“There are times when we work well together and everything goes smoothly, but because she has this completely different kind of mindset, I was able to learn a lot from her. “Meeting Eunyoung was an incident in my life that uncovered new things within me,” he remembers. Choi worked as a key animator on the series and would continue to work alongside Yuasa at Madhouse over the following years. The two first worked together at Madhouse on Yuasa’s original 2006 television series Kemonozume, a romance anime about flesh-eating monsters. None, however, has been as influential to Yuasa as South Korean producer Eunyoung Choi. To that end, Yuasa has always kept good company, having now worked with everyone from prolific screenwriter Reiko Yoshida ( Violet Evergarden) to storied art director Hiroshi Ôno ( Kiki’s Delivery Service) to rising-star composer Kensuke Ushio ( A Silent Voice). It’s a stark departure from the level of production micro-management we’re used to hearing out of studios like Ghibli, where Miyazaki personally approves every frame Speaking to the diverse expressions throughout his filmography, he’s quick to mention the team effort that it is, saying that while he “ or the style depending on what the film is about,” the details are all the work of his staff-what they like to do and what they’re good at. He stepped down as president of Science SARU in 2020 and finished the film as a freelance director, and in talking about his legacy, it’s clear he doesn’t see his departure as a loss to any collaborators. It’s easy to see why Yuasa may have wanted to end here. Inu-Oh, the real-life man, has been lost to history, and in bookends Yuasa considers what that really means for the artist. From its very premise, Yuasa’s latest explores themes of collaboration in artistic development, questions the motivations behind art that is considered radical and interrogates our motivations to create. Inu-Oh’s titular protagonist, depicted as a disfigured dancer and storyteller, teams up with a blind biwa-playing priest seeking the lost stories of the Heike clan. It’s a fitting final statement for the man, conveying a vision for the medium as an exclamation point. Since it premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last year, Inu-Oh has been considered Yuasa’s swan song. “My hope and what I think is best for the staff is everyone to just watch the films that we create.” “I don’t really think I have to be remembered as anything,” Yuasa told Paste on the eve of Inu-Oh’s U.S. If you don’t know Yuasa’s name already, you know his work-and that’s how he wants it. And where do you even begin to list the credits? You’ve seen him take wins from international film festivals ( Lu Over The Wall), direct the prestige miniseries equivalent of a serialized anime ( Japan Sinks: 2020) and then there’s his latest film, Inu-Oh, a sort of spin-off story to the historical epic The Tale of the Heike presented as a musical rock opera. Even his award-winning film debut Mind Game would only reach a cult following internationally.īut in 2013, Yuasa co-founded Science SARU, an unconventional animation studio that has turned out eye-catching, award-winning TV and film nearly every year for almost a decade now. Audiences outside Japan probably wouldn’t recognize most of his early staff credits, or even his directorial debut (an episode of the 1992 OVA Anime Rakugo Kan). He was able to build up a portfolio working on popular television shows like Chibi Maruko-chan as a key animator, or animation director on The Hakkenden: A New Saga-works that don’t really presage his international presence. Yuasa first began his career as an in-between animator at Ajia-do Animation Works in the ‘80s. Just how he pulls it all off is quite remarkable. It’s in movement and choreography, the lines all in dance, that he comes through. A Yuasa film doesn’t look like any one thing, let alone something defined by a singular art style. He shares an ability to reach audiences that may otherwise disregard animation with other “legends” like Hayao Miyazaki ( Spirited Away) and Makoto Shinkai ( Your Name), but neither the man nor his films look quite the same as those figures.
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