I got my Time of Eve Evlend Coffee Canister signed by the man himself!
AlltheAnime/Anime Limited (I forget what I'm specifically supposed to call them...), the UK licensors for Patema Inverted, flew director Yasuhiro Yoshiura over for a screening of the movie, followed by a brief QA session, today. No particularly deep cuts in the discussion, but I’ll paraphrase what I remember - bare in mind that this is a truncated version of the key points based on my memory of an on-the-fly translation I heard four hours ago augmented by some terrible shorthand notes, so don’t read anything too deep into an specific wording here or anything. Also skipping anything I didn’t think was particularly interesting and/or amusing.
- Apparently Yoshiura managed to lose a bet with AL director Andrew Partridge over the number of people in the audience who had seen Time of Eve - he seemed to be really, really lowballing in terms of his expectations (in so much as just fifteen people having seen it was enough to win AP a pint). That said, AP did hand him an extremely expensive looking bottle of whiskey for having won the Judges and Audience awards at last years SLA.
- He found the architecture (Edinburgh castle, and the Filmhouse cinema itself) pretty interesting. Also all the adverts before the movie, specifically calling out the trailer for the new Spike Jonze movie (Her) and “The Bacons” [*]
- Most (of not all) of the onscreen text in the film is in English. I hopefully caught the name right, but apparently Michael Arias (who I guess was the director of Tekkon Kinkreet?) assisted. Would probably explain why it’s 99% accurate (Absent is spelt Abcent at one point, if I was to get picky ^^
- Akira Yamaoka (Famed game music composer, mostly of Silent Hill fame I guess) did the Sound Design for the movie (all audio other than the VA and the music). Not the first movie he has done Sound Design for (apparently did work for the second Silent Hill LA movie, at least). Apparently there’s at least one sound effect (a klaxon noise) that’s recycled from Silent Hill - wasn’t specifically asked for, but Yoshiura felt like maybe Yamaoka “read his mind”.
- It’s uncommon, but Yoshiura apparently did voice direction himself. States that he has a background in acting, so it’s something he felt he wanted to do himself.
- The movies opening sequence uses dialogue in Esperanto, as does the closing theme. He said it’s because his image of Esperanto was of “something people wanted to popularise but kind of failed at”, which he felt fit the image of the movie (^^;?)
- AP mentions that it’s a film that doesn’t necessarily at first look like an actual story, but that it has a lot of details that can be picked up on, allowing you to discuss and read into things (specifically calls out being a little confused about the
at first, a conversation I’ve also had with other people, FWIW). Yoshiura comments that whilst he wanted it to be a broadly appealing movie, he also likes geeky films with a lot of interesting details. Whilst he wanted to make sure that he presented a relatively simply story about a hero and heroine with
on one level, he also likes to make films which raise questions which can be answered by thinking about things in a logical sense.
- In relation to the above, when answering a later question about the amount of detail put into the setting (and details like eye colour and the differing design ethos between Aiga and the below-ground folks), he also posits that the spirit of a film is in the details - he believes that a seemingly excessive amount of detail is the right amount of detail you should be imbuing a movie with. (Personal note - still love the orange Banana’s and red-and-black striped Bumblebees in the drawing in child-Patema’s bedroom).
- A production like this takes around one year of preparation/planning work, and a further year and a half of actual production to complete.
- When asked if he deliberately imbued his films with subversive political themes (1984 was called out during the question, to which Yoshiura responded, in English, “I like this film”
, he said that whilst his works have various themes, in the case of Patema he was mostly focused on making an entertainment movie, and it wasn’t entirely intentional a move. That said, movies he watches may unintentionally influence him during production (when asked about the overarching themes of his works later, he suggested that he might just subconsciously like these kinds of themes).
- The design of the underground world is inspired somewhat by French comics (he might have mentioned a specific work/name here, but I didn’t catch it). Aiga is influenced by general Modernist designs, but specifically mentions some influence from Indian city Chandigarh.
- His life motto is “Preservence is Power!”
- Most of the character names (he started out by saying “the underground characters”, but later admitted it was pretty much the case for everyone in the movie) are named after figures from books he likes. Specifically calls out the author Yastaka Tsutsui (He specifically mentioned Paprika, though I assume that’s because he figured most people in the audience would know the Satoshi Kon adaptation, though he also wrote The Girl Who Leapt Through Time).
- His Anime Mirai short, Harmonie, was apparently finished just before he flew out on this trip (presumably before he headed for France for a recent screening of Patema, rather than specifically the UK leg). Whilst he thinks it’s thematically a different work than Time of Eve and Patema (though he states that the fact he was playing in the same thematic ground there wasn’t entirely intentional), he definitely thinks it’s a “more bitter” work.
[*] - SLA injoke. The “please switch off your phone” message that plays in many UK cinemas is sponsored by a mobile phone network who used Kevin Bacon in their advertising. Obviously, once you are subjected to the same advert 8-10 times over a course of a weekend (16-18 times over two if you do Glasgow and Edinburgh), it takes on a certain memetic quality. AP called the Bacon advert out as well.
this was todays example.
