In conjunction with the release of the YUREI DECO Blu-ray set in December, Crunchyroll is happy to present an English translation of an interview included within the release featuring director Tomohisa Shimoyama, Series Composition writer Dai Sato and concept contributor Masaaki Yausa. The transcript of the video interview follows for fans to learn more about the series!

 

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Tomohisa Shimoyama (Director) x Dai Sato (Concept & Script & Series Composition) x Masaaki Yuasa (Concept)

 

At the planning stage, Masaaki Yuasa and Dai Sato were responsible for the initial conception, and once the project had taken shape to a certain degree, Tomohisa Shimoyama was brought in as the director. The project was intended to be a detective club story set in a society centered around social media and it would include a sweeping setting that spanned reality, augmented reality, and a virtual reality space known as the Hyperverse, raising questions about how each of them are shaped. We spoke to them about the final product, as well as the music in it.

 

A concept fusing detective club-style stories and internet culture

 

―So the project originated with Yuasa-san and Sato-san in 2016, right?

 

Yuasa: The show’s producer, Tetsushi Suzuki, asked me about adapting a manga based around a science-fiction version of The Boy Detectives Club into an anime. We ended up bringing Sato-san on board, and it started gaining steam from there. But this was just after the copyright on Ranpo Edogawa’s The Boy Detectives Club had run out, and there was a rush on projects based on those works, so we started discussing alternative versions we could do instead (*laughs*).

 

Sato: That’s right (*laughs*).

 

Yuasa: There was a children’s book series at the time that was comparable to The Boy Detectives Club called Tom & Sawyer in the City (a picture book illustrated by Kaoru Hayamine), and we had previously been interested in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, so I thought it might be a good idea to mix the two concepts. I can’t say for sure, but that may have been Sato-san’s idea. He’s a big fan of the author, Mark Twain. He would always bring a bunch of different books with him whenever we would have meetings, and the ones that were most interesting tended to focus on the internet. One of them talked about “filter bubbles,” which is basically when what you think is reality is actually a bunch of things that make you feel good, curated by a system. I thought it’d be fun to depict that kind of thing in an anime, which is where the ideas for the internet and augmented reality started expanding.

 

 

―So it started with a children’s adventure story, then developed into a way of examining the world via the internet?

 

Yuasa: With kids’ stories, you often have a character who is dissatisfied with their world, which leads to the discovery of another one, and they end up interacting with the inhabitants of this new world. But I didn’t want the original world to be a full-on dystopia, and I wanted there to be an energetic feel to it that comes with adventure and action.

 

Sato: Those core elements were decided on fairly early in the process. It’s from there that we got into things like the “filter bubble” and how there would be “content moderators” managing all the inappropriate content on the internet, which became our building blocks for how we constructed the world from that point on. I remember that bit taking a while.

 

Yuasa: Sato-san’s ideas and vision for the world just kept expanding, to the point that I got anxious whether we’d be able to sort it all out (*laughs*). Black Mirror did an episode that featured a social media-based system where your social standing was based entirely around your online engagement, and we talked about that perspective, too.

 

Sato: We also decided we didn’t want YUREI DECO to center around any particular social critique or commentary. With adventure and detective stories, whether it’s in prose or in a film, the cases are always a reflection of the period they take place in. So when we were coming up with mysteries and foes for Berry and Hack to deal with, the internet and social media felt thematically appropriate.

 

A Finale Featuring Aliens Was a Possibility

 

―Shimoyama-san, I heard you took over directing duties because Yuasa-san was too busy at the time. How did that work out?

 

Yuasa: The hand-off happened around the time Sato-san had started to solidify a lot of the details and structure of the story, and we really needed to get started on the design planning stage and with delivering on the visual production, which resulted in the timing issues. I didn’t really do much in that regard. It was a genuine passing of the wheel to Shimoyama-san.

 

Shimoyama: That’s right (*laughs*). I’d previously been the chief director on SUPER SHIRO, and we had a lot of back and forth on that project, but this time, he just explained the broad strokes and said “You take it from here.” (*laughs*)

 

 

―What parts of the story were decided after you joined, Shimoyama-san?

 

Shimoyama: The way we depicted the three sides to YUREI DECO’s setting of reality, augmented reality, and the Hyperverse. The idea was to have each world convey a different amount of visual information. As a test, we produced a pilot film to help us figure out how to execute the ways advanced AR could affect someone’s senses in real-time. What we realized then was that, when working in animation, it’s really hard to make a distinction between reality and AR compared to how obvious it is in live-action. This is what led us in the direction of ultimately having really simplistic buildings and backgrounds, which would then have “Deco” overlays that would result in them becoming wildly colorful. Then, there’s the Hyperverse, which we made distinct by making it clear that physical laws like the law of gravity didn’t apply there, which led to things like buildings that float, and people being able to fly.

 

Sato: From a story standpoint, we were working on the conclusion around then. We actually began production on the show before the ending was finalized. We tried to be flexible about what the endpoint would be and took the ultimate shape of the preceding episodes into consideration when figuring it out.

