Winning the Summer Wars

Find out what the director of the latest anime hit and potential Oscar nominee has to say about social networking and animation.

By Bill Desowitz | Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 7:00 am

Posted In | Magazines: AnimationWorld | Site Categories: Anime, Films

BD: Talk about the character designs and the contributions of Yoshiyuki Sadamoto.

MH: Yoshiyuki Sadamoto is one of the best animation/comic artists in Japan, and I'm a big fan of him. It's really an honor to have him as a character designer again, after working together for my previous film, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

His character designs are so unique, but everybody really loves them.

In color and design, the virtual Oz world was inspired by the Wii.

BD: What was the experience like at Madhouse compared to The Girl Who Leapt? I understand it took three years and the extra time was devoted to the large number of characters in the family.

MH: Compared to the previous title, it's true there were many more characters, so it was quite hard to put everything together: script, storyboard, animation, voice recording, etc... But so many staff helped us in finishing the film.

BD: How large an animation team did you have? And talk about the contributions of your animation directors, action animation director and CG director.

MH: There were 48 key animators. In total, maybe over 300 staff. The animation director [Hiroyuki Aoyama] was in charge of the real world, and the action animation director [Tatsuzo Nishita] was in charge of the Oz world. To create the 'real' Oz world and millions of avatars there, that was the CG director [Ryo Horibe].

BD: Did they set up a new pipeline at Madhouse and create any proprietary plug-ins? What animation software did they use and how much CG was there?

Yoshiyuki Sadamoto served as character designer once again with director Hosoda.

MH: Most of the staff were freelance, including myself. We used the software After Effects, and Digital Frontier, which was in charge of CG, created a program that creates millions of avatars with different colors and designs. About 30% of the film was CG.

BD: What are you proudest of with Summer Wars?

MH: I'm proud to have seen so many people who told me that they enjoyed the movie. Thanks to those people, I got a ticket to create the next new film.

BD: What can you tell us about it?

MH: I'll do my best to have everybody see the movie as soon as possible, but unfortunately can't say much about it just yet.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.