Special Interview part 2
Presenting part 2 of our special interview series! With the broadcast of the White Album 2 anime close at hand, we asked director Masaomi Ando, Fumiaki Maruto-san, and Naoya Shimokawa-san for the scoop!
Please tell us in detail about how White Album 2 came to be adapted into an anime.
Shimokawa:
The game, White Album 2, has a lot of very passionate fans, and with their support and encouragement, we found ourselves saying, “Well, why not make it into an anime?” So we reached out to producer Mijima from King Records, who had worked on the original White Album anime as a member of the production committee, and he said, “Oh, yeah, I’ll do it!” And we said, “All right, that settles it,” and that’s how it happened. The one point upon which I absolutely insisted was that Maruto-san write the script, so before I talked to Mijima-san, I checked with him—“If this does get made into an anime, will you write it?” And when he gave his OK, that was basically the “go” sign for our company.
Maruto:
When the talk came around to me, I was told, “If you don’t take this on, Maruto-san, then we’re going to say this discussion never happened.”
Ando:
That almost sounds like coercion. (laughs)
Shimokawa:
No, no, no, I didn’t word it like that! Maruto-san, you were the one who said you’d accept it as long as I did the music!
Maruto:
So it was a bartering transaction, basically.
Shimokawa:
I mean, I’d say it was a pretty good exchange. (laughs)
Director Ando, what were your thoughts and impressions on accepting this production?
Ando:
I had heard that the game itself was valued very highly, and with people who actually made the game managing the scenario and music of the anime, I could tell that the anime’s production would be starting from a very solid base, which I was grateful for. The destination was clearly visible—it was only a matter of catching up with the work, following it, and figuring out somewhere along the way what I could do.
Maruto:
And in return for that, you were all right with working with the two of us, who were novices in the world of animation?
Ando:
At this point in time, everything to do with the scenario is already finished. Compared with the way anime are usually made, this is an unbelievably fast pace.
Maruto:
Maybe that’s because I didn’t really have any conception of animation schedules, and a real pro would have pushed the deadline further back. (laughs)
Ando:
No, I’m not saying you did it too early. (laughs)
Shimokawa:
I think that, with games as well as with anime, the more quickly the scenario is finished, the easier it is to heighten the quality.
Ando:
Yes, of course. In the first place, given the intention of creating the story up through the game’s IC (Introductory Chapter), the fact that the framework that started from the end and was built backwards would be presented from the beginning seemed like something that could only happen by leaving the scenario to the original author. And then, I assumed that our task was to figure out how much of the game to reproduce in the anime, but these two felt very strongly that they wanted to create something “even better.” I was constantly surprised by the twists they wanted to add in, or arrangements that weren’t in the original version of the story.
Maruto:
I suppose we were a bit of a pain…
Ando:
No, no! I never said anything like that. (laughs) I was just impressed by the creativity the two of you showed, using the original work as a basis and endeavoring to create something even better for the anime.
Was the scenario completed quickly because you were concentrating all of your focus on work for this anime?
Maruto:
Oh, no. I was doing plenty of work in between, on my light novel, for example, so it was pretty tough.
Shimokawa:
Maruto-san is simply a quick writer.
Maruto:
Having the original game to work from made it easier, too.
Ando:
Thinking back on it now, when I first heard that the man himself would be writing the scenario, I was imagining that we could be given something as grand in scale as the game itself, and that figuring out how to condense that would be a huge struggle. However, the very first draft was neatly organized and had a grasp of all the important points, so there really wasn’t any serious difficulty at all. That’s the biggest reason that the scenario was finished so quickly.
Maruto:
Though I do remember being told, “We have to shave five minutes off.”
Ando:
Right. (laughs)
Maruto:
People who work in the animation field have this understanding of the fact that you end up having to cut out a lot like this, I’m sure. As people coming in from the game world, we had no idea at first. IC in particular is only about twenty percent of the entirety of the original, so I was concerned that it might be finished after like eight episodes. (laughs)
Shimokawa:
I just asked right out! “How are you going to use IC for a thirteen-episode anime?” “This is probably going to be over after eight episodes. Are you sure about this?”
Maruto:
So, I tried writing it, and it wasn’t nearly enough. I thought, wow, anime is tough! You have so few lines to use, and within that you have to make the story progress and develop the characters, so what you can do with the script is more limited than it is with a game. How much of that could I ask the animation staff, including the director, to express? That was a big point for me with this, and something I was really looking forward to seeing. What I’ve seen so far has gone above and beyond my hopes, so I can’t help being excited to see how it finishes.
Ando:
The hard part for me was figuring out how what we were able to show through animated images and plays between the characters could supplement the volume of staging directions and the abundance of content Maruto-san produced for the original game’s depictions. Could we make the characters act in a way that corresponded well enough to the directions of Maruto-san’s writing? I think that was the greatest difficulty I had in working on this production.
To look at it another way, could that in and of itself be a noteworthy point of the anime format?
Ando:
In a game, users can proceed at their own discretion, but with an anime, you have to show the whole thing along a one-way road. So, in order to convey information of this density and volume concisely and without misunderstandings, we’re working to create smooth additional lines, with acting and images and so on. I would say that the most noteworthy point of this anime is the new, unique challenges it has presented us with.
Maruto:
I also think there’s the way it takes really ridiculous things—like things that were done in the game but aren’t done in the anime, or things that haven’t been done in the game or in the anime—and tackles them in a completely serious way.
Shimokawa:
There are these clues scattered all around that make you want to pick them up and look deeper.
Maruto:
That’s a highlight for users of the game, but we worked to make it something that newcomers can enjoy on its own, too. You often hear about anime adaptations of games that “If you haven’t played the game, you won’t get it,” so we made our best effort to make the story accessible to first-time viewers.
Ando:
This is a work that already has a huge number of fans, so avoiding betraying the expectations of those fans basically goes without saying, but on top of that, we want people who get into White Album 2 for the first time via the anime to get just as much enjoyment out of it. That, to me, is the most difficult part, and also crucially important.
Maruto:
In addition, I would like to hope that the anime is something that can be enjoyed twice—that people who see the anime first will then play the game as well, and then come back to the anime again and realize how much was hidden in it.
Ando:
The repetition of routes in the original games leads to new text, so I have a sense that what we’re creating now is an anime “route.”
Shimokawa:
Of course, creating something that new users will watch and understand is the first priority, but we had a discussion with the staff at the outset, and decided that whenever points came up where we were dithering over how to handle it, we would use whatever would make users of the original work happy as a base. If we hit a wall, we see it through based on what the original users would find interesting. In that sense, the work has a wick running through it.
Ando:
The game itself really has a considerably wide scope to begin with. Depicting a high school romance—well, one of the heroines is a genius pianist, and the other one is the school idol, but the story isn’t that far detached from reality, and the age range of the targets audience is surprisingly broad, so if the people who liked the original game can enjoy the story, then I’m certain it can be something compelling as an anime, too.
Maruto:
The age range is wide, or high, you could say… Meaning, it has nostalgia value for middle-aged men. (laughs) The story itself is rather subdued, and I’m a bit worried about how long younger people will be able to stick with it, but I’m sure they’ll enjoy it if they watch, so I’d like them to give it a chance at least.
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