In the Paprika footage above, you can see Kon tracing over his sketches with clean ink lines, like he’s readying a manga page for publication. It was the logical end of a process he’d been developing since the ‘90s. Given all this, Kon’s struggle with Paprika wasn’t just a matter of the imagery. The development of a technique - Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika (click to enlarge) And that same tightly wound filmmaking is no less present. On the ones he did board, though, his work looks more like it was done for a feature than for TV. It’s common to overcredit directors - but these were Kon’s films.įor his sole TV series, Paranoia Agent (2004), Kon didn’t storyboard every episode. You see so much of the inventiveness, so many of the iconic scenes, right there in black and white. Yet, especially by the time of Godfathers, he was defining these projects to a startling degree. Kon always credited his teams with how his films turned out. Its storyboards double as immaculate layouts, with character drawings almost like key frames. ) Then he reached an entirely new plane with Tokyo Godfathers in 2003. He upped his game in Millennium Actress - you could publish its storyboards unedited as manga panels. “When I watch it again,” he said in 2008, “I feel inspired to keep improving my current work as if my life depended on the outcome.”Īs a storyboarder, that’s exactly what he did. The images might have been there, but it didn’t come together like he’d hoped. Still, Kon ultimately wasn’t happy with the film. Going over his storyboards, you realize that you’re watching Perfect Blue in slow motion - almost every shot is in place, sketched by Kon himself. He already has a master’s grasp of exactly where to point the camera, exactly how to pace each scene. In terms of detail, Kon’s storyboards for Perfect Blue rival Otomo’s storyboards for Akira. One of Kon’s early breaks was writing the screenplay for Magnetic Rose, part of Otomo’s Memories anthology. ) Otomo’s influence on Kon was undeniable, and he continued to open doors for him. ( See a few of his layouts for the film via Catsuka. Even back then, Kon captured scenes in a crisp, lucid way. Kon started out in anime as a layout artist for the Otomo-penned Roujin Z. Otomo’s help,” Kon later said, “I was able to begin working in the anime industry.” As his profile in anime rose, he pulled Kon up with him. Otomo carried that sensibility into the anime version, which he storyboarded by himself. Before he entered anime, Kon worked with Katsuhiro Otomo as an art assistant on Akira - maybe the most relentlessly hyperdetailed manga of the ‘80s. It wasn’t just his background in painting, either. I started out as a painter, so I think in terms of visualized drawings from the beginning. The final images are what I visualized them to be. When he premiered his first feature, Perfect Blue, an interviewer asked Kon if “some of the scenes turn out differently than what you had visualized or imagined.” The reply was telling: His clarity of imagination is stunning:īut this obsessive detail, this desire to pin down each individual beat in the storyboards, was always part of Kon’s work. In documentary footage from the time, you can watch Kon drawing them - figuring out the film as he goes and chasing leads as they arise. Seeing them is like seeing the film in miniature, at a level of detail comparable to what appears on camera. That only grew as he aged.įor Paprika, the storyboards were a bitter struggle that lasted a year and a half. Still, Kon always brought an uncommonly intense perfectionism to storyboarding. The recent Children of the Sea got the same treatment. It isn’t universal, but Hayao Miyazaki (to take one example) has done it many times. To craft Paprika ’s surreal imagery, he had to make “the most detailed and the biggest one in all works.” For Kon, that says something.Īnime directors have a history of storyboarding their films by themselves. It’s rich with insights, and it’s a clear example of Kon’s willingness to explain the thought behind his films.Īt one point, though, Kon addresses the storyboarding process. Slutsky’s interview dates to 2007, the year that Kon’s Paprika hit America. Before his untimely death in 2010, Kon built a reputation as one of Japan’s best anime directors. It lit up the internet - and for good reason. This week, the Substack writer Mark Slutsky published an interview with Satoshi Kon.
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