Hiroshi Nagahama is a veteran of the anime industry in Japan, having spent time on series such as Revolutionary Girl Utena and others in the 1990s as an animator before becoming a director. He has directed such series as Detroit Metal City, Mushishi and The Flowers of Evil among several others.

Scoop’s Carrie Wood had the opportunity to sit down with Nagahama at Otakon 2019 to discuss the early days of his career and how far the anime industry has come in his time working in it. The following interview was conducted with assistance from Otakon’s translation service.

Scoop: How has your experience at Otakon and in DC been?
Hiroshi Nagahama (HN): It’s really exciting. Otakon is well-known in Japan as being a popular convention. [In America,] people have a tendency to call your name when you walk around at a convention, too. It’s a very different feeling here, when compared to Japan.

Scoop: A lot of the anime that you’ve directed has a very unique, distinct visual style to it. Is there a reason as to why you’ve gravitated to these unique-looking series specifically?
HN: When I implement ideas into anime, I try not to do what I did in the past. So if I were to say, “well, this worked for me before, so I’ll do it again,” that won’t lead to a further understanding of that direction, or of the product. So if I use this coffee cup I have as an example – let’s say I’m looking at this cup for the very first time. I would try to take a different perspective about this cup each time I look at it, maybe noticing more about the details of the lid, or the shape of the cup. That’s the approach I take to animation, to look at it in different ways.

Even in the U.S., you have people who say “soda” or “pop” when talking about the same thing. This is what I do when I make anime. I try to look at the same thing from different perspectives. And the people who will watch it, hopefully they will find out what perspective they’re looking at it from, and what feelings they’re going to have about it. That process has just resulted in me doing different things every time.

Scoop: Let’s talk about Revolutionary Girl Utena – the series is still very popular worldwide even 20 years after its debut. Can you discuss what it was like to work on the show as an artist earlier in your career?
HN: I was desperate to finish [Utena.] I was only an animator at the time, but on Utena I worked on both the art and settings, so I was working on backgrounds of the whole world too. I was very much in a panic about it. The producer thought I could do it, so I told myself, “I can do it!” So I kept pushing myself. As a result of Utena, though, how I look at things is very different now.

To go back to my coffee cup, the director, [Kunihiko Ikuhara,] would tell me – oh, make a cup. So, I made a cup. But then Ikuhara-san would say, ah, it’s a cup – but it needs to be the right cup for Utena. So I would get into the mindset of thinking, in the world of Utena, what purpose does this specific cup serve? Why is it here? What is Ikuhara-san trying to say about Utena by having this cup specifically here?

Scoop: Are you at all surprised that Utena continues to be popular today?
HN: Yes, definitely. There’s so many cosplays of Utena at conventions today, and it makes me very happy.

Scoop: In a similar vein, let’s talk about Fruits Basket. You were an episode director on the original series, and there’s a new series out today that’s bringing new viewers into the franchise. Can you reflect on what it was like to work on that series?
HN: I was a big fan of the original Fruits Basket. It was fun meeting Natsuki Takaya, who created the series – it was such a blessing to be able to work on that series. In Fruits Basket meetings, I tried to show how much I knew about the story. The anime director told me to do the opening sequence, and to put everything I loved about Fruits Basket in that opening. I made it so that, as the episodes progress, it shows a different perspective every time. I faced all of the characters backwards, and as the episodes progressed, hopefully the audience would be able to think what the characters were thinking. A lot of people have given me good feedback about the Fruits Basket opening – I always hoped that your imagination would be what completed the opening for yourself.

Scoop: As someone who’s been in the anime industry for many years now, can you describe how things have changed in the time you’ve been working?
HN: When I first started in the industry, we would physically make the copies of pictures, and would physically use films. We would take the pictures and make animation that way. Everything is digital now, and it’s getting less and less about actually putting things on paper. We thought it was going to be much easier to make anime, but that’s not the case!

Since we use less paper, and everything is digital now, it’s harder for me to really feel what’s being made since you can no longer really touch it. It’s getting farther from what we were creating before. I’m actually worried that the good parts about animation itself, the process, is going to be lost. People would take a long time to draw, and a different person would take another long time to precisely color that in – it’s disappointing that we’re losing that process a bit. With streaming today, there’s more ways to watch anime, but the animation is a little looser. I wish people would look more at older series in order to see the effort that was put into it. But there is definitely good opportunity out there, so I don’t think the future of animation is bad at all. The veteran artists who know the pain of physically drawing every time, I hope they’re telling the new animators about what they went through so that there’s still the appreciation for it.