The Studio Orange Staff Talks With Anime Herald

Note: Due to the time-sensitive nature of our coverage, this article will debut on the main Anime Herald site on May 14. We apologize for the inconvenience.

• Author: Seth Burn

• Editor: Samantha Ferreira

Anime Corner: The BEASTARS finale is around the corner. Looking back over the past five years, how has the series changed the studio?

Studio Orange: We worked on Trigun Stampede after starting BEASTARS. We were able to take a lot of the technical advancements from Trigun Stampede and apply them to BEASTARS.

Anime Herald: What was it like working with Joe Hisaishi, Nobuko Toda, Kazuma Jinnouchi, and Diana Garnet on the ED for Leviathan?

Studio Orange: We just wrapped episode 2, so there’s still a lot more to do on the music side. Hisaishi-san has created such fantastic music for it. We are looking forward to the strong team that’s creating the music.

Toda-san and Jinnouchi-san are continuing to work on creating further episodes. We feel very confident and strong about their music as well so we are very excited to keep on working with them.

Anime Corner: In comparison to some of your other titles, how has working on Leviathan been?

Studio Orange: Compared to our other shows, one of the unique aspects of Leviathan is that we are trying to replicate more technical things than we are used to doing with hand-drawn animation. That’s not about replication. It’s not just about re-creating. It’s about taking the techniques and advancing them. The advancement of the animation techniques.

Anime Herald: What are Mr. Inomoto’s, and therefore, Studio Orange’s principles?

Studio Orange: There are a lot of gaps between the hand-drawn and the CG side in Japan. Our intention, our principle, is to overcome that gap and go further beyond.

Anime Corner: What does the near and far future hold for Studio Orange? Is there a project you’d like to take on?

Studio Orange: We’d like to continue working on TV series, but we’d also love to work on more movies. Also, It’s a bitter challenge to do, but we’d also like to do more original stories shows as well.

Anime Herald: Are there any stories you’d care to share from your trip to Otakon or to Anime NYC?

Studio Orange: For New York City itself, it’s a very exciting town. It’s also a very scary town, in terms of driving around. We drove around. We’ve been to a lot of museums so far. It’s been very exciting. It’s his (Daigo Ikeda) first time at Anime NYC, or any convention. In Japan there aren’t conventions. Especially, the type where fans and creatives, or the corporations that do business, are all together, creating more of a festival feeling. Usually it’s separated between the attendees, and the corporations. So that’s something we feel is very unique here.

For my side (Yoshihiro Watanabe), this Summer was tough for me. Doing five or six conventions over the Summer. It was the most number of conventions I’ve ever done. I think one of the reasons we do conventions is the communication with the market. Market is such a cool word, but I mean our viewers. We want to see who they are and what they are thinking. If we’re going to continue to create shows, we’re not going to base it off of that data, but also we’re going to consider it. Who we are making the shows for is something that is very important. My objective is to bring (Daigo) Ikeda or other people who haven’t been to conventions to see what kind of experience we can bring to a convention, and what they can take back from the convention to the production studio.

Anime Corner: It feels like Orange has almost singlehandedly changed the CGI anime outlook, proving that this non-traditional technique can work with long-running quality series. Would you say the animation scene has changed since you first started working, and would say Orange contributed to that significantly?

Studio Orange: It’s definitely part of our intention to make sure that people are more familiar with what CGI animation possibly can do.

We’ve been very strategic about it. For Land of the Lustrous, it resembles much more standard hand-drawn Japanese anime. As we go further away from there, we’ve been trying to test out new methods. Sometimes, we’ll try to implement Disney-like animation techniques, or entirely new ones. Dropping a frame, or adding much more new ones. We’re trying experiments to see what people can become more receptive to.

Anime Herald: Do you have any questions for us?

Studio Orange: What is the current perception of Studio Orange?

Anime Herald: An interesting question. When I think of Studio Orange, I think more of the animation itself than I think of the stories themselves. The style. Particularly the scenes you spent a lot of effort on. The ones that are the key scenes with a high amount of animation per frame. I don’t know if “boutique” is the right word, but where someone is going to make something very beautiful for a ten-to-fifteen second shot. Which is also very good for memes on Twitter, by the way. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I think of Studio Orange, I think of ten-second animation scenes.

Studio Orange: I feel that the storytelling side is a much challenging area where we need to step up. If you look at Leviathan, we’d hope to get feedback.

Anime Corner: I would say I’m pretty similar. I’d think about motion, particularly smaller, more intricate movements. Arms moving, hands moving, facial expressions. I’d think about that.

With shows like Trigun Stampede and BEASTARS, my friends who had looked down on CG animation stopped doing so because of those shows.

Anime Herald: CGI got a bad reputation because it looked bad. If you can make beautiful CGI, it will be accepted.