Tokunaga found that the timing was good to open The Answer Studio. Its skill in both 2D and 3D animation has been in demand with Japanese production companies and distributors.

BD: How did NeposNapos come about?

MT: After establishing Answer Studio, there was an offer from a Japanese company, OLC/Rights Ent., a company aiming to develop business in the intellectual property rights field, to work on a 3D animation TV series based on their original children’s character, NeposNapos. And there was a competition that Answer Studio participated in with three other production companies in L.A., Taiwan and Japan. We won the bid and so now we are expanding into 3D animation as well and are in the process of hiring 40 new staff, which would bring us to a staff of around 130. We are currently in production and it will start airing in Japan in late December or early January.

Twenty of Answer’s artists worked on The Cat That Looked at a King for three months. They delivered feature-level quality for the six-minute short.

BD: How are you handling the 3D transition?

MT: For tools, we are using Maya. We haven’t done 3D character design while we were affiliated with Disney, so what we are doing is training our traditional animators to use Maya and we are recruiting also people who have done animation at other companies or game creators who are acquainted with these tools.

BD: What problems have you run into?

MT: Actually, one of the difficulties is recruiting people. When we were affiliated with Disney, we could place ads and attract lots of people. But now that we are The Answer Studio, nobody knows what we’ve done. Even when we place recruiting ads, we don’t see many people coming.

BD: What distinguishes you from your competitors?

MT: I am quite confident in that we are very rare. We know the Disney style and we also know the Japanese style, so we can offer high quality on a small budget. That’s our strength. And also for 3D, most of it comes from game creators, but we started from animation. And we put a lot of animation technique into 3D things, which no one else has done, which is why we won the bid for NeposNapos.

BD: Please elaborate on your edge in 3D.

MT: In Japan, the 3D animation has been mainly for game animation, which is more or less limited to regular and repetitive actions. So there were no 3D animations as the ones Pixar makes. But for NeposNapos, the 3D artists involved are fully acquainted with traditional elements (many of them have traditional backgrounds), and they incorporate the traditional style into their works. That’s why I think NeposNapos would be a new experience for Japanese viewers, that Japan can also create something like this.

BD: Who do you see as your market?

MT: Again, as we just started, we are mainly looking at the Japanese market and doing a lot of business there. And, as I said before, computer animation is a growing market in Japan and that’s where we want to concentrate for now.