Variety spoke with director Naoya Andô and producer Ryo Nakamuray about their continuation of the saga. Set in an alternative, sci-fi version of late-Edo-period Tokyo, the Earth has been invaded by the Amanto, an alien species, and three friends set off on a personal mission. The manga became a long-running 367-episode anime series and has had three previous big-screen spin-offs.
How did you want to approach this franchise without losing its soul but at the same time making it suitably cinematic?Naoya Andô: When we started planning this film, we already knew that there would be many action scenes. We were keen to use the CinemaScope ultrawide ratio as well as using 3D in order to be able to move the camera more, and give us more variety, as well as keep the camera a little distant from the subjects so we could frame the shots better and really appreciate the design and setting. It’s for this reason we made this choice.
This story was already told in the TV series but despite the title Yoshiwara didn’t burn. But here we see it burn really.Naoya Andô: Our producer Takashi Maekawa also worked on the television series and so I asked him, are we going to actually burn the town this time? And the producer said: “Yes this time we’re going to burn everything.” And so we had talked among ourselves about how we were going to do it and the group made a creative decision to do it.
How important is Lucca Comic and Games for you to reach European fans and markets?Naoya Andô: Obviously, I am very honored and happy to have been invited to such an important event as Lucca. Up til now, we haven’t brought the films to Europe. This time we decided to try and bring the film here.
Yesterday, we saw how the Italian fans of “Gintama” love the series and we were very happy to see the warmth of the reception we got. Returning to such a well-loved narrative arc as “Yoshiwara in Flames,” how did you deal with the high expectations that audiences would have?Ryo Nakamuray: As you say, even in the original manga, this arc was hugely popular as well as the anime, but we felt there was enough time and we had the benefit of working on a different scale as well. How do you transfer from television to the big screen?Naoya Andô: Obviously we tried to find aspects that were big and impressive both in the audio and visual aspects.
But we finished the anime five years prior to beginning the film and in these five years, the technology has made great leaps forward. So we wanted to use these new technologies to push the film in new directions, especially using the 3D in the animation. We also worked on the music as well.
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