Persistence in “Mobs”*
HN: What was the real charm of the character design in this work?
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Tsukasa Kotobuki: I am the only one staff who was invited by Yasuhiko General Director individually among the whole members of this project, and thanks to that, I am in the credit as character designer in parallel with Mr. Yasuhiko in good faith. However, as I have talked so far, my work in this project is a bit unusual as a role of character design in animation. I am originally supposed to be a sub character design or a support designer of Mr. Yasuhiko’s character design works in the end role credits of this animation, I think. So, like the pleasure or fulfillment I feel from designing character of THE ORIGIN is slightly different from the real thrill of doing character designs in ordinary animation.
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Anyway, I think it would be that I can make the universe of the story more realistic by giving life to the characters, which support the story of the main characters drawn by Professor Yasuhiko, while paying attention not make them too conspicuous in the story.
HN: Thank you. Then, is it one of the reasons why this science fiction title has a strong realism, due to the staff’s huge amount of creative energy they put into, with not only the main characters, but also other side characters?
Tsukasa Kotobuki: It may be so. I think that there are some animation works in which only the main characters are rich in personality and other characters are not sharing the same world with them. On the other hand, I think that Mr. Yasuhiko does not want to show characters that disagree with the universe of the story in the back of the main characters on the same scene in this animation. I feel that his direction has the intention in making audience watch all the characters appearing on the whole screen, rather than spotting on a few specific characters.
For example, in terms of designing many other military characters behind the main characters, which we call “mobs”, Mr. Yasuhiko requested to me, “Please don’t think of them as the rest of the crowd. Every individual character in this animation has a life. I’d like to have a difference in each person as much as possible, irrespective of whether the character have lines or not”. So, I design the “mobs” to have different shapes of eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, and so on, among them as much as possible. However, there are some animators who draw all “mobs” with the same face, so that I try to correct such pictures according to character settings.
*Mob: A specific word in Japanese animation industry. It means background characters or extra in animation.
Atsuhiko Sekiguchi: As he said, in regard to THE ORIGIN, basically we draw and move many other characters behind the main characters with individuality and definition, even though we draw a crowd, a very huge number of people, in digital. For instance, we animated “mobs” well in the scenes of a victory celebration party in episode six.
In regard to “mobs” in the fifth episode, we made the character settings of patients in a hospital around Sayla Mass and the villagers who appear across scenes, and we shared them with all the animators in order to make each “mob” character be drawn as the same character design in all the different scenes. I selected some villagers in the original comics to be drawn as “mobs” at the meeting with the layout/animation director of episode five and we asked Mr. Kotobuki to design about 14 villagers in the end.
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Designs of the 14 villagers by Tsukasa Kotobuki.[/caption]
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Designs of the 14 villagers by Tsukasa Kotobuki.[/caption]
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Designs of the 14 villagers by Tsukasa Kotobuki.[/caption]
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The 14 villagers in the completed animation.[/caption]
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The 14 villagers in the completed animation.[/caption]
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The 14 villagers in the completed animation.[/caption]
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Tsukasa Kotobuki: Those are characters that appear in only one or two cuts, but I designed detailed settings for them. I keep a lot of comics, which Mr. Yasuhiko drawn in the past, close at hand. When I design a character, which doesn’t appear in the original comics, I look for a character, which is close to the characteristics of the character I was requested to design, among the comics. And I make it the base of the design, in order to make the character match the visual style and atmosphere of the characters drawn by Mr. Yasuhiko.
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Mr. Kotobuki at his working desk. There are a lot of Mr. Yasuhiko’s comics on the shelves.[/caption]
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Atsuhiko Sekiguchi: Actually, there are quite a few key animators who devise ideas for “mob’s” acting performance by themselves. Mr. Yasuhiko seems to prefer to receive those kinds of suggestions and he adopts some of them after modifying the “mob’s” actions. “If you suggest me an idea, let’s do it that way!”
