% of anime are based on manga, in which case the artistic (auteur) factor is taken care of largely by the manga... so the people making anime are more in a position to "perform". Therefore being able to be detached while creating anime is a matter of professional spirit. Originality and infusing an auteur spirit is up to the actual author (作家性、オリジナル、というのは作家の仕事 says one blog)

-Iso says that original works are not particularly welcomed or commended by the anime industry, which was originally created to animate manga in the first place. Like when everyone gets together to make an original anime but it doesn't sell... he ventures that perhaps this industry is not suited for making original projects.

-Sugii asks about the planning (pitching?) for Dennou Coil, and Iso says he had to do it himself - anime production studios wouldn't take him up on his offer and he was turned away everywhere [until he went to Tokuma]. Animators are not welcome except to do what they're told and since the industry feeds on profits made from making animated adaptations, they don't know how to sell original works. Therefore he had to do it himself.
They don't like it when the original creator goes on to direct the show as well (a director should be working under a production house). Iso can't mention too many details because of certain people in high places... Something about how you can't help certain power positions. [You get what I mean?] (Inoue jokes whether Iso is trying to portray himself as a victim)

-Sugii says however that the worth of a show should be on the results [did I understand "作品って結果がなんぼ" correctly] For example he teaches at an university but all the young people there know about Dennou Coil. It's a generation that doesn't watch TV but when asked to name interesting shows Dennou Coil comes out first. Even if it was difficult to produce at least that effort bore the result of leaving a definite impression on people.

Haraken's hair and more animation talk
-He mentions his daughter is 15-year-old (3rd year of middle school. Inoue is surprised that that's not his granddaughter instead and doesn't know whether he should be joking about this) and she couldn't bear to watch more than 10 minutes of his Hidamari no Ki, yet she loved Dennou Coil. She said the hair was very very nice.
-Iso mentions that Haraken's hair started growing longer during the show
-Inoue says this was a parting gift from Honda - he got tired of his own character designs and would draw the characters without looking at the model sheets (it's easy when the character designer himself is doing animation corrections)

-Sugii mentions that normally people decide the extreme, fixed poses and then create movements based on those, but Iso says this is rarer in theatrical anime. He's not saying it's wrong but (here?) he preferred to have sequences start from an intermediate pose and end with one too.
-Inoue says they managed to get together animators who actually thought like that because the director had the power to bring people to him, people who admired him for his groundbreaking animation techniques. So there's some influence in terms of thinking among the staff too.
Of course some younger animators like Oshiyama and Itatsu weren't fully aware of Iso's greatness so Inoue took it upon himself to proselytize to them. (Iso doesn't know what Inoue told them.)

Bringing Animation Talent Together
-Sugii wonders how they consistently managed to get together so many top-class animators every time for a 26-episode TV anime. Inoue says that actually a lot of it was held up by the core main staff. Iso adds that they covered it up by using a lot of still pans and playing around with cut distribution. [i.e. having long cuts to make up for important sequences with many short cuts] Maybe about 5000 drawings per episode, 2000 for the ones with less. He tried to plan things economically, but he left episode 3 as an episode with no limitations on action and frame-count. Inoue was supposed to come in here but a certain highly-anticipated big show he was working on, Pap**** didn't finish production that year like it was supposed to - it took one whole year longer than expected.
-Inoue hastily explained that previous jobs taking longer than expected was a normal thing (haha). So Iso had called up Nobutake Itou to work on episode 3 and normally with his own character designs and animation he has a unique, individualistic way of drawing but here he had taken pains to fit the designs (...in his own way).

-Sugii mentions that 10 years ago viewers would clearly notice the drop in animation quality after 4 episodes or so for TV series, but now everyone is used to it (and there's so much info available on why this happens or what to expect) so it's no longer like that. However with Dennou Coil viewers wouldn't feel that the quality had really dropped even until the very end.
-Hiramatsu says that then it means they were successful in fooling everyone. Inoue says this might be thanks to Iso paying attention to details to an insane level (監督の鬼気迫るこだわり, another report says he "didn't allow any compromises") although Iso replies that there were parts where he said it's okay to slack off a bit. (Inoue vehemently denies it)

-Sugii concludes that since Iso is extremely talented as an animator, and perhaps because of this he knows how to plan the animation budget very well - calculating where best to channel the staff's efforts and so on. Without having such a plan even if you put in a lot of time and labour the result won't show it. Or perhaps he just knew how to cut back skilfully.


