How was the natural atmosphere of "Tsuki ga Kirei" created?　Long interview with director Seiji Kishi

The original TV anime "Tsuki ga Kirei," which meticulously depicts the love lives of junior high school students, has been a hot topic this spring. Why does this anime, which does not take a flashy approach, capture people's hearts?　We spoke with director Seiji Kishi and producer Ken Minami of Flying Dog about the story behind the creation of this work and the many ways in which they achieved the natural, high-quality screen production that wafts from the screen.

─ When I saw "Tsuki ga Kirei", I had the impression that it was a work that did not seem to exist until now. How did you start planning this film?

Kishi: Minami-san asked me, "Why don't you try a love story? Kishi Minami asked me if I was interested in doing a love story. At that time, I asked him if he could do it. I could have said no, but I had no choice but to answer, "Yes, let's do it! I had no choice but to answer, "Let's do it! However, there are many forms of love stories, and after thinking about what form the story should take, I decided to carefully depict adolescent romance, because I thought there was a lot of interest in the ordinary, everyday lives of ordinary junior high school students. I think there have been works depicting junior high school student romance in the past with comical themes, but pure love is a project that you don't see very often in anime. And since it is a type of story that would not come to me (laughs), I think it gave the impression that it was new.

─ What did producer Minami see in Director Kishi that made him approach you with this project?

Minami: I believe that "Seiji Kishi is not good at any genre.

─ You mean "nothing he is good at"?

Minami: Yes. I think that "genre" for Director Kishi simply means what he has worked on before, and the general public thinks so. I don't think that Kishi is an animation director who wants to work only on specific subjects. Therefore, I think it would be a good step for the future to raise his value by giving him a subject he has never worked on before. I am also confident from our past relationship that no matter what subject matter I give him, he will definitely make it better than a certain level, and I am sure that he is a person who can find motivation in it.

─ Director Kishi has worked with Yuko Kakihara, who wrote the script and composed the series of this film, in the past, but is it because of this theme that you asked her to write the script?

Kishi: Yes, that's right. It is also a love story, so I wanted a woman's point of view. So, I asked Kakihara-san to direct this story, because of her past work. There are two of us here, so that's enough for the male point of view (laughs).

Minami: We old men only know the logic of men. The word "like" in love is completely different between men and women. I would like them to incorporate this into the script without having to explain it to us. In fact, he did explain it to me, but I thought, "I guess I don't understand women after all! (laughs).

K: I think there are a lot of things in the heroine Akane's behavior that don't make sense from a male point of view. I asked Kakihara-san to describe various behaviors and psychology from a woman's point of view.

Minami: There are behaviors of women that men do not know about. There are things that girls do that guys don't know, even to the point of saying, "They go to the bathroom together, but what are they doing? What are they doing? Men can't write that. There are many parts of the dialogue that were improvised by the voice actors, but even if they were to speak those lines, they would need something to call them out. In other words, we needed something that would make them think, "If the script says this much, then it's okay to go this far.

K: You did a wonderful job in fulfilling that role. This time, we are going to depict a love story between a boy and a girl in junior high school who live outside of the city center, and even if the story is not very good, we asked her to structure it in such a way that it can be a story in its own right.

K: So you decided on the stage of the story first, and then developed the characters from there?

Kishi: Those two things happened almost simultaneously. I had a vague idea of the characters at the beginning, but at the same time I decided on the stage. In order to depict the pure love story of a junior high school student, an urban setting would give too much information and make the story look clumsy. So we searched for a good location in the suburbs of Tokyo that would also make location scouting easier, and we found Kawagoe. I went there for location scouting once when we were in the idea stage, and after walking around the town, we decided that it looked like an interesting place.


K: Did you add drums and festivals to the story at that time?

K: That came much later. After we decided on Kawagoe as the setting, we went on a more detailed location scouting and happened to stop by a shrine and heard that they were practicing Ohayashi (traditional Japanese music). I thought it sounded interesting and was introduced to the idea of incorporating it into the story, so I went there that day. That was in a place called Renjaku-cho (Kawagoe City). It really came about by chance, didn't it?

─ That sounds like a live-action production.

K: Since this was an original animation, we were willing to take what we could from the town as elements of the story.

K: That's a fresh approach to making animation.

K: Yes, it was fresh. I've been to Kawagoe many times before, but I felt nostalgic there. The atmosphere of the musical gatherings is like an old-fashioned neighborhood association, or a "neighborhood" community. People in the neighborhood know everyone in town, and if a child misbehaves in any way, the uncle next door will jump in and get angry with him. As one of the members of the musical troupe told me when I interviewed him, "No one in our community is a degenerate. There are some mischievous kids, but they show a certain amount of respect to their superiors, and there is a firm connection both horizontally and vertically. It was a nostalgic place, and in retrospect, it is fresh and inspiring.