A Long Interview with Makoto Kato, Director of "Yattekimini ni naru" A Great Response to the Great Leap Forward as a Director

In the animation that aired from October to December 2018, "Yagete Kimi ni naru," which meticulously depicts the subtleties of teenage emotions based on the motif of love between two young girls, the workmanship was sublimated beautifully into images, captivating viewers with its high-quality theatricality and filmic feel. We asked director Makoto Kato about how he created that visual beauty in this work, and asked him about the key points in the creation of the work. He spoke passionately about everything from his thought process in directing to his production theory as an on-site director.

Making it a work of two people, Yu and Toko

─ First of all, I would like to ask you why you chose this original work to direct.

Kato: The original author, KADOKAWA, first gave me several original works and asked me if there was one among them that I would like to direct. All of them were fascinating works, but the one that caught my attention intuitively was "Yatte kimi ni naru" ("It Will Soon Become You"). When I read it, I found that although the person I fell in love with was a woman of the same sex, the content of the story was about universal love. I myself was completely unfamiliar with the so-called "yuri" genre, but when creating a visual work, I want to expand the audience to include as many people as possible, regardless of whether they are fans of the original work or not. Universality is an important element in such a situation, and I felt that this original work had that.

─ Did you have a premonition that this would be a challenging film to direct?

Kato: There are people who like the original "Someday It Will Be You" as a yuri work, so I certainly felt a certain amount of self-consciousness about making a film that I had no knowledge of yuri. But on the other hand, if I had been the type of person who really liked yuri and said, "I know it best," I think the work would have been more biased and aimed at a narrower target audience. I think that taking a step back, or rather, the act of searching for "what is the yuri worldview" while drawing the work, is perhaps what made this work interesting.

─ What do you mean by searching?

Kato: The original author, Mr. Nakatani (Grebe), placed each of the characters around him as a character with a message for the main character. When you think about it that way, there are no gaps in the composition. Therefore, it is necessary to face each character and explore more than the teacher the core of why this character is making these facial expressions and gestures and speaking these lines of dialogue. Of course, the main characters, Koito Yuu and Nanami Toko, were not easy to explain, so I thought it was a worthwhile work to explore. And since the teacher also likes to watch anime works, there was a lot of pressure and nervousness about whether I would be able to meet his expectations (laugh). (Laughs) But even when we first met, I didn't want to make it sound strange. I remember declaring, "This is what I thought," or "I think this will be a weapon in the making of the work, and this is how I will make it. The producer also said, "Just tell them what you think," and I thought that if they saw my attitude and what I created, they would understand.


───How did you and Mr. Hanada (Juki), who is in charge of the series composition, work together on the composition of all 13 episodes?

Kato: Regarding the composition, I first submitted a rough draft of what I wanted to include in the original story. After that, I asked Mr. Hanada to work on it once and put it together as a proper composition plan. What I focused on at that time was where to end the story. Probably, if people who read the original work imagine an anime adaptation, many would think that it would go all the way through to the student council play. It is certainly a showcase. But I thought that if we went that far, this would become a work only about Nanami Toko. I agreed with Mr. Hanada that this work had to be about Yuu and Toko, and if we were to do the student council play in one season, it would be a waste to omit an important part of the original work. Therefore, we decided to start from the beginning and draw the story properly. I think it was the right decision.

─ What were you conscious of when you decided to make it a story of two people, Yu and Toko?

Kato: I had to make it a story of two people, so I started from the point where Yuu says, "I don't understand love," but I was conscious of the fact that I wanted to depict the process of her inner light filling herself step by step. There is a universe inside her, and light from light years away comes and fills her heart, which she thought was empty. In the planetarium scene in episode 12, when the stars overlap, it is a reference to that. As for Toko, there is only so much I can do in one cool season, and that is to follow my sister's shadow. I made sure that I would never waver from that. Even so, I was conscious of how I could properly depict the true voice of Toko, who is still lonely and longs to be with someone.


─ Did you find it difficult because of the high degree of perfection of the original story?

Kato: My first film as a director, "Sakurako-san no Ashiwa ni shita shita wa shinda ga burimashita" (Hereinafter "Sakurako-san"), was based on a novel, whereas this time it was based on a manga. (Laughs) Although this work is a manga, the frame layout and flow are very visual. So it is easy to fall into the trap of creating a screen that is similar to the panels, but if you just follow the pictures of the original work, there is no point in making an animation. Of course, I pick up and respect the parts of the manga that I think the viewer would like to see in this frame, but I also try to expand it as an animation. I thought I should pick up something in between the panels of the manga, a sense of presence. So I remember reading the original work without any extra space. When I picked up on what I thought was the meaning in the really small panels, the professor said to me, "You noticed it well.

───To take what you just said more specifically, what did you pay attention to when you were reading?

Kato: The most important thing was to emphasize the sense of atmosphere. I did not want to show the characters' facial expressions directly, but I wanted the viewer to explore them more through the images. I want to open up more possibilities with figurative expressions such as the shimmering of a tree when a character is about to cry, or one foot sticking out of the shadows, or a hand jerking a bit, and so on. It's okay if it's not my interpretation. It's okay if I don't come up with the interpretation. If the viewer sees that and thinks, "Maybe this character was thinking this way," then it becomes his/her own work. So the atmosphere was really important. I was just exploring the possibilities of how to depict this frame in a different way.