 

Shimoyama: It still wasn’t settled on by the time Episodes 7 and 8 were being worked on. We knew they’d go to Mark Twain and encounter Injunction Jo, but we still had the possibility of Berry and Hack leaving the island altogether in our minds at that point.

 

Sato: That ultimately got rejected, but one of the ideas that was proposed for the ending… was the arrival of aliens. The rest of the story proceeds along a linear trajectory, where it examines the characters’ relationships with each other and with the society in general, so I thought it might be a good idea to just take off in a totally different direction at the end.

 

Shimoyama: It was like “Injunction Jo is really an alien!” (*laughs*) I think Sato-san’s generation really has a thing for UFOs… (*smirk*)

 

 

Yuasa: That’s one way to handle things (*laughs*). Start with an outrageous idea, then work your way back from it until you reach something everyone can agree on.

 

Shimoyama: I see what you mean. But personally, I didn’t want to take everything we had built up until that point and then cap it off with a completely new element like aliens. I wanted to indicate the direction that the world we had worked on for 12 episodes would be heading in beyond the climax of the series. I wanted to prioritize how the characters dealt with the things they’d seen, and how they would go on living in that world.

 

Sato: It was after discussing this that we hit upon the ending we ultimately used, with the final scene being Berry’s return to a normal life after having what turned out to be a “slightly strange summer adventure.” And because the story was still up in the air by the midpoint of the series, it ended up feeling like the natural direction to go in. It’s really rare to work on a production that allows for that kind of leeway nowadays, so I was grateful for that.

 

Yuasa: When I saw how the ending panned out, I felt it was a good note to end on. Since the middle of the story had so many surprises and expanded on things as widely as they did, I thought the ending being more down-to-earth made a lot of sense.

 

The Music Was Produced After the Artists Had Seen the Footage 

 

―For the music of the show, you had three people in charge of the overall series, and each of them collaborated with artists to create songs for individual episodes. It was a pretty extravagant production.

 

Sato: That was Ban-Nam’s idea (Bandai Namco Filmsworks). The music was the part that was truly being worked on right up until the very last second. When my friend ☆Taku takahashi told me he was working on a song, I thought there was no way he’d make it in time. But when I heard he was collaborating with someone else, I was relieved (*laughs*). Something that’s worth noting is that, with most original productions, the music is done before the film is finished, but with this project, the music was being worked on with near-final footage already available.

 

 

―Did you have any particular directions for the music side of the series, Shimoyama-san?

 

Shimoyama: The music for the pilot was handled by Mito-san and Clammbon, and the piece “Utopia” that they came up with was so fantastic, when we got around to the pre-title sequence for Episode 1, I used it as the background music. And then, during the last scene of the final episode, when Berry is explaining what became of the members of the detective club, “Utopia” starts playing again.

 

In addition to that, the music wasn’t worked on before the animation like on most shows, instead starting around the time the animatics were ready. So while it wasn’t quite at the level of film scoring, being able to work with some of the footage already available made a big difference.

 

Sato: Early on, when I was meeting with Yuasa-san, as well as all the books, I brought some CDs along, too. I didn’t want the story to have a cyberpunk vibe to it, even though it shared a lot of similar elements, so I aimed for more of a lively “world music” kind of feel, with strange beats and strange instruments as part of the atmosphere. When Shimoyama-san came along and started working on the visual angle, the subject of our mutual love for Clammbon came up, and when he mentioned getting Mito-san involved for the music, it was a huge weight off my shoulders (*laughs*). After all, he’s someone who has an incredible pop sensibility, as well as a wealth of knowledge and experience from working on soundtracks.

 

―When you direct a project, Yuasa-san, do you oversee all the music?

 

Yuasa: If there are tracks available beforehand, I like to personally be the one who chooses them, in the sense of “This piece should be playing during this scene.” That said, I usually learn a lot from the music professionals about what different techniques can be applied, and I try to apply that knowledge going forward.

 

 

Yurei Deco Begins and Ends With “Utopia.”

 

―It sounds like production took a fair while. Did that result in a greater feeling of satisfaction once it was completed?

 

Sato: As Director Shimoyama mentioned, the pilot starting with “Utopia” and the same piece playing again at the very end created a feeling of completion. The series ends with about a minute of Berry reading from her diary while some music plays, and a number of details aren’t really elaborated on. We don’t learn exactly what Injunction Jo has decided to do with her freedom, nor the exact nature of whatever kind of authority might have transferred to Hack. But I think that piece of music is what makes that final note work in spite of the lack of specifics. I think that all of it combined is what makes it feel like a truly unique work.

 

Shimoyama: It’s about leaving some room for interpretation. When I was reading the script, I thought “This is Hack we’re talking about here, who’ll no doubt get bored and ditch after about a year.” (*laughs*) I think that it ended up being a story that stirs the imagination in that kind of way.

 

―Yuasa-san, what would you say is the most appealing part of working on an original production?

 

Yuasa: When I first started working on originals, I wouldn’t go in with a pre-set ending, and would think about how the ending should shape up as the project proceeded. Once you’re in the process of making something, a lot of times, your preconceived notions about it can change. And since I handed this over to Shimoyama-san before it started taking shape visually, I’m happy as long as it turned out the way he hoped.