Question: Nobutake Itou and individuality
-Someone from the floor asks about Itou having "fit" his style to Dennou Coil's even though Iso did his obvious trademark explosions in RahXephon without "fitting" it in.
-Iso says there were some cuts that retained Itou's mark in Dennou Coil too. There was a point of time where he experienced a change in mindset - when he first started doing episode direction he thought sakuga alone could power the whole thing, even to the extent of saying that in order to surpass the show there's no choice but to break it [or something like that]. But then by breaking it, nothing was left of the animation...
-So he was rather divided for some time during RahXephon, and his conclusion was to embark on making an anime where the animators and directors can put in full effort and yet it doesn't lead to a dead end. Something about having to write the script as well in order to have good direction.. In the end though animators and directors should have the same ultimate goal of "making anime".
-Iso uses a metaphor: no matter how many excellent window-makers you hire, if they make you a window larger than the house then it's useless.
-Of course there are people who insist on individuality and sometimes it works better that way, but often the producers and so would come in and intervene.

-Iso tells Sugii that he didn't put in most effort into the script, but sometimes goes a little overboard with it. He makes sure to put in some other people's ideas I think. Of course places have been cut, like originally in episode 10 Yasako was supposed to have met with Michiko in the tent, but there wasn't enough time for that so he axed it. (There are still many long lines left in the anime but that's after he had shaved off quite a bit.)


A bit about Gisaburo Sugii
-Iso asks Sugii about Night of the Galactic Railroad, which he likes very much - he mentioned checking out the Street Fighter movie just to see how the person behind Night of the Galactic Railroad would do it, but it turned out to be a rather stupid movie [did he just say バカ映画 to Sugii's face?!]
-Sugii replies that Night was a challenge aimed at the film world. Something about the idea of speaking with images and taking on an adaptation of Kenji Miyazawa. [To be honest I don't fully understand this part and I suppose most of you interested can read Japanese anyway] He mentions that he's now testing himself with an adaptation of Guskobudori no Denki.

23/06: Coil Night part two.

God, I'm pooped from flipping between a bunch of blog entries to write all that, so forgive the awful rambling writing style as usual... I may have made some gross errors in part 1b because it's SO long and I don't think I really know what they're saying sometimes (different blogs say different things).

I added some lousy headings, hope it helps. But that's it for now, I'll translate part 2 (which was not very popular among most event-goers, most say it felt like they were talking about stuff not all that related to Dennou Coil) and 3 (which has more anecdotes) some other time. You can attempt to trudge through this in the meantime.

Suggestions, comments, corrections and clarifications are HIGHLY welcome

Almost all information taken from the blog entries listed here (major super ultimate props to the people who wrote these reports and compiled them!): http://d.hatena.ne.jp/cure/20080617/p1

[BluWacky]

As always, wao, that was absolutely fascinating, and thank you for going to such efforts to translate all of that for the rest of us.

To be honest, I sometimes read interviews with animators where they don't really have anything particularly interesting to say, but as Dennou Coil was a project so close to Iso I think it's unsurprising that the interview turned out so intriguing.

Spoiler for To save space on the page, I've put this in a spoiler box:

It's a shame what he says about investors and studios not being interested in original projects. Although it's understandable in that these are untested ideas that may not translate into high viewing figures/advertising sales/merchandise deals etc. aside from the Haruhi phenomenon most anime that have gone "big" have been original ideas (Eva, Gundam, Geass etc.). I guess it's just a lot more risky.

Iso's comments on his Rah episode are also quite interesting given that, as we all know, Coil is such a consistent series in animation style and quality. I think The Children's Night works so well precisely because it is so different - it's out of chronological sequence, and deliberately cryptic as to what exactly is going on, and that wouldn't have worked so well if had looked like everything else in the series. Given that it's a Bones series as well, a studio famed for its consistency in animation, I'm not sure whether to take Iso's comments at face value; I don't think he just got carried away with doing it his way, I think it was more planned than that.

I'm being really dense, but I assume Inoue was delayed working on Paprika? I still haven't seen that (in fact, I've barely seen anything Kon's done - just Paranoia Agent and Tokyo Godfathers!). Must get around to it. Madhouse does seem to delay projects an awful lot or at least take a long time over them - whatever happened to that weird Hell's Angels project they were doing?

Something I thought about reading Sugii's comments about his students - wao, you're much more informed about this than anyone I expect, but I wonder how many people go into anime and think realistically about what they're actually going to do for a living? Do most animators do inbetweening for somewhere like Studio Deen for a few years and get disenchanted with the career and get office jobs, or do you have to be exceptionally talented to get anywhere? Going to university and dreaming of working on Dennou Coil is one thing, but when it's a high possibility you'll spend your career working on stuff where you're just drawing lipflaps for shows you probably have no interest in would be fairly demoralising.

At least he's got students who've heard of the show, though.

I've run out of steam, but suffice to say that was a very interesting report indeed. Thanks again, wao!

[Shiroi Hane]

I'm greatly impressed and appreciative,. I've not finished reading everything but I need to make a couple of comments before I get lost in all the text and forget them.

Originally Posted by wao

The table where the speakers were had plushies and drawings on it like this

Is that drawing in the top left what it looks like?

Iso, Inoue, Hiramatsu do a live audio commentary of the last episode

They really should have done this earlier, then they could have recorded it and included it on the DVDs.