A Taste of Employment
 In May, the assistant manager of my apartment
building, who had gone to school in Colorado, introduced me to a friend of his that worked
as an as assistant director in an animation studio called Visual 80. They
were working on Spiral Zone for a US company at the time and the
American translator and I got to talking and she invited me to go back and work for them.
I was so excited that I almost exploded.
My first real anime job!
The Japanese management of Visual 80 was never told that
I was “going to work” for them so they figured that I was just some weird
American hanging around the studio, which, in fact, was the case. I got Ken to come in
with me and we experienced Japanese animation production, albeit for a US show.
It was really interesting. I spent time with the
producers, learning about how they managed the production and with the directors and
assistant directors seeing how they did their work.
Ken and I decided that we wanted to learn to animate and
one of the chief animators—a really scary guy—began to teach
us. He looked like an old man because of his gray hair but it turns out that he was only
28 and had some kind of accident and the medicine they gave him turned his hair gray. He
had absolutely no sense of humor—at least that I could
detect—and he would get mad when I fooled around a little bit.3 This is where I learned the
great truth of being an animator—most of the time you don’t get to draw
anything you are interested in. Ken could take this. I could not.
I decided to learn to paint cels instead, which was much
easier and fun. I helped out a little bit when subcontracted work would come in and the
very first real work I did was some cels on an Orange Road TV episode.
The director of Spiral Zone was a French
Canadian who had a very short temper. The translator hated him (usually because he made
her work harder) and she stabbed him in the back every chance she got and made working in
Japan totally miserable for him.
He did give me some great advice on art and animating
though, which I will be forever grateful for.
Eventually, he gave up and moved back to Canada and they
sent a new director, a Greek man, to take over the show.
I didn’t have a formal job and cel painting was
getting old so I started helping them out with retake checking and such. Once the
translator discovered that I would do this, she stopped and whenever the Greek director
was out of town (about half the time) I had to do it alone. So
here’s somebody who had never worked in an animation company before, never had any
formal training, never had the approval of the directors (Japanese or US), and had no
interest whatsoever in American animation checking shows for director’s
retakes. Thankfully the Japanese staff pretty much figured out what was going on
and helped me out, showing me how to call retakes in a reasonable and efficient way.
I spent my afternoons and evenings at Visual and some
days I skipped Japanese school to go there when it was busy. (I didn’t even consider
that this could have killed my visa.) I would stay there all Saturday night and hang out
with the producers and animators. Sometimes we watched new anime shows and
sometimes old live action movies like the Hidden Fortress and the Wizard of
Oz. I would go home at 5 or 6 A.M. Sunday morning and
sleep until midday.
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My First Meeting With Megalomania
Bit by bit the translator decided she really wanted to
move back to the States and started trying to find ways to get the US company Visual was
working with to take her on. She figured that by making herself look superior to
everyone else that they would fall to their knees and beg her to go. This was compounded
by her totally wrong idea that she could be a great director/producer.
She was totally insane. She hated the
Japanese and went on about terrible Japanese men are (even though she was married
to a Japanese man) and about how she hated Japan. She believed in space aliens
and thought that Men in Black followed her around sometimes. (This was
many years before the X-Files and the MIB movie!) A few times she told me about
how they had secret bases in the Antarctic and on the Moon. She had delusions about being
a great artist and kept sketching herself. At least she had some talent—she built a
clay model of a lizardy thing that was pretty neat.
She thought she was very important and used to speak in
common terms to the president of the company (a social no-no) and come up with crazy plans
for new projects.
Once she wanted to make up a production proposal for an incredibly
bad idea she had and I ended up rewriting the whole thing on a broken down
typewriter in the office and she submitted the new version with her own name on it. My
version had about 2% of her story in it. The remake was called the
Tears of Illandra. (It wasn’t half bad and I still have the script around
somewhere.) I did incredibly bad character designs for it. At least she
helped by designing one of the (alien) characters.
The real problem was that she started dreaming up weird
ideas that the Japanese were screwing the US company. When the chief producer
from the US came over once the translator told her all sorts of crazy stories and made her
think that the Japanese were doing all sorts of bad things behind their backs. It was
pretty important for Visual to get another series from the US company and she was making
it less likely that would happen with every nutso word that came out of her mouth.
Once, when she told me about some wacko tale she had just
told the US producer, I couldn’t take it any more and I had to tell the Japanese. I
wrote out a crude letter explaining what I had heard, knowing that I wasn’t good
enough to explain what I wanted to yet and gave it to the chief director. He read it and immediately
called the translator, who went crazy and yelled at me for
hours.
After that I knew that if she was going to stay there was
no way I wanted to be there because I could never communicate with the Japanese staff
better than she could and she would undermine everything I would do. So I left.
I went back to the school and told them I wanted to
start training in the animation school as soon as possible. That US company never worked
with Visual again and the translator eventually moved back to the US to pursue her mad
goal of becoming a great writer and artist. |
Animation = Education?
They transferred me from the language school to the
animation school in October after six months of Japanese study. (Sink or swim, buddy!)
Initially, it was really hard to deal with but the guy who sat next to me
was very helpful and they managed to catch me up to the rest of the class.
Ken came into the class and we tried to figure the rest
out together.
We studied basic animation theory, drawing our own
animated scenes based on ideas the teachers gave us, then learned how to do a good
clean-up of a key animator’s rough drawing. This is extremely important and cannot be
overstressed. Lines define a great part of the look of the animation and line quality can
mean the difference between mediocre and beautiful. When you are sitting in a classroom
drawing lines for days on end it gets really boring though!.
Until I went to Visual I thought that I wanted to be a character
designer but I soon found out that my real strengths lie elsewhere. (Especially
since I am a very slow designer and could never make a schedule.) After
the experience at Visual I saw that I could probably do directing work pretty well so when
I went into the animation school I wanted to get as broad an overview of the animation
process as possible so that I could someday get a position as a director or assistant
director. (Naturally, everyone under the sun thinks he can direct and that is is easy and
there isn’t much study involved. Nothing could be further from the truth!)
The school’s main office, main animation and manga
classrooms were near Hiroo station, near the middle of the city. It’s a very
nice but very expensive area—lots of embassies around there. It was just over an
hour’s train ride from my apartment and it was not fun during rush
hour. After awhile I changed to the second year animation class room which was in the
northern part of town, up past Ikebukuro station. |
