THE ORIGIN‘s unique design process
HN: THE ORIGIN is based on the comics of the same title written by Mr. Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, the general director of the animation series. Are there any differences or difficulties in designing animation characters which have original visual designs in the original comics, compared to your experiences in designing original characters for animation from zero?
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Tsukasa Kotobuki: In the case of designing characters from scratch by myself, I tend to get an order with no limitations in design. If I design new characters without constraint, it could be too flexible for me and it will make me work slower, on the contrary. So, to clarify and understand the client’s needs, I tend to ask them like, “I’d like you to tell me what you would like to have in design a little bit more concretely.”. On the other hand, in the case of THE ORIGIN, what I could design freely at my discretion for the characters was defined and what I was requested was clear, so that there was nothing to worry about in the direction of the design.
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Actually, there was no clear line between Mr. Yasuhiko and me in the assignation of the main characters in THE ORIGIN. Basically, Mr. Yasuhiko designed the characters he has strong feelings for, and I followed his works by designing all other characters, including some of the main characters. In terms of my design of the non-main characters, there was almost no requests I’ve received to change the character designs later.
Regarding the design of the main characters, there are some main characters which I was assigned to design because Mr. Yasuhiko has too much personal attachment to the characters to design them by himself. For example, a character named M’Quve, who is one of the main characters. Mr. Yasuhiko had been able to draw the character without too much thinking, but afterwards, he started to think, “Oh, M’Quve might possibly be a cooler character than I’ve thought.”, he has not been able to draw M’Quve smoothly like before. Then, I was in charge of designing M’Quve.
Nevertheless, Mr. Yasuhiko has a firm image of M’Quve, even if it is a sort-of sensuous image. So, I thought that Mr. Yasuhiko could develop the image of M’Quve in his brain from a sensory thing to a more concrete image by watching the illustration of M’Quve designed and visualized by me, a third person. Hence, to make my illustration of M’Quve the same design as the concrete image he got in his head, he asked me to make a number of corrections.
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Facial expressions of M’Quve designed by Tsukasa Kotobuki.[/caption]
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Full picture of M’Quve designed by Tsukasa Kotobuki.[/caption]
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Color settings for M’Quve.[/caption]
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M’Quve in the completed animation.[/caption]
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Tsukasa Kotobuki: I think that this is because Mr. Yasuhiko’s personal style for designing characters is not just blindly basing the animation on the original comics, but rather he thinks that the atmosphere of the character is more important than the design of the character itself. For instance, he requested me to fix up the ways of dressing military uniforms, such as the position to fasten the belt and the posture of the character like having it better to make a round-shouldered posture, or straightening the spine, because those kinds of things embody the personality of the character as its unique atmosphere.
On the other hand, Mr. Nishimura, the supervising animator, told me: “the illustrations of character sheets are for sharing the visuals of each character in details among all the animators, so please do not include directive elements in character sheets and instruct those kinds of elements when we work on keyframes”. It is only a category of my imagination, but it seemed like Mr. Yasuhiko was thinking that character setting includes such information. So, maybe, as once it was. Then it was changed to the system, which by Mr. Nishimura taught me after many years.
Costume designing by Takuhito Kusanagi
HN: As you mentioned a little bit about the way of dressing a character with military uniform now, I think that one of the features of the Gundam franchise is the elaborate settings of every kind, which are very realistic. How did you gather materials for designing such things as each character’s clothes and space suit, named “normal suit” in the story? Also, could you please let us know about what you took care of and what you specifically focused on in designing them?
Tsukasa Kotobuki: Takuhito Kusanagi is participating in this project as a military equipment designer and doing costume design. It can be said that a character setting picture is completed by putting the clothes, which Mr. Kusanagi designed, on the character I designed. Mr. Kusanagi is good at designing realistic military equipment, but Mr. Yasuhiko’s characters have a variety of body types, including unusual body types as a soldier, such as a person with narrow shoulders and an obese person. So, there are some cases where details of Mr. Kusanagi’s design can not fall into place satisfactorily. For example, he made a very detailed design on the shoulder of the Principality of Zeon’s military uniform, but there is not enough space to draw the design on the uniform for a character with narrow shoulders. And also, that kind of his fine design is too complicated to draw on a number of in-betweens. Therefore, I did some minor adjustments of the designs to the extent which will not affect his design, and reduced the number of lines in his designs to make it more animate-able by repeating consultation with Ms. Nishimura. However, the detailed design is one of the characteristics of Mr. Kusanagi’s art works and also one of the reasons why this project asked him to join. So, we needed to understand his designs deeply to keep the characteristics and intention of them. It was a very difficult challenge.
As I said, my title in this project was only a character designer at the beginning of my participation in this project. But I have started to work as a lead animator as well from the 2nd or 3rd episode. And then, it was really hard for me to check keyframes one by one details of the characters’ visual, which I designed. So, I thought that I should have made the designs simpler by talking with Mr. Kusanagi (laughs).
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One of Takuhito Kusanagi’s original military equipment designs.[/caption]
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One of Takuhito Kusanagi’s original military equipment designs.[/caption]
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Hiroyuki Nishimura’s final design (the number of lines were reduced).[/caption]
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Hiroyuki Nishimura’s final design (the number of lines were reduced).[/caption]
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Military equipment in the completed animation.[/caption]
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Military equipment in the completed animation.[/caption]
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HN: Could you please let us know your favorite one in your designed characters?
Tsukasa Kotobuki: In the animated version of Mobile Suit Gundam: THE ORIGIN, there are some original scenes that are not depicted in the original comics. And Lino Fernandez, a man who knows the identity of Char Aznable, only appears in the third episode of the animation as an original character. He is my favorite character. I drew a rough design of him on the spot when I received the offer to design him, and I got the okay on the first design. Actually, I had a request of a few more different patterns of design later, just in case, so I drew a couple of new designs of him. But we decided to go with the first design, which left a strong impact, after all.
[Continued on page 3]
