Shuzo John Shiota – MIFA interview

Annecy has just posted an interview with Shuzo John Shiota, President and CEO of Polygon Pictures Inc., who is attending at MIFA 2016 (Marché international du film d'animation d'Annecy / the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and its Market).  He is also on the jury of the short film competition at Annecy this year.  Shiota grew up in the United States and is a graduate of Sophia University in Tokyo.   He has been at Polygon since 1999 and has been president and CEO since 2003.

Ajin: Demi-Human (2016): Polygon Pictures co-production with Netflix

Tokyo-based Polygon Pictures was established in 1983 and is one of the oldest digital animation studios in the world.  Some notable anime works that they helped produce include Production IG’s Ghost in the Shell: Innocence (Mamoru Oshii, 2002), The Sky Crawlers (Mamoru Oshii, 2008, Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror (Shinsuke Sato, 2009) and more recently they co-produced Ronia the Robber’s Daughter (Gorō Miyazaki, 2014-15) with Studio Ghibli.  They create fully CG television series in collaboration with American companies such as Tranformers: Prime (2010-13), Tron: Uprising (2012-13), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008-14) as well as digital animation for films, video games, exhibitions, websites and smart devices.  Polygon also have their own original character properties such as Rocky + Hopper.  In 2013 they opened a joint venture studio in Malaysia: Silver Ant PPI.

Although most of their work is pretty mainstream, they do also occasionally support artistic projects.  One major case in point is the work of Kōji Yamamura.  The company’s first international co-production was Yamamura’s NFB film Muybridge’s Strings in 2011.

Polygon partnered with Netflix earlier this year to create a 13-episode anime series AJIN: Demi-Human (亜人, 2016) based on the seinen manga by Gamon Sakurai.  The second season is due out this fall. 

The transcript of Shuzo’s interview follows, with asides and minor errors edited out. 

MIFA: What are the biggest challenges facing the animation industry today?

Shiota:  The challenge is also a big benefit that we have been seeing in the past two years.  Because of the advent of the streaming video like the Netflixes, the Amazons, and the Hulus, there is suddenly a huge window of opportunity to show our work whereas before our genre, which is anime.  .  .  it was very difficult to find a place to show it in the international media.  But with the steaming video, we are able to produce shows and show them to many, many different countries at the same time.  So the challenge actually is that we have more than enough demand to create a show and there is now an opportunity to license the show for lucrative amounts of money. The challenge is actually how do we create the show facing the demand and how do we produce a show with these parameters.  It’s a matter of finding enough talent [and] finding enough interesting projects, because the opportunities are there. 

MIFA:  How is your company addressing these industry changes?

Shiota: We are having more strategic relationships with publishers – Japanese publishers like Kodansha – to find properties.  We are coming up with ideas on our own.   The elementary [aspects] to these things aren’t changing, the challenge is to find enough talent, great talent, to help us produce the shows.  We are sourcing talent not just from Japan but from all over the world.  We have created a studio in Malaysia to offshore some of the production and to make it manageable within the schedule and the budget.  It’s more of how do we find enough animators, talented animators to help us produce the show.

MIFA: What are your expectations from this year’s MIFA?

 Shiota:  I’m here mostly to connect and network.  And also to meet up with people that I have known and try to exchange information.  Like I said, the medium is changing extremely rapidly and so it is very dynamic and so there are many more opportunities to work together as there weren’t [before].  I am try to find, to connect, and to digest as much information as possible and try to find new opportunities.  .  .  For me it’s mostly trying to find new ideas [and] people to work with because in terms of distribution we’re in a pretty good place.  For me, like I said, we’re trying to find new talent, new people to work with, to help us produce new shows.  .  .  It’s my first time here.  It’s amazing.  This is crazy.

Annecy 2016: P'tits Déj du court / Shorts & Breakfast - Koji YAMAMURA

 

Kōji Yamamura is in Annecy with his latest animated short “Parade” de Satie (サティの「パラード」/ Satie’s “Parade”), which was made in honour of the centenary of Erik Satie’s ballet Parade (1916-17) and the 150^th anniversary of Satie’s birth (1866-1925).  The film soundtrack uses a recording of “Parade” by the Dutch indie jazz band, Willem Breuker Kollektief.

