With more than sixty careers in Japanese animation, Rintaro saw the birth of this industry, worked with the biggest names and produced several essential masterpieces. While waiting for his autobiographical manga, he looks back on his extraordinary journey to Konbini, in an interview conducted during his visit to France for the Utopiales festival, where he was honored this year.Konbini | You started out as a colorist on Le Serpent blanc in 1958, the first color animated feature film in Japanese history. Were you and the rest of the team aware that you were working on a title that would mark Japanese animation?Rintaro | At Toei Animation, a lot of senior animators, older than me, dreamed of Disney cinema and chose this job because of it. So, obviously, they were aware of the importance of the project, but not of the place it would have in the history of Japanese animation, in hindsight. Simply, they were passionate about this project.See also on KonbiniWhile me… I want to tell you that I didn’t particularly like animation [rires] ! It was live cinema that interested me. Right next to the Toei Animation premises, there were the Toei studios where the films were shot in live action and I dreamed of going to the other side of the aisle. For me, joining Toei Animation should only be a step to get closer to cinema. But once I started working in animation, I wanted to continue in this field. However, I didn’t thrive as an animator. I wanted to do directing first and foremost. You get this job by joining Mushi Production, Osamu Tezuka’s studios, directing a few episodes of Atro le petit robot, the first animated series in the history of Japan created in 1963. How did you meet the weekly deadlines? To produce a feature film, it took about two or three years. In the cinema, the animation was done with 24 frames per second – this “full animation” was used at Disney, or even on The White Serpent. So nobody knew how to go about producing a TV series, when one thing was certain: every week, a new episode had to be broadcast. Osamu Tezuka gathered his team and explained to us that in the States United States, the studios used the process of “limited animation”, a method based on economy of work, and that one could completely express oneself through this process. We had to create a new form of expression for this new medium. I’m not supposed to say it myself, but Tezuka liked me and he offered to do the directing myself on a few episodes of Astro le petit robot, before entrusting me with King Leo in 1965. As it was the very first color series for TV, we had to carry out a lot of tests to study the color rendering on the screen , which was expensive! However, our sponsor, Sanrio, manufactured the stations in color. This series served them as a bit of a promotional showcase and that’s how it was developed! “I consider myself a craftsman, a maker; and not as an artist, a creator.” It was at this time that you met Masao Maruyama who founded the Madhouse studio in 1972, following the bankruptcy of Mushi Production. Although a member of Madhouse, you continued to work for Toei, notably on Albator in 1978. How did this series come to you? Toei Animation solicited me a lot and, even if I worked with Madhouse, I was still free to sign contracts elsewhere. So I happened to come back to Toei, for whom I had already worked, in particular for a project that I liked, Grand Prix, in 1977. We talk very little about Grand Prix, but for me, it was a very good experience. , on which I was able to learn the freedom of artistic expression. Since it’s about motor racing, it’s a series in which speed takes an important place, and I was able to experiment with different ways of representing it, in particular by working on the optics: long focal lengths, crushing perspectives , help give that feeling of speed. I did other research with the animators, it was really fulfilling. But I also experimented musically. Until now, the music in cartoons had only a decorative vocation, whereas I wanted it to be a character in its own right on Grand Prix, in particular by exploiting orchestral compositions. It was seeing what I was doing at Grand Prix from a visual and musical point of view that the managers of Toei came to me to entrust me with the production of Harlock the following year.Your works are becoming more adult at Madhouse with titles like Harmageddon (1983) or The Sword of Kamui (1985), but Manie Manie (1987) marks above all your first work as a screenwriter… In reality, I had no intention of write the stories myself. I consider myself as an artisan, a maker and not as an artist, a creator. For Manie Manie, I really wanted to highlight the short films of Katsuhiro Otomo [réalisateur, entre autres, d’Akira, Memories ou encore Steamboy, ndlr] and Yoshiaki Kawajiri. To do this, I wanted an introduction… and I found myself writing and directing this preliminary segment, whose duration is finally equal to that of the other two short films! But for me, what was important was to make start Otomo and Kawajiri as directors! You are working again with Otomo on Metropolis, a tribute to Tezuka…I found Otomo again for a televised debate around Tezuka, shortly after the latter’s death. When I started directing, I was very young, and I was aware of not being up to the task, even less up to Tezuka. Following this debate, a desire was born to reprocess his work with my age, my experience, which gave Metropolis, in which Otomo also participated. After directing it, I actually wanted to leave the world of animation, but Maruyama stopped me! From this experience, how do you see the world of animation today? In my opinion, the greatest technical progress was made in the 1980s. Since then, I think that animation has become above all a product. It’s not the fault of the animators or the producers, it’s just a result of the times. I think that today, we seek so much to produce products that we seek less to invent new techniques.
