ANIMERICA INTERVIEW: MASASHI IKEDA

Interview by Takayuki Karahashi

Masashi Ikeda first got into the animation industry as a side job during his student years in the film department at Tokyo Zokei University. A teacher asked him if he wanted a job doing storyboard work on a Doraemon episode. This led to some freelance work at Sunrise studio, where Ikeda worked for director Ryosuke Takahashi as a storyboard artist on the mecha series Votoms and Galient. Takahashi recommended Ikeda for his first directing job, Yoroiden Samurai Troopers (a.ka. Ronin Warriors). Since then, Ikeda’s career has led him to helm action-packed series such as Vampire Hunter (a.ka. Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge), Gundam Wing, and Ryû Knight: Adieus Legend.

Gundam Wing, along with Vampire Hunter, is an occasion of Ikeda teaming up with character designer Shuko Murase, also the designer for Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. In this interview, Ikeda is quick to credit a large part of Gundam Wing‘s popularity to Murase’s character designs. “When I work with Murase, the level of completion he delivers in his works is far better by a magnitude,” Ikeda says. “If you think about the amount of work he puts in, he should have time for nothing much else. With that in mind, any positive praise from viewers about the show should be deservedly for him.”

ANIMERICA: Let me ask you about Gundam Wing. How did you get involved in this project?

Ikeda: After Yoshiyuki Tomino’s V Gundam, there was a show called G Gundam by director [Yasuhiro] Imagawa that didn’t have Tomino’s involvement. It was around that time when Bandai decided on multiple Gundams, as opposed to the previous shows, such as the one about Amuro’s Gundam, where that alone is the center of the story. That’s how G Gundam came to be. The year after that, they decided to let another young kid try out another multiple Gundam story, and that’s when someone suggested “Ikeda.” So I got involved almost at the start, when all they knew was that they wanted a show with five Gundams.

ANIMERICA: How did you like creating your very own Gundam show?

Ikeda: Well, I worked with the character designer and animation directors to come up with the characters and to come up with a five-Gundam story as opposed to Tomino’s Gundam. I watched all of Tomino’s Gundam shows and extrapolated how he might do a live-Gundam story. I hoped something of his flavor would show up on screen. After all, if it has the name Gundam, you can’t keep the name Tomino off your mind. I could mention the kind of care I took in that respect.

ANIMERICA: What are your views on Gundam? Are you part of the generation that grew up watching the series?

Ikeda: Well, I didn’t watch Gundam when it first came on the air. I was at the age when people tend to stop watching animated shows. But when it comes to views on Gundam it’s such a major show that most anyone who watches animation must have some kind of view on it. I think this might be related to Murase’s character-making, but I think it’s a show that depicts a person’s internal aspects. In Tomino’s depiction of the characters’ interior lives, he has a unique way of cornering his characters that I don’t necessarily like. Whereas he corners his characters into a tragic point of no return, I’d like to shove mine into a hard-fought, brighter tomorrow. My optimism shows in that kind of child-oriented, rather than Gundam-oriented, direction, and I think Gundam Wing did go that way. I do think that Gundam is about the internal worlds of the main characters, and Murase’s designs are about the surfaces of a character, but include so much of the minute expressions he’d show and whatnot that by the time his draft is done, he comes up with characters with far more internals (showing on the surface) than I expected. So although I was involved in Gundam Wing from the beginning, a lot of the work went into how I could make Murase’s characters come to life and make them breathe. Since Murase was involved in Tomino’s Gundam as well, such as in F91, he was aware of how I wanted to pursue a Gundam-style world in the show, and he’d draft character designs with the kind of dimensions they needed. I think the convergence of all this effort was where Gundam Wing’s flavors came from, not just through my own.

ANIMERICA: Gundam Wing’s characters, especially the main characters, are also very pretty types. Was this intentional too?

Ikeda: [LAUGHS] Well, this time, the character designer wasn’t [Norio] Shioyama (Votoms), but Murase, and the characters are younger than most animation main characters. They still have their futures ahead of them. I asked him for the five characters with that kind of purity and possibilities. In that sense, I would think pure things have a beauty of their own, and as they grow up, they might get dirtier. But I had his help with the purity aspect. As for whether they’re pretty, I’m not sure if the beauty of purity translates directly to pretty faces…. It’s nice you can glance at the characters and find appeal in the drawings, but I think non-pretty-face characters can still carry a story. Perhaps (the series) would have been easier [to do] if the characters were just pretty faces.

ANIMERICA: Gundam Wing’s main characters look like invincible superheroes compared to the other characters and mecha in the show. Was this your idea?