All of the filmmakers in the Annecy shorts competition are invited to a breakfast chat with the festival’s artistic director Marcel Jean called P'tits Déj du court (Shorts + Breakfast) to “talk about the genesis of their films” as well as “the development and the artistic and technical choices.”  Yamamura’s breakfast occurred Tuesday, June 14^th.  Ilan Nguyen was on hand to interpret between French and Japanese for Yamamura.  The following is an approximate English translation of the proceedings. 

Jean: I now invite the director of “Parade”, Kōji Yamamura, to join me. [applause]  So, Erik Satie.  .  . what is your relationship with this great composer?

Yamamura:  I had a CD of Satie’s music.  I have known his music since I was about 20 years old.  There was an exhibition about Satie about 30 years ago and I got a copy of the catalogue.  In it I learned a great deal about Satie as a person.  For example, that he had lived alone in Arcueil in a small apartment that no one ever visited.  After his death they discovered many things in his apartment, including thousands of cards that he had written and drawn on.  These cards had texts that were ironical.   This later, lonely period of Satie’s life interested me a lot. 

Jean:  “Parade” is of course by Erik Satie, but Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau where also involved in the work.  Did you consider at all including them or did you want to concentrate on Satie?       

  

Yamamura:  I very much concentrated on the character of Erik Satie.  I wanted the work to express the life of Erik Satie, and for “Parade” to be one element of the larger picture.  Finally, I wanted to concentrate on the music of this ballet itself.  As the music plays, I integrate certain elements of the life of Satie.  There was a certain distance between Satie and Cocteau.  From the start, Satie did not fully appreciate Cocteau’s script.  Picasso and Satie started getting along well and Cocteau became a bit of a third wheel.  In the end, Satie did not remain faithful to the original text of Cocteau. 

Jean: You rightly say that you are aligning yourself with the music of Erik Satie, so is the length of your film predetermined by the length of the music?  Also is the music not also a train of thought?

Yamamura:  Initially, my hope was to reproduce in animation the first public performance of “Parade” in 1917. As it is a ballet, the length of the music would be already set.  The information about the original performance was pretty sketchy, so I used some of these fragments, these choreographed elements and used my own ideas. . . . . . [I didn’t catch all of this part]

Jean: “Parade” is a ballet and a ballet is a dance, “the art of movement”.  When I watch the films of Kōji Yamamura, there is an approach to movement that is very stylised and very free, and I ask myself, at what point, in ‘Parade’ but also in general,  does dance or other arts of movement act as a reference?

Yamamura: Obviously, the elements of movement, dance in particular, are the important elements for me.  As we know, in animation the animator creates a choreography of movement in a certain sense.  Of course, there exists, in this case in particular, different ways of expressing the internal.  But when one compares the relationship between the ballet and the music on the one hand and the animation and the music on the other, there are notable differences.  It’s a question of corporeality.  The ballet is restricted by the corporeality of the human body, but animation is free of this.  It is not constrained by the limitations of the body. 

Jean: [to the audience] Do you have any questions for Kōji Yamamura? 

Audience member:  Thank you so much for bringing us films that tell us a lot about culture.  First you brought us a film that told us the story of Muybridge, and now a story about Cocteau and Satie.  My question actually does not pertain to your film but to the film that we saw last night, The Red Turtle [the French-Japanese-Belgian feature film co-produced by Wild Bunch and Studio Ghibli].  Everyone was agreeing that Michaël Dudok de Wit was influenced by Japanese art.  What did you think about this film?

Yamamura: Well, it’s a bit difficult to publicly state my opinion on this subject.  I will answer quite frankly, I think this material would have been more appropriate as a short film.  It’s not quite obvious why it would have been done as a feature.   

[There were two more audience questions before the session wrapped up.]