Interview: Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko Director Ayumu Watanabe

Straight on the heels of the arthouse anime masterpiece Children of the Sea, director Ayumu Watanabe and Studio 4°C return for Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko, a charming coming-of-age anime film about a young girl and her surrogate mother in a seaside town. ANN spoke to Watanabe at Tokyo International Film Festival about the biggest challenges in creating a widely relatable film.

Compared to Children of the Sea, Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko has a more down-to-earth story. What attracted you to the novel?

I would say that the biggest difference from my previous work Children of the Sea is that this one doesn't have any visual cues. So it was up to me to decide how much reality we should bring into the visuals of the film. Of course, we were working with more or less the same staff members at the same studio, so it was possible for us to aim for realistic visuals.

At the same time, we were depicting a rather overweight character, for lack of a better word, and we wanted to emphasize the humor and how adorable she is over reality. In order to do that, we had to resort to a more manga-like effect in comparison to my previous work.

When it came to Children of the Sea, you were very scrupulous with the storyboards. Was Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko similarly ambitious at the outset?

It was more or less of a challenge this time because with Children of the Sea, we had the original manga to work off of, so there was a certain direction that was presented to us, whereas this one, I said before, is based on the text-based medium of a novel, so there was that much more freedom. But it means that we had to pre-meditate that much more, meaning that we had to have this common understanding between myself and my crew members as to what we were aiming at or looking for. Being on the same page was very important even before starting on the storyboards.

Do you have any strong memories or impressions when it comes to seaside towns?

First of all, regarding the production of this film, the original novel written by Kanako Nishi was very specific in terms of which seaside town was the backdrop. It was a town called Onagawa, but its landscape was ruined because of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, so we weren't able to recreate that specific scenery in the film.

To make up for that, we decided to go general here and not specify the town. Instead, we made it look like a seaside town that you would be able to find anywhere in Japan. And so, because it's not a specific town we're depicting here, that of course means that I have to infuse my own experiences and memories into the film. Some aspects are influenced by my childhood nostalgia, for example the seaside towns that I would visit in my summer vacation.

Izu is an example of one of the towns I frequented, and there are other ports and seaside towns that I like to walk along. But there are common elements between seaside towns, and those are the parts that we decided to include in this film. To be a little more specific here, you often see curving, winding roads in seaside towns that connect to the ocean. Alternatively, you could walk along these roads and end up very far away from the shore. There's always that contrast of the mountain sort of jutting out over the ocean. It's very emblematic of Japanese seaside towns.

Earlier, you mentioned that Nikuko has a kind of manga-like expression. Did you ever worry that if you went too far with it, you would create a stereotypical depiction? What kind of things did you do to maintain the balance and emphasize her humanity as a character?

Indeed, it was a difficult balance to strike, I suppose, but one way we decided to bring out the character in Nikuko was to contrast her with her “daughter” Kikuko. Kikuko is very real, the sort of girl you can imagine spotting anywhere. So even though Nikuko skews a little towards the manga-esque side, the nuances of her character are brought out vis-à-vis the daughter character.

Part of the film focuses on Kikuko's early adolescence as a woman, such as experiencing her first menstruation. What kinds of consideration did you take in order to make those parts feel true to reality?

It was indeed one of the difficult parts of directing this story, because I am indeed not an adolescent girl myself. So that was rather challenging. But I think that, regardless of whether you are a boy or a girl, you'll experience doubts and aggravations in your relationships with your classmates. It was very important to depict that tiny sliver of time where a boy is not definitively a man, nor is a girl definitively a woman. It's a very special time, especially here with the relationship between Kikuko and her classmate Ninomiya-kun. By focusing on that kind of pure relationship, even a little step into womanhood like a girl's first period marks a big leap. We were very intentional about bringing out that kind of contrast in that pure, pre-adolescent state.

Is there anything you're particularly conscious about when it comes to making a film about family?

What one has to be very careful about when making films about families like that is to create something that as many people as possible can relate to. I was really careful about depicting the family situations with a realistic perspective, so much so that you can really imagine this family existing anywhere.

How did you end up working with the comedian Sanma Akashiya, and what was your experience like working with him?

First of all, there were initially talks about developing this novel adaptation as a live-action work. However, it was eventually decided that the creative process would have more freedom if it were made into animation. This was a decision made on Sanma-san's side. Thankfully, because of that, I was able to have this opportunity as an animation director, so for that I am very grateful to him.

Of course, Sanma-san is a figure that I knew very well from watching on TV as a very impressionable teenager. So to have him right there in front of me and to be able to converse with him was a wonderful experience. He's just like he is on television, so sometimes I would forget that this was actually a job. I was also very impressed watching him at work. He's always thinking about how to make people happy, how to make people laugh, and always coming up with ideas of how to express things. His mind is always on, so he's always very earnest and diligent about it. He's such a serious-minded person in that respect. Before I worked with him, I was just a plain fan, but now I have really come to respect his work ethic above all else.

What kind of performance were you seeking from Cocomi?

It was really a straightforward approach because her voice does it all. What I mean by this is that there's a kind of duality in the character. She's a very mature little girl, but she still acts her age sometimes, so there are parts of her that are still incomplete, still wavering. That's all expressed in her voice, so we just played it straight.

Several years ago, there was news about a Studio 4°C employee working many hours of unpaid overtime. Since then, has Studio 4°C made changes to improving the work environment?

It depends on which conditions each employee is working under and what their separate circumstances are like. But one thing I can say is this: You see these people working with a consolidated effort towards a project, and you can see the solidarity between these workers. I can definitely say that the environment has improved. Without the solidarity between the workers, I don't think we would have been able to complete Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko either.