GARO Cast & Crew Q&A at Otakon 2015

This moderated panel and fan Q&A for GARO was held at Otakon 2015.

Moderator: Please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your previous works.

Masao Maruyama: I'm the CEO of MAPPA. My name is Maruyama Masao. The series I've worked on recently are Punch Line, Terror in Resonance, Rage of Bahamut, and GARO.

Romi Park: Hello! Yah! Otakon! Very nice! My name is Romi Park. Nice to meet you! I worked on, of course, GARO as Ema Guzman, Attack on Titan as Zoe Hanji, NANA as NANA, Digimon as Ken Ichijouji, Adventure Time as Finn, Fullmetal Alchemist as Edward Elric, Kill la Kill as Ragyo, Turn A Gundam as Loran, and Shaman King as Tao Ren.

Yuichio Hayashi: I'm Yuichiro Hayashi, let's see, what did I work on before GARO… I did 009 Re:Cyborg, and Welcome to THE SPACE SHOW.

Tōru Kubo: I'm Kubo. I used to be a game creator, so I'll just run through some games: Sakura Taisen, Galaxy Fraulein Legend Yuna, and Gungrave. I then went to the tokusatsu live-action show Ryukendo. I recently did Milky Holmes, Cardfight!! Vanguard, Future Card Buddyfight, and Garo, too.

Moderator: Let's talk a little bit about GARO here. This show is definitely fantastical in nature, but it has some very common themes. What themes inspired your work in Garo the Animation?

YH: I guess the longest running theme of the main TV series is how the armor – the knight – is passed along through the generations. So the show depicts how the armor and the powers are passed on from father to son, and how [the son] has to carry on the destiny of wielding that power, and how he grows as a character throughout the series. Of course, this a theme that carries over from the live-action show as well, where the armor is passed on. So I really wanted to concentrate on the aspect of the power being passed on.

Moderator: Alright, thank you. We just mentioned here that GARO is based on a live-action show. So tell me, what were the difficulties in translating a show from live-action to an animation? Is it easier or more difficult than an original story or a manga?

YH: The original story for us was the live-action TV show. But I really didn't want to carry over any of the way the story was told through the actions of the live-action show. I wanted to tell it the way an anime would show that story, and didn't want to have any sort of baggage from the show.

Moderator: Do you think that since it's an anime and you can do almost anything you want, was it more difficult to have almost no limitations in how the action can go? Because in live action you're forced to do what's practical.

YH: One of the things that we wanted to concentrate on was to have an original combat scene every episode. We didn't want to reuse any footage. So we concentrated on how to come up with original fight sequences through each episode.

Moderator: This next question is for Romi Park. You're well known for voicing the male character Edward Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist. In GARO you voiced a female character. Do you prefer voicing male or female characters in your shows?

RP: I'm sort of a girl, so…

Boys are generally more straightforward. They're honest with their emotions. When I'm acting enemies, if it's a boy, then I try to see it from their eyes. When it's the protagonist's the antagonist is the enemy, but from the antagonist's side, the protagonist is the enemy. So I try to be very honest with their emotions. But when I'm acting as a female character there might be some idea in my mind that females women are not as direct with their emotions as men are, so I try to hold it back a little. Thank you.

Moderator: Talking about [GARO,] there seems to be a good amount of CG used in this anime, especially for the armored suits. What was the line of reasoning for using this method of animation specifically in GARO?

YH: When it comes down to it it's the amount of time you have to produce an episode.

TK: When you work with CGI you can get the gleam, the metallic sheen that you couldn't duplicate through traditional animation.

YH: Depicting combat sequences where the camera can pan 360 degrees around the battle, that's really hard to do in animation, so right from the get-go we thought “when we do battle scenes, we're going with CGI.”

Moderator: The next question is for everyone here. We talked a little bit about the different shows you've worked on in the past. What are some of your favorite that you've worked on – or will work on – and why?

