[PRODUCTION] Hideyuki Tomioka x Katsuyuki Sumizawa Special Interview (Patreon)

PRODUCER Hideyuki Tomioka

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SERIES COMPOSITION & SCREENWRITER Katsuyuki Sumizawa

SPECIAL INTERVIEW

From the staff side, we invited the two men most deeply involved with the New Mobile Report Gundam Wing series, producer Hideyuki Tomioka and series composer/scriptwriter Katsuyuki Sumizawa, to speak passionately about what the production was like at the time.

THE ATMOSPHERE BACK THEN WAS ONE OF "NOT WANTING TO MAKE GUNDAM"

★ First, could you tell us how the project for New Mobile Report Gundam Wing first got off the ground?

Tomioka: I was summoned by Yoshii (Takayuki), who was president of Sunrise at the time (now Bandai Namco Filmworks), and since Mobile Fighter G Gundam began airing in April 1994, that would have been around June or July of that year, I suppose. At the time, I was working on the TV series and OVA for Lord of Lords Ryu Knight, as well as animation-related material for games. then he just hit me with, "Tomioka, I want you on the next Gundam."

It might be hard to imagine, given how things are now, but back then, there was this pervasive mood inside the company, people just didn't want to make Gundam. It was grueling to produce, full stop. On top of that, the shading work in anime finishing was getting more and more elaborate at the time, so when you factored in how burned out the production floor was and your own bandwidth, yeah, people were dragging their feet. That's the honest truth.

But it was a directive from the company, and there was nobody else around who could do it, so what choice did I have? When I asked, "So who's directing?" they told me to decide for myself. So I strong-armed Ikeda Masashi into it, even though he was still working on the Ryu Knight OVA (Adeu's Legend). Unthinkable now, right? Asking someone to juggle both at the same time.

★ At the time the project began, I’ve heard that neither Director Ikeda nor you, were especially well-versed in Gundam.

Tomioka: Well, it’s not as if we knew absolutely nothing about it. (laughs) But as a producer, as a director, it wasn’t something we had ever watched with that kind of conscious, professional attention, so once we agreed to take it on, we did our homework. I gave Ikeda all the videos the company had of the Gundam series up to that point. He watched them, and by around the end of August, he brought in a rough draft for the series structure. From there, in order to build out an actual, concrete series composition, we brought in Sumizawa...

Sumizawa: May I take the baton from here? Around that time, there really weren’t many staff members who wanted to work on Gundam. With Ryu Knight, I had only just started working with Sunrise for the first time, and when Tomioka reached out to me, I said, “I don’t mind going to Sunrise, but something like Gundam is... a bit...” And he told me, “Don’t worry. I’m not doing Gundam.” So I felt safe. But then...

Tomioka: Which is exactly why I ended up having to do it. (laughs)

Sumizawa: That was not the deal. (laughs)

★ So given all that reluctance, what made you decide to join?

Sumizawa: Because I heard Ikeda was directing it. After seeing the work he’d done on Ryu Knight, I genuinely thought, "What would happen if this man did Gundam?" I was dead serious.

★ So even though neither of you was exactly eager at first, the fact that you still joined suggests you must have seen tremendous potential in the kind of Gundam Director Ikeda might make.

Tomioka: Oh, absolutely.

Sumizawa: But Ikeda himself was saying, “Tomioka, you told me you weren’t doing Gundam!” (laughs) So for two months, while still working on Ryu Knight, he just kept watching Gundam videos to the point that he later said, “I started dreaming about making the next-episode previews.” But the incredible thing about Ikeda is his ability to perfectly dissect what makes a show tick. What are the essential elements a Gundam needs to have? What can you leave out? What must you absolutely not do? And what should you do differently if someone other than Director Yoshiyuki Tomino is at the helm?

