©Kanejo Muneyuki, Nomura Yusuke, Kodansha/”Blue Rock” Production Committee
blue lock Everywhere anime expo 2024. Multiple groups made a strong appearance at the exhibition Kodansha Countless booths in the exhibition hall role player Chuan Ning blue lockInstantly recognizable training apparel, all based on popular shounen anime and rising manga.
I had the privilege of sitting down with three core employees blue lock The franchise is in anime expo 2024. Arisawa Ryoyaanimation producer, Megumi Tsuchiyacomics editor, and Kazuki Uradubbing the protagonist Jun Yangyi of the play.
I want to know how they feel blue lockworldwide reach and what they hope the series can achieve.
What effect do you want to see blue lock Are there any in the world?
Arisawa Ryoya: blue lock It is a work with a positive attitude. It’s about finding your strengths and using those strengths to overcome adversity. So if it makes the audience think, “I’m going to do my best,” and be ready to do my best the next day, then I’m happy with that.
Kazuki Ura: This may overlap a bit with what Mr. Arisawa just said, but I always hope that it can be a support for those who are trying to achieve certain goals. I feel like, especially in Japan, a lot of people give up on their dreams very quickly, as if there’s no point in putting in the effort, or it’s not worth doing if you can’t be number one. obviously, blue lock It’s about being the best, and that makes sense to a certain extent, but there’s a deeper meaning to the effort itself. so i want blue lock When someone feels intimidated about committing to work, they may need that push and encouragement. Just break a sweat and work hard!
Megumi Tsuchiya: blue lock Appear in weekly shounen magazine, aimed at teenagers. things i often talk about [manga writer] Mr. Jincheng and [manga illustrator] Mr. Nomura believes that maybe this will not directly make someone a professional football player or a cartoonist, but if blue lock Made a positive impact on someone and helped them choose what they wanted to do. As in “I read blue lock When I was young, it inspired me to pursue this or that. maybe they are reading blue lock As a kid now, 10 or 20 years from now, you can go back blue lockimpact on their life paths.
What kind of impact do you think this series has had on real-life players at home and abroad? How does that make you feel?
Tsuchiya: I once had a conversation with a Japanese professional soccer player who mentioned Isagi’s backheel shot in the series and said he looked at it and thought, “Hey, that’s me! I use this move a lot! That kind of conversation is fun.” .
Also, during the 2022 World Cup, when international fans watch, there will be some wonderful shots or goals, and they will mention them in articles online. blue lock. It made me realize that it was affecting football culture around the world. This made a deep impression on me.
Speaking of the World Cup, the Japanese team achieved historic results in the 2022 Qatar World Cup. When they beat Germany in the group stage, you saw people saying: “blue lock it is true! blue lock?
Tsuchiya: In fact, I was in a meeting with Mr. Kaneshiro and Mr. Nomura and we were watching the game. That moment really stood out to me because it was a moment where our hearts just clicked, like, “Wow, people all over the world are reading and watching blue lock! This is a very celebratory moment for us in many ways.
about one thing blue lock What excites me are the moments when a character is about to fire a gun. A crescendo of music, a voiceover that sounds increasingly desperate, and a gorgeously animated sound effect of a foot making contact with the ball and sending it into the back of the net. I asked how I could bring it all together.
The field goal moments in the show are so powerful and exciting. What makes these moments so gripping?
Tsuchiya: Each player has their own style of play, their own strengths, and their own unique way of creating shooting opportunities. One rule was that it should be a drama that could be done in real life, so Mr. Kaneshiro and Mr. Nomura would find a real-life footage and use it as the basis for a scene in the manga. This may be one of the favorite characters among players of the same age blue lock It’s achievable, but none of it is impossible to do in real life.
Anyway, they’ll find the film and use it as a model, and when they’re adapting it, they’ll say, “Okay, what angle looks best for that shot? What’s the coolest way to approach that moment?”
Arisawa: This is pretty much the same for animation. Things in the comics, even every step the characters take, are depicted with such care and detail. Of course, we’ll do the same thing faithfully for animation. We also tried to focus on how to describe the rhythm of things unfolding in a way that felt good. If it’s a manga, you can read it at whatever pace feels best to you as a reader, but since it’s anime, it has to flow at a certain pace. So at every stage, whether it’s the overall scene, storyboarding, or editing, we pay great attention to rhythm.
Of course, that’s important for the action, but we also wanted the emotion and drama of it to keep up. For example, “When a particular character is getting ready to shoot, how are their thoughts going to flow?” That’s something we adjust very carefully in animation.
Ulla: As the voice of the character, I try to think carefully about real-life situations. Obviously, in a real game, no one has time to have long mental monologues. But that’s one of the great things about anime. you can create those moments Feel real. That’s the voiceover artist’s tool, stepping in at the very end of a production and giving it emotion and drama to make it believable. You’re trying to be in sync with what’s on the screen and the intention behind it, and deliver your lines in a way that makes the audience feel good.
Voice works on blue lock As we just said, it’s crucial to making these moments so powerful. What method do you use to get into the mindset to come up with lines for a scene like this?
Ulla: Isagi is always in a situation where he’s being chased in the beginning, so he’s portrayed as struggling like crazy in a way, and you want people to feel that. You know that feeling when you finish something and you realize you still have some energy left and you think to yourself, “Hey, you didn’t really give it all you had, did you?” I really try to get into it. A space where I felt like I didn’t even have a millimeter of space. I forget that I’m standing in a studio recording lines in front of a microphone, and I’m trying to convey a sense of desperation in a scene like this. I was basically in a trance.
Football naturally uses a player’s feet as their primary tools for playing the game. The series focuses a lot on how feet are depicted on screen. What’s behind the special treatment of the feet?
Tsuchiya: Mr. Nomura pays great attention to the player’s footwork, posture and proportion. So for the foot, they’re going to have a player with a specific playing style, and they’re going to focus on the musculature of the foot and aspects that are specific to the foot. Then, in comics, you have panels where things are shown at fixed angles and he has to think about how to draw the feet a certain way as he goes from one frame to the next.
Arisawa: Likewise, for anime, the body is drawn in such detail, so the animation team pays great attention to these details. But you can’t really change the shape of the panels like you can in the comics. You’ll always display content in a 16:9 rectangle, so in order to make the content fit into that shape, you may have parts that don’t fit into the frame. For shots with just one foot, even if the rest of the body isn’t on screen, you still have to keep this in mind so that the foot looks correct.
Then it’s sometimes hard to make sure the characters are drawn in a way that’s visually different from each other. We have detailed CG models of the feet, which are very well made. Of course, sometimes it’s just one foot shooting or passing the ball and it looks the same, but a CG model can help us design how it looks in motion, decide on colors based on the character, and help us make things look fake.
Our time is almost up, but with people working on both the manga side and the animation side in front of me, I wanted to ask what makes animation so unique.
What can the medium of animation allow you to do? blue lock No comics?
Arisawa: Well, obviously there’s movement, but Mr. Nomura’s work already has a lot of movement, so translating that into animation and making it all move was really difficult. But animation allows us to show visual changes and transformations, which we take very seriously. For example, the color of the character’s aura, just like when Isamu attains enlightenment or awakening, his blue aura instantly turns to yellow-green. A transformation like this that happens in a split second is something you don’t see in comics. We added a lot of this stuff when we translated the action from the comics into animation.
Another example is the way a character’s eyes change, such as gradually becoming more swirly, or a moment where the character’s eyes suddenly widen. You see this a lot with Bachira. These changes allow us to emphasize action or the emotion of a character to further enhance Nomura-san’s work, so the anime adaptation does more than just add action.