Ikeda: Well, I hadn’t given it that much thought. But Tomino’s Gundam that I previously mentioned is about a regular civilian who gets involved in a war, pilots mecha, and shows latent talent as a Newtype. I think that’s Tomino’s style for Gundam. I suppose that might be the proper way to take on his Gundam legacy, but a good way to show the five Gundams winning and please the sponsor was to show the five as complete soldiers from the start and show them a lot onscreen. Pursuing that avenue of thought, the main characters aren’t supposed to die, so if that makes them look invincible, if the kids are immediately victorious in episode 1, maybe that does make them superheroes.

ANIMERICA: So the other military personnel in the show aren’t complete soldiers, but what shall we say-plebes?

Ikeda: Well, okay, first, what about the main characters do you call superheroish?

ANIMERICA: Well, could a normal junior-high-school student who just happens to get involved in war heal his broken leg just by twisting it?

Ikeda: I think healing a broken leg by yourself is something that we can conceivably do. If given the proper training and desperation, we could all do it. And our main characters aren’t doing their jobs for fun. The existence of their colonies is at stake. The resentment toward Earth may have been artificially planted by the grownups as the only necessary information. But only by putting themselves into dire straits can they release their explosive life energy, along with their anger. I’m sure ordinary people can get to that point too.

ANIMERICA: So a normal junior high student could do it?

Ikeda: Yes.

ANIMERICA: Now, what was the purpose of naming all the major characters after numbers?

Ikeda: This was chief writer [Katsuyuki] Sumisawa’s doing. I wasn’t too concerned with that. My job was to give Murase’s characters a place to show off.

ANIMERICA: About Quatre’s character design: Was he always male and not female?

Ikeda: Yes, the main characters were always five boys

ANIMERICA: Of all the five, Quatre alone looks almost like a girl

Ikeda: Oh. I did think it would be bad if all five looked indistinguishable. An issue was how to get the story going with five or so Gundams. If five same-age boys were there, one might be easily provoked, another might be kind, and a third might keep the peace between those two. The five started with those kinds of preset personalities. As preproduction work progressed, Murase came up with the drafts for the characters, with their personalities as well as their looks. We thought that their personalities could freely change and become similar as the story progressed. But as for Quatre, he had to have the gentleness that would be able to embrace everyone and that would set him differently from the other boys.

ANIMERICA: A gentleness that would even embrace Heero’s hopeless suicidal tendencies?

Ikeda: I suppose so. Although this story wasn’t about the five of them uniting together. They could have acted fully independently.

ANIMERICA: What is the relationship between Heero and Relena?

Ikeda: Well, according to the story as far as I was involved in it, the girl Relena represented what was still good about Earth, and I wanted her to talk to the main characters that way. Starting with Heero, all five of them are the same, but they are in a war propagated by grownups in which you go with the flow, and firepower is the deciding factor. I wanted Relena to represent something different, where people could instead resolve differences with a sincere dialogue. So rather than talk about her relationship to Heero, I think of her more as a representation of the good that’s left on Earth.

ANIMERICA: So they have no boy-girl relationship?

Ikeda: Well, you could say I was nurtured in a Ryosuke Takahashi world, and that may have something to do with it. I have a hard time with female characters. Boy-girl-relationship type situations are still beyond my capabilities. So that wasn’t something on my mind. I think that my job is in exposing the raw interior of the characters. And, of course, the inspiration for working on the interiors of the characters is in Murase’s designs, with the expressions on their faces that indicate deep personalities within. My job is in deciding how to pursue that. When I work with Murase, the level of completion in which he delivers his works is far better by a magnitude. If you think about the amount of work he put in, he shouldn’t really have time for much else. With that in mind, any positive praise from viewers about the show should be deservedly for him. Although I’d have my own satisfaction of knowing I was able to utilize his characters well. But I think it’s right to be impressed by Murase’s characters.

ANIMERICA: If you take this idea to the extreme, wouldn’t you be watching the show not for the mecha but for the characters?

Ikeda: Well, yes, but I tend to focus more on the characters. Of course, you won’t always be able to find those kinds of characters every time. And then, depending on the project you’re invited to work on, there are different things you can do. For this project, and it’s still the same for the current project we’re working on (Vampire Hunter), I get to be taking care of Murase’s characters. But if I were to work on a mecha-over-character show, I’d have to give first priority to how the mecha would be fighting and how to make them look good on screen. Well, of course, I had the mecha in mind for Gundam Wing too, but my top concern was whether I could fully handle Murase’s characters.

Source: Animerica Vol.8, No. 4, May 2000 (pages010-011)