Any mechanically related animation in a production is supervised by the chief mechanical animation director. What is a mecha animation director’s job like, when it comes to depicting the mecha in an anime-like way even when hand-drawn art has been replaced by CG? In our latest relay interview, we talked to mecha animation director Takuya Suzuki, who was responsible for depicting the mecha in this story. We asked him about his focus when depicting the mecha in “MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM THE ORIGIN” (hereafter referred to as "THE ORIGIN"). Suzuki: Well, I was previously involved with the Sunrise-produced “VALVRAVE THE LIBERATOR” (hereafter referred to as "VALVRAVE"). When that job reached a stopping point, the show’s producer Mr. (Hiroomi) Ikeya approached me and asked if I wanted to be the mecha animation director on "THE ORIGIN." I’d kind of been invited to work on it before that too, but with a huge title like "THE ORIGIN," I was looking forward to seeing it as a viewer, so I turned down the offers few times. But this gap came up in my schedule, and the timing was perfect, so I had no reason to refuse and ultimately I accepted. Suzuki: When I first accepted the job, I hadn’t heard anything about it, but when I spoke to Mr. Ikeya about it afterwards, he said, “Apparently the mecha is going to be done with CG.” As mecha animation director on "VALVRAVE," we’d done the mecha movement with CG there too, and I thought it might be a similar kind of job. So that was another reason I accepted. The fact is, I naively thought that maybe it would be easy because it wasn't hand-drawn! (laughs) Suzuki: I watched “MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM” (First Gundam) in elementary and junior high school, and I’ve loved Mr. Yasuhiko’s characters ever since. I read manga like “ARION,” too, and used to try to copy the drawings.
With First Gundam, I was a child, so of course I was absorbed by the battle scenes. In most anime of that era, the battle scenes usually occurred in the latter half of the story, but in First Gundam sometimes there would be continuous fighting for several episodes, and sometimes there would be no fighting at all. Even though I was a kid at the time, I felt that was realistic. That feeling made a deep impression on me, so when it comes to "THE ORIGIN," I sometimes think “Is it really okay for me to be working on this?” It feels like a massive responsibility.
Suzuki: "VALVRAVE" was the first time. Before that, I had worked as an animation director using hand-drawn mecha and characters. As for the work itself, the job is basically the same whether it's hand-drawn or CG. It’s just about creating images that move in a certain way that you want them to. Even if you say that movement will be created with CG, you don’t really think about how the CG will depict it. You draw rough key frames and create movement guides. When it comes to creating the actual footage, the CG production staff gets to work, but since they can’t create movement that's attractive as anime, the mecha animation director actually has to create artwork to supplement the CG. Suzuki: That’s right. The detail is put in with CG. Even if I drew in lots of fine detail in my rough key frames, it wouldn’t amount to anything. I draw them so you can understand the silhouettes and other forms. I include supplements to explain how things should feel, like the directions of the arms and the angles things twist at. As artwork, it’s very simplified, but I draw it the same way I would for any normal anime. Suzuki: On the CG production side, they change the forms to match the drawings I make, so there weren’t any limitations there. They stretch out arms or torsos to suit the pose, or make an arm coming forward bigger so that it looks right. They work things out so they look nice artistically, and so I can do my work without any limitations. Suzuki: We worked hard on those small moving parts that you can’t do in normal hand-drawn animation. That said, for example, if I were to draw rough key frames for things like the caterpillar movement of the Guntank Early Type, it would be pointless. So instead I draw up guidelines which say, “This is how it should undulate and move,” and then I entrust that to the CG production team as reference. Also, we worked hard on figuring out how to resolve modelling constraints. When creating a pose then moving it, there are always places where there’s interference. So I sometimes wrote on the key frames that I wanted to smoothly cover that up. Incidentally, the way the Guntank Early Type moved was very difficult, so when it came to doing it in CG we extended the torso a bit to give it balance.
