All the Announcements from Otakon 2024

The Art is in Nature's Details: Laid-Back Camp at Otakon

For such a relaxing and comforting series like Laid-Back Camp, you'd think that the production would be rather, well, laid back. But in reality, there were a lot of details the team had to make sure to get right to properly bring this fan-favorite back to life for season 3. This would end up taking a lot more time and care than you might expect.

When researching campsites to decide which could be used for the characters to visit in the anime, they couldn't just look up lists online and pick one at random. Director of Laid-Back Camp season 3, Susumu Tosaka, recalled their criteria at one of their panels at Otakon 2024, "The campsites had to be realistic to match the character's abilities to get there for their age, their budget, and their means of transportation. Especially getting to the campsite in a realistic amount of time."

It's the little things like that in Laid-Back Camp that not only make it feel so genuine but show the fans just how much the staff cares. Some of the staff, including director Tosaka, went on online auction sites to buy some of the same camping gear the girls of the camping club used in the original manga so they could try to use it themselves on camping trips and get familiar with all its parts to animate—and paid for them out of their own pockets. To recreate the feeling of eating all that delicious camp food the series is known for, not only did the staff cook the recipes themselves to try them all out, but the show had staff members to specifically work on just drawing all the camp food. There was even a dedicated food colorist on staff to ensure all the food was painted to look as delicious as possible.

Even when composing the backgrounds and layouts for the show, all the fine details were taken into consideration. Art director Taketo Gonpei, when asked about using Mount Fuji in certain scenes, made sure to look up how much snow was usually on the mountain during the different times of the year so the staff could take note of how much snow to paint on it for each episode. "When you think of cherry blossoms, you might think 'pink,'" Gompei continued, "But if everything just gets painted pink, there's no sense of depth. So I made sure that there would be other colors, such as purple and blue-ish tints, so that you would get a sense of depth in the art." In fact, when director Tosaka and crew did on-location research and scouting, they took ten terabytes of cherry blossom photos for the staff to reference.

While this might seem a bit excessive for reference material, this was actually incredibly important to its production, as cherry blossoms were a central ongoing theme for the show's third season. "Cherry blossoms is a flower that has deep meaning to the people of Japan," Tosaka continued, "In particular, we wanted to portray how the sakura flower develops and blooms from episode 1 to episode 12. And in the final episode, we had the cherry blossoms in full bloom, and Nadeshiko and the other members enjoying camping under full blooming sakura trees in episode 12."

While the staff was in town for Otakon, they visited where the DC cherry blossom trees were located, even though they weren't in bloom, to get a taste of what cherry blossom season is like for fans here in the U.S. "If you've ever been to see the Washington DC sakura when it's in full blossom," Tosaka said to fans at the panel, "it's a very overwhelming experience. It's something that's very much ingrained into a lot of Japanese people. And it does coincide with very important life milestones, such as a new school year or graduation. So it's this kind of 'full sakura sensation' that we wanted to reincarnate into Laid-Back Camp."