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Interview: Shuzo John Shiota, President of Polygon Pictures

Excellent interview - extremely candid. It’s rare for any many higher ups in a company to so openly talk about having misconceptions about how to best run their operation, especially on the Japanese side of things, so hearing the admittance that remote work has generally been a blessing to both Polygon as a studio & its workforce was enlightening. Same with the expectations vs costs conversation of attempting big budget cg productions in the early 00’s, attempting to get a foothold into the US industry & talking about the drawbacks that the Netflix binge model has on keeping ips fresh in the public perception.

Still as an anime fan, a part of me finds it unfortunate that despite how articulate & passionate Shuzo John Shiota is, I’m still of the opinion that the studio’s output still isn’t of the acceptable quality for me to give one of their titles more than a one episode check in.

Admitting that Polygon is aware of the negative comparison with Orange was fascinating although I didn’t quite buy into this reason being mainly due to the latter’s perception in the fandom with having a sakuga-based background. At this point in time there are plenty of other studios that could be confidentially claimed have surpassed Polygon in terms of technical mastery. Shirogumi & Digital Frontier being two obvious examples, with the likes of Larx, Graphinica & arguably Sanzigen also being in consideration. Shiota mentions that’s it’s in the blood of the studio to be experimental, & while I think this is somewhat true in how versatile they are with genre hopping, general shading & filters, etc. the fact their current title (Kaina of the Great Snow Sea) is stilling mirroring the rather stiff & unconvincing models seen back in 2014’s Sidonia, and every sci-fi anime story since (Ajinn, Blame! Godzilla, Human Lost) indicates an inability, or perhaps more likely an unwillingness to adjust their base fundamentals to make the end result less uncanny.

Still, given some of his musings about how Japan was largely sceptical of cg, with that mantle now falling on the international market, it does make a level of sense to give up on trying to improve for otaku, when the vast majority of either Netflix/streaming viewers will be generally unaware or indifferent to the shows limitations. That definitely makes sense from a business stance point, particular when seemingly nothing you can do will please the most hardcore of fans (just look at the twitter comments for any Orange or Crunchyroll Trigun Stampede post) but it is deflating whenever I see they’ve picked up another high concept sci-fi adaptation & I spent roughly 50% of my viewing experience thinking “you could have polished this up a lot more, folks”.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t I guess.