Interview with Kyouhei Ishiguro, Director of "The Whale's Children Sing on the Sand": "I have a core belief in making things up"--Methods for Creating Fantasy

Whale Children Sing on the Sand" finished airing its TV series at the end of 2017. This fantasy work is set on the Mud Whale, a small island-like drifting ship in the sandy sea, and tells the story of its epic adventures from the perspective of Chakuro, a boy who lives there. Based on a manga by Umeda Abi, currently serialized in Mystery Bonita, the work has gained popularity for its beautifully rendered artwork and ephemeral worldview.
We asked director Kyohei Ishiguro, who has fully depicted the fate of the characters and recreated the atmosphere of the work in animation, about his approach to creating the world of this work. While his filmography includes a variety of works, this is surprisingly his first attempt at a fantasy film. While sticking to analog art, he also showed effective use of computer graphics and a particular attention to the use of colors, and we learned that behind the finished beautiful images, there was a tremendous amount of ingenuity to stay close to the original story and tireless efforts by the staff to maintain the quality until the very end. The film is a great example of the effort that went into the production of this film.

The sense of distance from the characters differs from creator to creator.

───What was your impression of Umeda-sensei's original work when you first saw it?

Ishiguro: What caught my attention at first was the beauty of the line drawings. The door picture, of course, but the drawings on each page were also amazing. Later, I was surprised to learn that you did almost all of these drawings by yourself. The main character Chakuro and his friends live in "Mud Whale," an isolated world that has remained unchanged for a long time. I wanted to reproduce the sense of stagnation and dystopian atmosphere in the anime. Also, since the story is set in exile and 100 years have passed on a sea of sand, I always tried to create the image of a space that has been left behind, like a box garden.


─ ─ What were the main policies you followed in directing this film, and what did you tell the storyboarders and directors for each episode?

Ishiguro: Overall, I was conscious of making cuts that were easy to understand. I tried to avoid making cuts that were too eccentric, and when ordering storyboards, I asked them to avoid making cuts that were too eccentric. I also focused on following the characters while presenting the worldview. I wondered if I should make a lot of cuts to explain the setting or show the art, but I thought it would be pointless unless I followed the characters. So, I did not include many explanations of the locations, but rather showed the characters walking around and showed the space through camera work and other means, so that the audience could make some kind of guesses just from the dialogue. I often used camera work to show a wider view of the world through the characters, including the direction of their movements. In the first episode, the mud whales are on the upper side of the screen, and Nagarejima is on the lower side. The upper side is upstream, so perhaps the mud whale should be on the lower side, but considering the flow of the story, I thought it would be more natural to place the mud whale higher. Perhaps, subconsciously, I was following the flow of the manga when I opened it.

───What were you conscious of in your depiction of the characters?

Ishiguro: I feel that Mr. Umeda is very objective about his characters, and he is not afraid to make them suffer cruel fates in his works. It's kind of cool that he is willing to let his characters suffer cruel fates. This may be just my own feeling, but I feel that the distance he keeps from the characters he creates is similar to that of Mr. Odado of "Danchi Tomoo" (*Director Ishiguro was the series director for the first half of the animated version). I myself tend to look at things from the perspective of the main character, so in that sense, I can no longer look objectively at the works I have created in the past. In this work, too, it would be painful if Chakuro cried, but I tried to keep that feeling in check, while at the same time being careful to keep the comical aspects of the original work as much as possible to strike the right balance, so that the audience would not feel too hurt. The stronger the emotional attachment, the more you want the characters to be happy, so I envy Mr. Umeda's ability as an artist to move the characters objectively. I think it is really cool that he can do that, including how he wants to be as a creator.


──One of the features of this work is the elaborately hand-drawn background art. What kind of image did you have in mind when you created the art?

Ishiguro: When I saw Mr. Umeda's manga, I felt that his use of color was very individualistic, so I wanted to interpret that characteristic in my own mind before incorporating it into the film. The reason why I asked the art to leave the solid lines was to preserve this illustration-like quality. I also used colors that do not exist in the actual landscape as if they were color inserts. I had discussed this with the art director, Toshiharu Mizutani, from the very beginning. Mr. Mizutani is from Kobayashi Productions (an art company led by Shichiro Kobayashi, who was active in the early days of TV animation and focused on hand-drawn art; the company was dissolved in 2011), and he is very skilled at creating art with main lines. Based on his experience, I thought he would definitely be a good fit for this film. Surprisingly, however, Mr. Mizutani had not done much art for fantasy works in his long career. Of course it must have been difficult to draw something that had no real scenery, but I was happy to hear that he said he enjoyed it.

───Did you have any materials that you presented to Mr. Mizutani in order to work out a specific image?

Ishiguro: I gave him a lot of photo references for the art board. I picked up a few that were close to my own image from a collection of photographs, and he compared them with Mr. Umeda's illustrations and my ideas, such as "I want the evening sky to be this color," or "I want the atmosphere of the color scheme to be in this direction. For example, there is a village in Spain where the walls are painted with brightly saturated red paint, and that unrealistic atmosphere was helpful. I also felt that the photograph of the ruins with moss growing all over the place was dystopian and close to the world of the work. Mizutani-san expanded on the images from the photos I presented, and we sometimes talked about how they were connected to the ancient Alexandria period and Cappadocia, a World Heritage site in Turkey. For the landscape of Cappadocia, Mr. Mizutani lent me the film "Snow Trails" (2014), which I thought was indeed like a mud whale, and we also shared various reference materials such as a collection of illustrations by Mobius, a Bande dessinée (French-style manga) artist, and Hiroshi Yoshida, a Japanese printmaker of the Taisho period. We shared these references with each other as we developed our worldview.