November 2016 Interview 13

-Most union members are animators, aren't they?
It seems that the Toei Doga Union now also includes contract employees who draw illustrations for promotional purposes.

H: I haven't met anyone from the Toei Doga Union recently, so I didn't know that.

-What was it like in the past?

H: In the past, it was just people who worked on the production floor. Everyone was involved, from drawing, finishing, and art.

-Is that only people who worked at Toei Doga Studio?

H: Some people who worked at Toei's subcontracted studios were members of Eisanro.
Until the '90s, even people who weren't union members were supportive of our union activities.
When we started a signature campaign, everyone would sign it.

In the 1980s, when the Animation Joint Struggle Conference held petitions under the titles "Stop Prime Minister Nakasone" and "Let's put an end to Japan's nuclear armament policy," many small and medium-sized business owners, including those affiliated with Toei, and many animators who were not union members also cooperated.
The petition is still uploaded on Anime Report. (https://anirepo.exblog.jp/18984420/)
Everyone cooperated, whether union or not, including Yoshinori Kaneda, Takao Kozai, Mushi Productions, and Toei Doga Union.
There's also Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Kenzo and of course the name of Yoshifumi Kondo, a former Eisanro union member. The name of my teacher, Kenzo Koizumi, is also there.

My mentor, Kenzo Koizumi, actually joined Toei Doga early on. Around the time of "The Legend of the White Snake" (1958). He started out as a camera assistant on "The Legend of the White Snake." He assembled and cleaned the multi-camera equipment.
However, Koizumi only had a junior high school education. He joined the company but had a hard time getting promoted.
Koizumi felt inferior about the fact that people who joined the company later, such as Miyazaki Hayao, who was a university graduate, were steadily promoted. "I joined the company before you..." he said.
Even when he was put in charge of "動画/douga" for feature-length films, the higher sections were full, and it was difficult to get hired as a key animator.
So he left Toei and started his own company.
But he loved Toei.
This was a time when there were no production committees and advertising agencies were not as strict as they are now.
Conversely, there are people who couldn't get into Toei Doga and feel inferior about it.

-Was that the '80s?

H: No. I'm talking about the '60s-'70s. It was a time when you could create relatively freely.
Of course, you still had to sell products from toy companies that sponsored you, but it was a time when you could create more freely than now.
However, the industry was commercialized under the initiative of the government and the business world (mainly in 2000), and people from other industries who did not know the history, traditions, or past hardships of the anime industry suddenly stepped into the industry as producers.
We were resistant to the new business demands made by those people.

-It feels like Japanese anime flowed out from Toei.

H: Yes. All of the old works were good. In the '70s, Toei's live-action films were also interesting.
In the time of President Shigeru Okada, there was a history and spirit (inherited from the previous producer, Mitsuo Makino) of just making movies. There was a lot of energy on set.

-When I read Kasuga's books, I really feel that kind of passion.