A dandy guy in London - Shinichiro Watanabe

Written by A. H. on 29 Oct 2014

To say it's been a busy year for Shinichiro Watanabe would be an understatement - although a closer look into the industry will often find him at work in some shape or form, 2014 has seen him step back into the limelight in a notable way, bringing us space comedy Space Dandy on one hand and terrorism thriller Terror in Resonance on the other.

With these projects now completed, Mr. Watanabe found the time to travel to London for October's MCM London Comic Con, and we were lucky enough to spend some time with the world-renowned director of Cowboy Bebop to talk about his latest works.

UK Anime Network: First of all, welcome back to the UK - it's great to see you in London again, and many thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

Shinichiro Watanabe: Thank you.

UK Anime Network: When you were last in London, you teased us with a little information about Space Dandy and told us it would have a lot of aliens, which certainly turned out to be true! Now that the series has finished, how do you feel about the project as a whole?

Shinichiro Watanabe: I made another work as well called Terror in Resonance, so I've made two series in one year and I feel like I have worked a bit too hard and I'm very tired! But I'm happy with it.

(Leaning into the microphone with a knowing smile and breaking into English, Mr. Watanabe says "Hardest working man in the anime business")

UK Anime Network: As the overall director of Space Dandy, were there any particular difficulties for you having to work with a different episode director for each episode of the series?

Shinichiro Watanabe: One difference between the two projects that I've been working on, if you compare it to music, is that Terror in Resonance is like my solo album and my personal touch comes through I think. But for Space Dandy it's a collaboration album, so for each episode I collaborated with a different artist, or different artists, different directors, different animators - it was a different way of working, and so it was like having sessions with them. It was good fun.

UK Anime Network: The largely self-contained nature of the series seemed to give each episode director a lot of freedom to do whatever they wanted, were there many rules laid down in advance about what they could and couldn't do with the universe and characters?

Shinichiro Watanabe: Actually, I was more concerned that each episode could be completely different and standalone and not to have any overlap between them. So the rule was that there were no rules!

If you've seen the whole series then you'll know that there's a reason why there are so many different styles, but maybe we should keep that under our hats for the people who haven't seen it through to the end yet.

UK Anime Network: Similarly, the animation styles used across Space Dandy frequently feel quite experimental and are certainly varied - was there a conscious decision to allow the animator's working on the series to experiment and express themselves more than you might see in other anime series?

Shinichiro Watanabe: Of course. I'm always keen to try different styles of animation but usually there's no opportunity to chop and change that style within one anime, so I wannted to create an opportunity to do that.

I've got quite a short attention span, so if I'm working in one style I'll want to change to another style - I think it's good for people like me with short attention spans!

UK Anime Network: The second half of Space Dandy in particular seems to have a lot of music-themed episodes - did that come about because of your influence and love of music, or is it simply a coincidence?

Shinichiro Watanabe: I'm always keen to use music in my work, and for the second series in particular there was so much freedom that it was inevitable that there was a lot of music involved.

In the first season we didn't want to go too crazy straight away, because we didn't want to lose people, so we sort of kept it toned down a bit for the first few episodes in particular. Then, as the audience got used to it, we brought in strangner and stranger episodes and with season two it was pretty much a case of anything goes!

UK Anime Network: There are obviously plenty of elements within Space Dandy that will appeal to a western audience, and the series has enjoyed a lot of popularity outside of Japan - was western support for the series an important consideration when the show was being made?

Shinichiro Watanabe: What do you think the themes are that make it appeal to a western audience?

UK Anime Network: Apart from Boobies?! I think just the general characters and concepts are perhaps more universal than you see in a lot of other series.

Shinichiro Watanabe: It may seem that way, but actually there are a lot of very Japanese jokes in there that you probably wouldn't notice. I did try to make it so that it didn't matter if you didn't notice these jokes, but actually the Japanese audience is picking up more detail.