MM: Rather than the things I've worked on before, things I'm going to work on now are the ones I love the most. I love them all. Everything. If I didn't like it, I wouldn't have made it in the first place. So, since I love them all equally, I will not pick one. I'm just capricious that way.

YH: The answer would be that whatever show I'm working on currently is the one I'm in love with, but it's also the thing that gives me the most amount of stress with the schedules and the amount of work, but it stays with you. But once it's done, it's like “God I love that show.” So right now, I really love GARO.

RP: Adventure Time! I love Adventure Time!

MM: The series that I love is the series I'm working on right now. GARO has a theatrical film coming out right now which features the first series, and there's a second series that's going to be made for GARO.

FAN Q&A

Question: Mr. Maruyama, earlier, at your MAPPA panel, you were talking a bit about GARO season two, and you mentioned that Abe no Seimei is a major character, did you say that Abe no Seimei is a main character AND there will be a female protagonist, or that Abe no Seimei IS the female protagonist?

MM: I wasn't supposed to say anything, so I didn't say anything.

Question: Hey guys, first of all, this is my favorite show from the past few seasons. It's about parenthood, it's about coming of age, it's about responsibility. What exactly were you trying to get across to audiences? What were your goals in speaking to the audience? I mean, it's about so many things.

YH: So I touched upon this before, but it's basically depicting the growth of the main character through his connection with his comrades in battle, having the power passed on from his father, the armor, his responsibility, all of this is, as you said, what I want to show the audience.

MM: So the GARO series features the knights, and they're called the protectors, and we're always trying to make use of that. So for this animation series that's what we focused on.

Question: What exactly made you want to turn GARO into an anime?

MM: My company is an animation studio, not a live-action studio, but when I was watching the live-action series I just thought it was interesting. I went to Tôhoku Shinsha, the company making the live-action GARO series and asked, “can we make this into an anime.” I love tokusatsu live action series like The Golden Bat or Garo.

Question: Why did you decide to place this version of GARO in a medieval setting?

TK: When we were originally scripting out the show, I was speaking to Yasuko Kobayashi, our main scriptwriter. She said, “Well I'd like to set the world in this sort of place…” She didn't actually say middle ages, it's just that from the conversation, that setting seemed to make the most sense for the type of story she was trying to tell. When it came down to it, in what period of time would knights fit best?

Question: The character Germán reminds me of Roy Focker from Macross. He's blond and a consummate womanizer. León's hair looks like a character from the 70s, a Tatsunoko Production like Captain Harlock. Was that intentional?

TK: I have no idea. It never came up once. Maybe he's just that good-looking of a guy?

MM: I've never seen Macross.

Question: When working a TV series rather than a feature, besides time and money, what would you say are the challenges that each represent?

TK: Budget and schedule. I guess that one of the things you could say is that when we make a TV series we have to build it from scratch. I mean, it was based on a show and exists in the same universe, but when you're making a movie you're just trying to improve upon what you've already done, show off the best parts of it, and wow the audience.

MM: The original GARO was made by Keita Amemiya. He told us that for animation we could do whatever we wanted, but when making the animation we wanted to make it so that how the world was structured was as much as possible like Amemiya's design. For example, the title design for the animated GARO is designed by Amemiya. Also, in the live-action series, there are lots of boobs. But in the animation, we basically do not have any boobs.

Question: You used a really striking and different animation for it paired with an opening by JAM PROJECT? Is there any specific reason why you chose such a special animation technique?

YH: The live-action show had a really cool opening, and I didn't just want to do a typical opening sequence that you'd see in an anime show. So I decided to ask my animator friends to do something a little different from the expected norm. And the result is what you see. Deadlines were pending, and we had so little time, and I was worried we weren't going to get it done. But in the end, I thought that it was very powerful.

TK: Until it showed up completed, we didn't know what it was going to look like.

MM: The Emblem Fire arc has ended. However, we're still making a theatrical film, so look forward to it. Ema Guzmán is not going to be in the next series, but she will be in the movie. I am, however, going to ask Romi Park to have a role in the next series.