He used to say often, “Gundam Wing is going to include all the elements of a Gundam series,” but what he really did was analyze the parts of the franchise that landed with audiences and distill them into a concentrated form. At the same time, he deliberately avoided borrowing the surface-level developments. For example, in Mobile Suit Gundam, you have evacuees boarding the ship and traveling along with the cast, or the characters being cut off from military supply lines and left to wander. We didn't replicate any of that. So the question became: how do you create something that still feels unmistakably like Gundam? The answer that emerged was a story in which five boys come to Earth as terrorists, and that idea was already there at the rough-outline stage of the series composition.

★ Were there any elements that had already been decided before the project officially took shape?

Tomioka: The sponsor, Bandai, had told us they wanted five Gundams to appear. A lead unit that transforms into an aircraft, a dragon-motif unit inspired by Dragon Gundam, which had been popular in G Gundam, and a unit loaded to the teeth with missiles. Those three machine concepts were proposed by Bandai's side in advance. Beyond that, the types of mobile suits and the story itself were left entirely up to us.

Sumizawa: If I recall correctly, I heard that the lead unit flying and transforming came after the draft outline. At that stage, the concept was a “falling Gundam,” and there were tentative titles like Meteor Gundam or Gundam M. So the first episode had been written around the image of a Gundam crashing down, with the idea of “Gundams don’t fly” from Mobile Suit Gundam still very much in mind. And then I distinctly remember Ikeda shouting, “Why the hell can it fly?!”

★ So there were quite a few changes even during production. How extensive was the draft outline for the series composition?

Tomioka: About ten pages, printed on A4 paper, I'd say.

Sumizawa: At that point there weren't even character designs yet, so it was just brief, two-or-three-line story memos, "Boy A and Boy B fight," lined up for maybe thirty or forty episodes.

Tomioka: So first, I asked Sumizawa to turn about ten episodes’ worth of that into actual plot outlines.

Sumizawa: But the line from Heero in episode one, “I’ll kill you,” that was written by Ikeda, wasn’t it?

Tomioka: Right, that’s true. Ikeda had written rough plots himself too, in a broad sense.

Sumizawa: If I remember correctly, when the proposal was being compiled for the planning meetings, the broad arc was that a peaceful nation would ultimately become a dictatorship. And the ending was going to be that the five pilots would fight and die to protect Relena’s kingdom. So there was nothing at all yet about the latter half of the series, none of the material after they went into space. And after Heero self-destructed in episode 10, as we kept making the first half, the show drifted farther and farther away from that original concept. (laughs)

THE SECOND HALF OF THE TV SERIES WENT BEYOND ANYTHING WE'D IMAGINED

★ Starting with Heero Yuy, the series features a vivid cast of characters. How did they come to life?

Tomioka: Basically, Ikeda would come up with the names and explain what kind of personalities they were supposed to have.

Sumizawa: And to make sure we were all sharing the same image at that stage, we’d bring up specific real people or fictional characters as reference points. Heero, for example, was Yuki Uchida with the personality of Joe Yabuki from Ashita no Joe.

Tomioka: At the time, the image we had was something rather androgynous, so we said he’d be a boy, dressed in a sleeveless undershirt and shorts, and then Murase came back with that design.

Sumizawa: Duo was Mattia, the violin-playing boy from the anime Nobody’s Boy, a cheerful god of death. As for Trowa, Ikeda kept saying, “I haven’t quite pinned him down yet,” but since he loved Tim Burton, the image became something like Edward Scissorhands: expressionless, yet unbelievably powerful.

Tomioka: Quatre, meanwhile, was, above all else, weak. Weak by temperament, and weak in the way he handled his Gundam as a pilot.

Sumizawa: He had that classic sheltered-rich-kid image. And in terms of balance among the five, if Heero was your lead, and then you had the comic, easygoing Duo, and the eccentric Trowa, it made sense to have one character who was more of a sensible, grounded presence. Then there was Wufei. He was the one we had the hardest time settling on. Early on, he was this dangerous guy who always carried a spear and said things like, “You are evil. I stab you.” (laughs) But Bandai had specifically requested that one of the Gundams be based on a dragon motif, and they wanted that character to pilot it, so we used the manga Crying Freeman as a reference, and that gradually led to the character he became.

