Interview: Shinnouske Yakuwa. (Writer/Director Totto-Chan: The Little Girl In The Window)
The UK's biggest anime film festival, Scotland Loves Anime, expanded to London for the first time this year. For the festival's first trip south of the border, the organisers brought with them, guest of honour Shinnouske Yakuwa. Yakuwa is the writer and director of the anime feature Totto-Chan: The Little Girl At The Window. The acclaimed film is adapted from the best-selling autobiography, written by Japanese celebrity Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, recounting her unusual education in Japan during the period up to and including the Second World War. Expelled from her original school, she enrolls in Tomoe Academy which offers a unique education philosophy, that goes deeper than the fact the classrooms are derelict train carriages. The film went on to win the grand Jury Prize at SLA.
We got the chance to sit down with Mr Yakuwa, when we discussed the film's production and development and more. The interview was conducted through an interpreter.
AFA: How did you first get into animation?
When I saw the Crayon Shin Chan movie directed by Keiichi Hara, I was so impressed by how well animation could convey human drama. And I ended up joining this company.(Shin-Ei Animation)
How did you first come across the original Totto-Chan novel? Did you grow up with it?
I was aware of the book when I was at Primary school, but I didn’t read it. I didn’t read it until 2016. At the time on the news you saw children dying in the war in Syria, there were attacks at a facility for disabled people in Japan and I wanted to somehow be able to contribute to society through my work. I was searching around for a story, and I came across Totto-Chan, and that was when I read it for the first time.
What was it about Totto-Chan that made you want to adapt it as an anime?
Well, Because Totto-Chan featured elements of education, war, [and] discrimination against people with disabilities, I felt it did a good job of covering a lot of the issues I was seeing in the world today, and I thought that this was a story that I could use to revisit those issues.
How did you decide how faithful to be to the source material?
Well, for example, when I was doing my research I learned that there was no shopping street between Jiyūgaoka station and Tomoe Academy, but for the purposes of the film, I needed there to be this street in the middle of Jiyūgaoka, and I decided to add this street of shops between the station and the school. So it’s artistic licence but I did it that way to get a message across. But on the other hand, historical events, things like the air raids in Tokyo that took place in March and April of 1945, I didn’t want to change those at all.
What was your approach to the film’s visual style?
Well, normally in Japanese anime, people tend to think that photo-realistic style makes for a richer animation. But that’s never quite sat right with me, and I wanted this to have the kind of beauty it can only have because it consists of drawings- a painterly touch if you like. And as I was searching around for inspiration for the style I came across the work of the Scandanavian artist Karl Larson, which featured watercolour backgrounds, but the figures had an outline. That seemed to fit very well with Japanese animation, that’s very line-centric.
And so it was sort of a water-colour and line hybrid, and so I referred a lot to the work of Karl Larson
How did you decide on the different art style for the fantasy sequences?
Well firstly, the Tomoe Academy has a very free and unique education philosophy and I wanted us to experience that freedom of expression in our animation. Generally, it’s hard to create this kind of artistic animation in the Japanese animation system structure. But we prioritised that sense of freedom, and I suppose I was motivated by the idea that because this is animation, we can go beyond words and beyond logic.
Did you feel an extra sense of responsibility making a film based on a real person and real events?
Well, depicting historical events in fiction is something very powerful, because you’re showing people watching Totto-Chan what Japan was like 80 years ago, so it is a big responsibility. That sense of responsibility to portray history accurately was bigger for me than the sense of responsibility to any actual person. But what I was careful to do was to show it from the point-of-view of people living at that time, and not to judge them.
Is it more challenging to make a period film?
[Comparing] the past and the present, with the past there’s a lot more research to do, so it’s harder in that respect. Previously I worked on the Doraemon anime and when you’re working on something like that, which has fantastical elements, you are having to imagine things that don’t exist, so that’s difficult in its own way. They both have their own challenges, with history there’s a lot of research, with fantasy you’re having to create something new from scratch.
The war remains very much in the background for much of the film and is very subtle. Was there ever any thought of making the war a more prominent part of the story?
Early on in production, I talked with the team that a lot of people, we thought, that had read the book, didn’t read it as a ‘war story’- they probably read it as a story about education. Personally, I thought as you’re reading the book, you don’t see the clothes people are wearing, you don’t see the signs and the slogans. If you’re watching a film set during the Sino-Japanese War and the Asia Pacific War, you can’t avoid seeing what’s happening. In that case I decided we would need to show those aspects of the war going on in the background. So I included them in the script that I wrote. But on the other hand, I thought that while that was going on in the background, I decided there was no need to have any extreme scenes of war, because there would be enough information in the background.
Do you think that animation particularly lends itself to depicting tough topics like the effects of war on children?
Well, I think by making something into an animation… real events into an animation, you’re making it easier for children to understand. There are already a lot of anime in Japan that deal with war and the effect of war on children from Barefoot Gen to Grave Of The Fireflies, [and] In This Corner Of The World. But in a lot of cases, they are a bit too heavy for younger children, children below primary school age. But Totto-Chan may be a way in for younger children to think about war
It’s definitely a lot less heavy than Grave Of The Fireflies! What message would you like viewers to take away from Totto-Chan?
The message would be one of mutual understanding. I think all the issues that I mentioned- education, war, discrimination- are because of a lack of mutual understanding. And if we can be considerate to people with a different point of view, or in a different position to us, that most of these issues can be resolved
Are you able to tell us anything about what you’re working on next?
I do have some ideas, they’re all at very early stages. One of them is about war. A lot of the anime we see in Japan about war, pictures Japan as a victim. I feel there’s room for something that touches on our role as [an] aggressor. And I do really enjoy working with these autobiographical stories, so I would like to do more of that.
