Motoyoshi Tokunaga transformed the closing of Disney Animation (Japan) into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to start a new studio using the talent and skills of the unemployed artists.

After The Walt Disney Co. shuttered Walt Disney Animation (Japan) last year, former vp and general manager Motoyoshi Tokunaga decided it would be a shame to waste all of that valuable talent that collaborated with DisneyToon Studios on 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure, The Tigger Movie, Piglet’s Big Movie and the upcoming Pooh’s Heffalump Movie. So Tokunaga gathered together most of the animators and staff that had been laid off, secured a bank loan of ¥6 million (US$50,000) and reopened the Tokyo animation studio in June, renaming it The Answer Studio Co. Ltd., signifying the internal quest for meaning. For its first project, DisneyToon Studios offered the original short for the Mary Poppins 40^th Anniversary DVD that streets Dec. 14, The Cat That Looked at a King. Directed by David Bossert, the 2D short is based on an original story by P.L. Travers about the magical nanny, featuring voice work by former Duchess of York Sara Ferguson, Tracy Ullman and David Ogden Stiers. Meanwhile, The Answer Studio also animated Toon Disney’s anime-inspired Jetix series, Super Robot Monkey Team, and its first 3D project, NeposNapos, a children’s TV series about a friendly world inhabited by characters that are fusion of fruit, vegetables and flowers. VFXWorld recently spoke with Tokunaga, The Answer Studio’s president, about the formation and plans to fuse 2D and 3D into the business model.

Bill Desowitz: Please describe the process of reopening as an independent studio.

Motoyoshi Tokunaga: Basically, the beginning started with the artists, who thought that it was a pity when the Disney studio closed, so they thought that if there is any way that they could get together and establish a company, they would like to explore that. So I thought that since the artists are talking a lot about computer animation these days, that I could find a successful business by combining computer animation with the wonderful 2D animation that Disney and our staff have been doing. And we were lucky that there are so many demands for animation productions in Japan, so I can collaborate with these distributors as well, so the timing is good at this moment. Of course, at Disney, I didn’t have to worry about money, but now that I own a company, this is a new headache for me.

A 2D short, The Cat That Looked at a King, directed by David Bossert (right) from Mary Poppins’ 40th Anniversary DVD, was Answer Studio’s first project. © 2004 The Walt Disney Co.

BD: How much of the staff were you able to rehire?

MT: As for animators, there were 40 animators working for Disney (Japan) and now we hired back 35 of them. Overall, we currently have a staff of nearly 100 right now.

BD: How many of your management did you retain from the Disney studio?

MT: We had a staff at Disney of 101, and many of them came to Answer Studio, so the structure is quite similar.

BD: Talk about The Cat That Looked at a King.

MT: We finished it in August…it’s about six minutes. Around 20 artists worked on it for three months but we were required to deliver feature-level quality and I think we did a very good job within the constraints. As with the previous Disney projects, the storyboard and post-production work was done in L.A. but from the layout on, all the work was done in Japan.