Tomioka: Ikeda had already studied the chemistry of a five-man character lineup very thoroughly in Ronin Warriors. He had this conviction, this philosophy as a director, that without forceful characters and lines that hit hard, a work simply wouldn’t succeed. Gundam Wing was built on that same philosophy.

Sumizawa: He was someone who insisted on crafting every detail of a show with absolute precision. So once the story had started to solidify up through around episode 20, Director Ikeda told me that he would handle the plot for episodes 10 through 20, which were already moving through production, but that there was something he wanted me to look into.

★ What was it?

Sumizawa: "Research every possible cause of war you can find." As the story progressed, the plot had started veering away from the original series outline, and what Ikeda wanted to do was gather everyone in the Sanc Kingdom and then shift the story's axis toward war. But there's no way to find a plausible reason for a pacifist nation to start a war. This was back when the internet wasn't widespread, so you couldn't just pull up reference material easily. There weren't many realistic war-simulation games either. I struggled enormously putting together what I could on my own, but apparently it didn't satisfy him. He said, "Isn't there some new way to start a war? Like, hasn't there ever been a country that went to war over which end of a boiled egg tastes better?"

But this isn't a fairy tale; wars like that don't exist. At most, you've got disputes over land, food, and resources, or conflicts rooted in religion and national pride. A great power waging war on another country in the name of its own vision of peace, that's just imperialism.

Tomioka: Right around then, he was also agonizing over how to bring in Wing Gundam Zero and Gundam Epyon, and it was clearly weighing on him heavily. That began affecting the production schedule on the ground as well. Up to that point, we’d been delivering printed masters to the broadcast station a week before airing, but things deteriorated to the point where, if this kept up, we were genuinely looking at dead air. The show was already on the air, and the anime industry back then was nothing like it is now; you couldn’t delay or suspend a broadcast just because production ran into trouble. So I persuaded Ikeda to leave the story developments entirely to Sumizawa, and we rebuilt the production structure from there.

★ Even so, from your side, that meant you were suddenly being handed all of those unresolved elements as-is, including, as you mentioned, “the reason for war,” didn’t it?

Sumizawa: It did. So I dug back through the rough outline for the series, and through the notes Ikeda had left behind, and started asking myself: "What was it, exactly, that he had wanted to do with this story when the project first began?" And it wasn’t just me doing that. Tomioka and the rest of the staff were all pulling together as one. And as we did that, something gradually began to materialize, though I honestly don’t know how consciously Ikeda himself understood it. Even the line, “I want to be a loser...,” was something he had written. For Treize, I think what it meant was that he longed to encounter a force powerful enough to utterly defeat him, and that in order for that to happen, he himself first had to become stronger still. But, well... it’s not exactly the clearest line in the world. (laughs)

Tomioka: I feel like it was around that same time that the basic dynamic finally began to take shape, Epyon as the thing that drives human hearts into madness, with Wing Gundam Zero standing in opposition to it. These days most anime is adapted from existing source material, but making an original work, one where even the people creating it can’t see what lies ahead, is just unimaginably difficult.

★ Do you think the unpredictability of Gundam Wing, that sense that no one could foresee what would happen next, was tied to the fact that even the people making it were feeling their way forward in production?

Sumizawa: In the second half, all we were doing was trying to figure out how to fold back up the enormous sprawl the first half had opened out. First, we had to wrap up the obsessions the director had been dragging along behind him as quickly as possible. The collapse of the Sanc Kingdom almost immediately after its establishment is a perfect example of that. Then we had Queen Relena of the United Earth Sphere Alliance step down almost at once as well, and from there we worked toward Zechs becoming Milliardo and taking the colonies’ side. That said, the episode writers, people like Chiba (Katsuhiko) and Omoide (Akemi), weren’t the ones who had to think about how to bring the whole thing together, so I think they were still writing with the same freedom they had in the first half. Chiba blew up Wing Gundam in episode 10, sure, but even near the end, he’d do things like have the Peacemillion launch a suicide attack and Libra fall toward Earth. He wouldn’t say a word about it in meetings, he’d just suddenly write it into the script. (laughs)

★ As the series composer, didn’t you ask him to revise things?

