Shopping Guide
Rage of Bahamut, the smartphone game that’s popular across the globe, will be adapted into an anime series. Here’s part two of our interview with world-renowned director, Keiichi Sato.
TOM: With anime series like Tiger & Bunny, your work has attracted many fans from abroad. Have you ever taken your large foreign fan base into consideration when doing your work?
Sato: I hope to continue to work with the assumption that what I do will be viewed by those abroad with different cultural and religious viewpoints. More than Japanese people, I think that people abroad are familiar with fantasy stories that feature dragons and the like. In “Japanimation,” there haven’t been many hardcore fantasy works based on the traditional mix of swordplay and magic. I’m personally excited to see how Japanese anime approaches the fantasy genre in the future.
TOM: What did you worry about the most with this work?
Sato: I think the most challenging thing was figuring out how to convey Bahamut. I felt like I didn’t want to portray him as just a monster. In Japan, if you talk about monster series, Godzilla and Ultraman monsters are usually the first to come to mind, and I didn’t want to go in that direction at all.
TOM: What else did you focus on in this work?
Sato: I tried to keep the story simple while leaving room for emotional depth. I think it’s important to keep the important plot points spread out in the story, but I didn’t want to make something that wouldn’t be understood and accessible after watching the first episode. I am always thinking about how the character drama should develop and grow as I write. This series follows an adult character in a grown up world, and he likes to drink. I’m very interested to see how his mature behaviour is received by younger viewers.
TOM: What did you enjoy the most about making this series?
Sato: In this series, there was a specific request from the client, which was to not use explosives. Japanese animation is used to explosions. People often end up wanting to blow things up just like that. I thought it wouldn’t be showy enough without the use of explosives, and that the aesthetic of destructive scenes might suffer as a result.
If you don’t use explosives, that rules out flashes of light. And just having a cloud of dust looks kind of sad. So we were confronted with the problem of how to make the destruction engaging and exciting. I thought about using magic for destructive purposes instead, and using some kind of lightning instead of explosives. It was really difficult to think of a way around this issue, but as I thought about it more I began to enjoy the challenge.
Besides that, in previous works I’ve done there have always been skyscrapers, rubble, and buildings, so this was my first time drawing more natural scenes like forests, stone streets, rivers and canals. It was fun coming up with shapes for trees that could only exist in a fantasy universe. It brought be back to my younger days.