The other hard thing with CG is the still images. There are still images of the Guntank Early Type, but, for example, when they line up and stop, they become incredibly machine-like. Not being able to get the personality of a hand-drawn still image was a headache. It’s fine when it’s moving, but how it looks when it’s stopped is hard work. Suzuki: Maybe the slow motion in the latter half of the battle scene between Guntank Early Types in the first episode. The director, Mr. (Takashi) Imanishi, had drawn storyboards for it, but it was hard to visualize how slow it should be. When you go slow, things that were covered up and hidden by the speed become visible. So we had a lot more rough key frames, and we had to imagine how we were going to do it in CG, and that was difficult. It takes time to understand the overall flow of the scene in terms of movement as well, so my impression is that was very hard indeed.
Also, after the rough key frames were done, they wanted the movement to fill out more. There’s that scene where the Guntank Early Type dashes. At first, I thought the Guntank Early Type is incredibly huge, and it’s equipped with an amazing engine, but it can’t move very much and can’t pick up much speed. So I gave it somewhat subdued movements, but the production side told me they wanted it a bit faster, so I should fill out the movement a bit more. Suzuki: After the rough key frames are done, the overall motion is created with CG and I have the task of checking that. Then, we tweak things in closer detail: make this fast, slow this down a little, I want you to put in some pulls and holds, etc. That's a long process. We go through instructions and corrections multiple times, and I’m very sorry to the people doing the work, but that’s something I focus on checking. Suzuki: When I was working on "VALVRAVE" we had to do new modelling for the destroyed parts, and so we tried hard to destroy as little as possible. So on "THE ORIGIN," at first I thought the destruction would only be animated. But we had computer simulations of the destruction, and making full use of those we could even do the fragments in CG, so we were able to do that work without much worry.
Also, the designers put in detailed little gimmicks and things, and one of the good things about using CG is that you can depict how they move in close detail. In hand-drawn anime, it’s very difficult to depict those kinds of gimmicks, so they’re often simplified. CG can depict them closely. Suzuki: There were requests about small details, but I was left largely on my own, and I didn’t get any really big directions in particular. However, Mr. Yasuhiko and Mr. Imanishi were doing the storyboards for different parts, so I had to grope around to get the movement of Mr. Imanishi’s storyboards close to the feel of what Mr. Yasuhiko drew. And I had to accurately reflect the deep, detailed parts that Mr. Imanishi drew, so actually the portions of the process that worried me were rather big. Suzuki: Based on my previous work as a mecha animation director, the mobile worker is humanoid, so its motion is easier. However, in the designs the legs are very short, but I drew them a tiny bit longer in the rough key frames, so I think the CG production chief must’ve worked really hard on them. With a humanoid you’ve got hands and feet, and it’s easy to make them perform. There weren’t that many actual scenes, but I think they came out relatively well. Suzuki: The cockpit is attached to the exterior, so it was quite difficult to synchronize with the character animation. It’s not just the mecha -- I’m in charge of the animation for Ramba Ral and Mash as well, but the cockpit is so small, it’s hard to get them to “act” in there. Also, depicting cables. In Mr. Imanishi’s storyboards, he didn’t draw any cables on the mobile workers, but according to the designs they're dragging lots of cables as they fight. In motion, those cables would surely get in the way, and I was worried about whether we’d really be able to get the movement right with the CG. Suzuki: They're large machines, so I wanted to express the heaviness you would expect. In the rough key frames, I drew them so that the movement wouldn’t be light, but when they actually moved, there were aspects that still did seem light. So I made sure to check that. And they have those arms like giant pincers, but they fight without closing them, so the image I had when drawing it was that the mobile worker was an early type, so the pilot would also be inexperienced when fighting in it. Suzuki: Well, it’s got Casval and Artesia’s separation scene which Gundam fans know so well, so that’s a must-see for sure. Also, it depicts the development of the mobile workers which were the starting point of the mobile suit, and I was involved with that. So there’s some very rich stuff about mecha in there which you should look forward to. The combat scene appears in the trailer, but we’ve been doing more work on it, so it will be even more complete. I can’t wait for you all to see the actual finished footage.