Sumizawa: I definitely thought, "This is just Char’s Counterattack, isn’t it?!" But there was no time to revise anything, and by the second half I’d more or less reached the point where, as long as it was exciting, the script was good enough.

Tomioka: And the production side was the same. With anime today, once you have a scenario meeting, it takes two weeks for the first draft to come in, then another second or third revision, and about five weeks total before you arrive at a final script. After that, storyboards take another six weeks. That’s the general rhythm now. By contrast, for the second half of the show, once we held a script meeting, the first draft would arrive in two days, three at the absolute latest. The moment it came in, we’d check it, then revisions went out the very next day. For the storyboards, we’d split the episode into Part A and Part B and assign them to two different people, and ten days later they had to be finished so animation could begin. Then we were working on a schedule where key animation had to be completed in two weeks after that. It was a punishing schedule.

Sumizawa: Even so, the script for the final episode still wouldn’t come easily. Libra was getting dropped whether we liked it or not, and the whole thing really had become, “What are we supposed to do with just two episodes left?” Somehow, though, we managed to push through and finish the first draft, and then I sent it straight to Kouichi Tokita, who was serializing the Gundam Wing manga in Comic BomBom at the time.

Tomioka: Really, we should have waited until the storyboards were done and then handed everything over together, but there simply wasn’t time.

Sumizawa: But doesn't it seem absurd that the anime was running behind schedule compared to a monthly manga serialization? (laughs) That’s why the idea in Tokita’s manga, having the energy of all six Gundams converge into the Twin Buster Rifle to fire on Libra, came from that first draft. Then, at the script meeting the very next day, it changed into the form it has now.

★ It's remarkable that even under that kind of deadline pressure, everyone still insisted on refining things to that degree.

Sumizawa: Well, everyone had far too much pride to let it go. And for my part, once Ikeda had entrusted it to me, I was determined to take what he’d left behind and somehow surpass him. If we had stayed with Ikeda’s original plot, an ending where all five Gundam pilots died was entirely possible.

Tomioka: Keywords like the Shinsengumi and Goryokaku were coming up, weren’t they? The beauty of the way one dies, that sort of thing.

★ It's incredible to learn that the show was produced under conditions even more dire than I'd imagined. The fact that it wrapped up as cleanly as it did almost feels like a miracle.

Sumizawa: When you watch the finished work, it actually looks well put together. But while we were making it, it was more like, "Is this really going to come together?" “Well... we won’t know unless we try.” Even the dialogue, half the time we had no idea whether it would fit within the allotted runtime.

Tomioka: We really were desperate then. Absolutely desperate.

THE MEANING BEHIND THE TITLE ENDLESS WALTZ

★ The year after the TV series ended, the OVA series Endless Waltz was announced. Could you tell us how that production came about?

Tomioka: Back then, Jun Yukawa at Bandai Visual was telling me almost immediately after the broadcast ended, “Please make a sequel to Wing.” But I was already deep into production on After War Gundam X, and the Ryu Knight OVA was still ongoing on top of that. Still, there was something nagging at me, the feeling that with Wing, I'd prioritized keeping the broadcast on schedule above all else, and the show had suffered for it. The truth is, there was more than enough potential for much higher-quality visuals. So I talked to Sumizawa about whether, if we kept it to three episodes, we could actually pull it together as a production.

Sumizawa: Ever since the TV series, we had at least been laying down the groundwork for a sequel or some kind of new continuation. In the final episode, there’s Quinze’s line: “How many times do you intend to interfere with our Operation Meteor?” That was meant to imply that there had been earlier occasions too when Operation Meteor had nearly been carried out. Ikeda himself hadn’t really given much thought to Operation Meteor, so I figured that if we established that the true Operation Meteor was a colony drop, we could probably wrap it up in about three OVA episodes. But then Tomioka came down with a strict order. He told me, "Make it so Gundam can never appear again."

