A New Dawn it’s a vague thing. An anime segment featured in the main competition section of this year’s Berlinale. The film, produced by Japan’s Asmik Ace and France’s Miyu Productions, is the debut novel by Yoshitoshi Shinomiya, a talented artist turned animator who has worked with Makoto Shinkai on earlier projects such as. Word Garden like the latest singer and breakout song Your name as a sequence director. His other credits as a contemporary artist include Pump: The Cinemaphile and Sleeping Princess.
Shinomiya brings much of his experience and attitude as an artist to filmmaking. Color is used in painting, watercolor, and A New DawnThe pastel palette is far from the usual primaries of theatrical anime. This film tells the story of three childhood friends who want to ensure the survival of a fireworks factory, which needs to be demolished in order to improve it.
A few weeks away A New DawnBowing to Berlin, the film has its own domestic theatrical release in Japan. No US distributor has been announced yet, but a major distributor for Charades is in the works. Ahead of the film’s premiere, Shinomiya sat down with us to discuss his project’s long journey to the screen.
Cartoon Brew: Can you elaborate on the career path that led you to writing and directing A New Dawn? It’s my understanding that you’ve done key animations for many of Makoto Shinkai’s works, and now you’re out with your first book – the subject of the Berlinale Competition as well.
Yoshitoshi Shinomiya: I am best known as a traditional Japanese artist. I did a doctorate. Until I was 27 years old, I studied mainly Japanese traditional paintings, which are also two-sided. But when I was 28 years old, I became interested in creating something in three dimensions or in motion pictures. One of those opportunities was animation, but I hadn’t learned any techniques in that regard.
I had a classmate at university who worked with Makoto Shinkai. I was interested in his work, so I applied to work in his company. I was working as a background artist, and I was also interested in critical animation. Since my background was traditional art, I thought it would be an easy transition. I continued to work in Shinkai’s films. Gradually, people started approaching me with other opportunities, such as television commercials or photo shoots. Around 2015, I started running ads. That was my first animation director credit.
When I started running ads, and when Shinkai was creating Your namewhich I was asked to direct parts of, at the same time I was putting on exhibitions of my paintings. I was offered a lot of animation opportunities at that time – I would get three TV commercial hosting fees a month – but, in my identity, I am an artist, whereas this work was commercial in nature. I felt pulled in two directions, and these two things were incompatible for me. I needed something that would incorporate my creativity as a traditional Japanese artist and marry it with animation. That was the biggest motivation that led to the creation of this film.
What parts of Your name did you go There is an interesting sequence from the important scenes in the film to A New Dawn.
The event is that the main character is given to drink, and after drinking the water, he starts to dream. It’s a flashback sequence of sorts. I ordered that.
How many years has it been A New Dawn development for?
The seed of this project, without any support, was in 2016. So the journey ended up being about ten years. And of course, at that time, a lot of companies went in and out of business – you know how it goes.
Tell me about the setting of the film. Is it Miura, the fictional Kanagawa?
Yes. It’s really my hometown. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s very inspired by the real Kanagawa area.
The opening sequence of the film is absolutely stunning. It opens with stripes and bursts of color, before transitioning to walking through a tunnel, with the sea looking down on its ceiling. Can you tell us about the genesis of this sequence?
In this case, the subject is English A New Dawn it is more appropriate. I thought it would be great if I could, for the audience, make a connection between the opening and closing of the film, like sunrise and sunset. I also wanted to talk about a Japanese fairy tale where there is a metaphor for coming out of a cave.
The situations in this movie are very detailed, and you are surrounded by curious eyes. I think your background as an artist informs this. Can you tell me about how to place the different elements in the pictures, and how you animate them?
I produced watercolors, which served as the basis for many scenes, especially all the greenery. That’s the process of analog – not just presenting everything digitally. As you know, a lot of nature in modern art is produced using CG, but it was important to me that it was hand drawn. It creates a rich texture – the wind makes the plants move, for example.
The film is about a craftsman, so I wanted it to have that artistic, analog element. When you look at the underwater, landscape, or fireworks scenes in this film, which can easily be achieved digitally and perhaps in other works, they are deliberately achieved in analog mode. I used a multi-plane camera – there were scenes where we shot every frame that way. That way, we could spread the cells. There is something unpleasant about seeing that going on, I feel. I was determined to do something similar to Disney Fantasy movies, especially fireworks and underwater scenes. Of course, when you have a 76-minute episode, it’s impossible to do everything that way, so we only did that for selected sequences.
The water quality is absolutely stunning, and the color is central to the characters and environment of this film.
Often in animation, the roles of animation direction, color, and art design are separate. I often feel inadequate. Because if your job is just an art director, you won’t be sure what the colors are. If you’re a fan of color, you can’t be sure what animation will do in terms of movement. My work is abstract and intellectual, and I knew that, for it to work, I would have to do all this myself. He is a color designer, art director and animation director.
How did you create the important and explosive sequence at the end of the film?
I have so much to share. No CGI was used; all drawn by hand. I held a workshop. 30 artists entered, and one of the things I asked them to do was to use needles to poke holes in a piece of black paper. With a light source behind it, that became a firework. Another exercise I gave them was to use only red paint to draw fireworks on white scraps of paper. It was a lot – about 400 pages of paper. What happens when you turn it off is that it turns into a blue firework against a black sky background. You might say, why not just use blue first? It’s interesting – when you do it this way, the blue color in the end is very versatile, it’s amazing. It’s painted by people, but the color we end up with when we change it is something that doesn’t feel man-made. We used light in many different analog ways to create many effects. I can go on.
What would you like your audience to take away from this film?
We are in a world with climate change. Environmental and energy issues are rampant in Japan, and solar panels are one of the solutions to that problem. With immigration, conflict and war everywhere, I feel like the cultural landscape as we know it is changing. In a way, we find ourselves in new places. For me, the important thing is the place – the information that the country holds for us, and how we can preserve it. I think in that way, this movie is universal.
I want the audience, especially the young ones, to find the answers to these questions as artists themselves. I do that in the film, metaphorically using fireworks. Fireworks are my art, and I am an artist. Through artistic expression, people will be able to maintain that identity of the country they live in, and be confident and proud of that identity as they continue to live there. That’s the suggestion I wanted to make.
What would you like the animation industry to take away from the change and difference you made in this film?
Digital technologies and AI are evolving every day. I am someone who has only ever worked from an analog perspective. I don’t know how these other things will change as we go forward. I feel like the more AI grows, the more everything that matters – something that is made and created by our hands – changes. I wanted to make that clear. I hope it serves as an inspiration to others.
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