The Present and Future of Anime Studios (Part 3) │Speaking With Studio Chizu’s Yuichiro Saito About What Has and Hasn’t Changed With Animation

Studio Chizu Prioritizes the Films

ーー I want to ask you about BELLE, specifically about how it relates to Beauty and the Beast. How did you feel when Hosoda suggested that he wanted to use Beauty and the Beast as a motif for his new film?

Saito: The original Beauty and the Beast is a French novel from the 1700s. Each generation has had countless creators make not only movies but other works inspired by it, so the story is one of Hosoda’s favorites. Contrasting the composition of the various stories, the most appealing thing about the Disney version is the Beast, or so everyone says. A similar construct appears in Wolf Children, and there was some influence on The Boy and the Beast as well. When you point it out, you can see that we’ve always been using this concept.

So when we talked about what kind of movie we wanted to make this time, there were three things that Hosoda and I spoke about.

The first thing was using stories that we like as a base for the project. The second was that, up until now, the stories have been based on things that have happened around Hosoda or his family. We could still have that as the root of the story while avoiding writing the story as it actually happened. Finally, we talked about having a teenage girl as the protagonist, just as we did back with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. I remember that we spoke about all of this while in a car.

As an example of what we wanted to do – and this may seem a bit arrogant – but when Akira Kurosawa made The Seven Samurai in 1945 and then Yojimbo in 1961, it was as if he had come full circle as a creator by making a movie with the same motifs and themes.

After Kurosawa made The Seven Samurai, the people around him were told him that he needs to make another samurai action movie. However, he didn’t dare do that.

After he got a bit older, he entered a new phase of his life and used the same motifs and themes in a new challenge.

Also, Hosoda directed Digimon Adventures: Our War Game and Summer Wars, two movies with the theme of the internet, ten years apart. Taking on the theme of dual personalities on the internet and linking it with the Beast motif of dual personalities was a clever way to lead to the creation of a brand-new work.

ーー What was the reason you took on this challenge?

Saito: It’s because the focus is on our films. Those who create make that their priority, or maybe it’s the work itself that makes people focus on it. All of the instructions, from "We can't do that," to "we should do this" all add up to become part of the work.

That’s exactly why we shouldn’t make the same thing over and over. We can't make a sequel; it's difficult to do that. Society keeps changing - as do we - so it's a must that the works keep changing and taking on new challenges. Not just animation, but movies in general reflect modern day and they are made in line with the changing values of society. Movies themselves need to change. However, some aspects will never change. Having the motivation to proactively change what needs to be changed while valuing the unchanging parts are what makes Hosoda's works what they are, and the films themselves are the main characters.