You hear that and think, "Why?" But after living through the second half of Wing, and while still in the trenches making Gundam X, I completely understood where he was coming from. On the production floor, there was genuinely a sense that G, W, and X would be a trilogy, and after that, Gundam would take a rest. So that's how we arrived at that ending. The title Endless Waltz was, paradoxically, meant to say "this is where Gundam ends." But then, later on, Tomioka went and made Turn A Gundam with Director Tomino, and Wing Gundam showed up in it. (laughs)

★ As one page in the Dark History, of course.

Sumizawa: Exactly. So with that in mind, as the one who wrote the line, “And from this point on in history, weapons known as mobile suits, including the Gundams, were never seen again.” I’ve felt that I ought to take responsibility in some way. That feeling is what led into the novel Frozen Teardrop, and then to the current Preventer 7.

★ So “Endless,” which you chose because you meant to bring it to an end, ended up becoming a title that has truly continued for thirty years.

Sumizawa: Well, of course, that only happened because other series, like Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, became such major hits too. But even so, at the time I never imagined that the Gundam franchise as a whole, including Gundam Wing, would become content that lasted this long.

Tomioka: Maybe this is the sort of thing that only someone already retired can say, but I think one of Wing’s great achievements was that it pulled the Gundam series back from the super-deformed side of its popularity, back then SD Gundam was actually more popular, toward a more realistic line. Whether you can truly call it “realistic,” I don’t know, but at least toward a more serious line. After V and then G, if Wing had gone in yet another completely different direction, I don't think it would have paved the way for Gundam SEED or any of the series from the 2000s onward.

★ When you consider the approach to building characters, the allusive nods to past series, it really does feel like Wing is the wellspring that so much of the modern Gundam franchise draws from.

Tomioka: Yes. I think that’s exactly right.

★ Looking back now, what does Wing mean to each of you?

Tomioka: I started out in production advancement on Armored Trooper VOTOMS, and after that I had the chance to work on all kinds of titles, the Dirty Pair movie, Arion, Turn A Gundam, Inuyasha, Steamboy, and many others. I’m attached to every single one of them. But there’s no question, Wing is the one I feel most deeply about by far. It was an absolute beast of a project and I nearly worked myself to death on it, but it's the show I was most deeply involved in, and the passion I poured into it, and the sense of accomplishment I got back, were greater than anything else. Having gone through that experience while I was still young helped me establish my footing in the industry. For me, it was a truly epoch-making work.

Sumizawa: It’s been thirty years since the broadcast ended, and for maybe fifteen of those years, one way or another, I feel like I’ve kept being involved with Wing. I’ve had a fairly long career as a screenwriter, but there’s no other work into which I’ve poured this much of my life.

Tomioka: I mean, there’s Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Yu Yu Hakusho, NARUTO, there are all sorts of them.

★ Those are all globally iconic properties.

Sumizawa: And Wing was the first Gundam ever broadcast in America. At this point, Hollywood ought to start noticing me any day now. (laughs)

★ To close, could we ask each of you for a final word to our readers as we mark the thirtieth anniversary of Gundam Wing?

Tomioka: I'm truly grateful to every fan who has supported us over the years. At the same time, while I've already left the company and consider my mission complete, there's a younger generation carrying the torch and keeping Gundam W alive, so I hope you'll continue cheering them on.

Sumizawa: The thirtieth anniversary of Gundam W is a milestone, but I'm sure new Gundam series will continue to launch, and when they do, I'd be happy if you spared a thought for Gundam W as well. I'll keep contributing through projects like Preventer 7, and I believe there will be new Gundam Wing works from a new generation of creators, like the thirtieth anniversary commemorative video. Everyone, please look forward to it.

★ Thank you very much.