Anime director Masaaki YUASA was at AnimeLA on Saturday as an industry guest and the highlight of a couple panels. Since a lot of folks can’t exactly make it out to Los Angeles immediately after New Year’s for a mid-size con, I figured I might as well write up what little I could remember of his panels. It’s worth noting that Yuasa-san was in town around this time for the dub recording for his crowd-funded short Kick-Heart and that his ability to be at the con was more of a happy coincidence.

His first panel of the night was Anime Production in Japan. Other guest were Eunyoung CHOI (color coordinator and an animator on Kick-Heart), and Maki TERASHIMA-FURUTA, Vice President of Production IG, LLC (Production IG’s US branch). The panel itself was mostly a Q&A session after a few initial announcements – that Yuasa-san was at AnimeLA on Saturday only, but that he was in the US through next Saturday, and that IG hoped to bring him to the US for another convention this year (they weren’t ready to announce which one just yet, though after the panel Maki did seem to spend a fair amount of time talking to SPJA CEO Marc Perez, so perhaps Anime Expo is under consideration).

• The goal was to have the Kick-Heart premiere for backers be the world premiere (meaning among other things that it hasn’t premiered in Japan yet)
• On animation production (not a big part of this panel, despite the title): some amount of animation work in Japan is done by people working from their home rather than in the studio, but they collaborate by mailing around pieces of paper and the like rather than by emailing files
• Yuasa-san said that as a child he was inspired by shows like Yamato and Mazinger Z and Castle of Cagliostro. He wanted to be an animator even as a child, and can’t imagine what he’d want to do if he hadn’t become one.

The panel was well-attended: with perhaps 37 of 45 seats filled. At the end of the panel Yuasa-san signed some autographs and drew a few sketches (though this had to be cut short due to time limitations), but he did manage to get his picture taken with some of the Kaiba cosplayers in attendance:

Yuasa-san’s second panel of the night was Kick-Heart Crowd Funded Anime

left to right in my poor-quality photo above: Stephen Weese, Maki TERASHIMA-FURUTA, Eunyoung CHOI, Masaaki YUASA, Richard Epcar, Ellyn Stern. Also sort of in the photo in the front row are some of the backers who were selected to be in the fan dub, though you probably can’t identify the back of their heads…

This panel was more panelist-driven, with the discussion largely driven by Richard and Steve (who worked on the dub along with Epcar Productions). I apologize that my notes from the panel are so fragmentary, but here’s what I remember:

• Paypal pledges to Kick-Heart after the Kickstarter closed are still coming in even as of the time of the panel; the total amount of money raised at that point was about $230-250K
• One of the issues encountered with Japanese backers interested in backing the project is that they aren’t used to entering their credit card information for online orders (I understand they often use some other form of payment for ecommerce). Kickstarter requires credit cards through Amazon, but Paypal doesn’t so it seems like Japanese backers were more likely to pledge via Paypal than through Kickstarter.
• From what Maki said, it sounds like the 10-minute Kick-Heart film (now 12 minutes) was originally intended as a trailer to raise money for a feature-length film. This might explain why early stretch goals for the project had held out the possibility of extending the film to 40 minutes or even a feature-length production if enough money could be raised.
• Asked about what creative freedom crowd-funding provides, Yuasa-san said that it didn’t alter any decisions he would have made; it just made it possible to produce an animated short film, which is quite hard to do in Japan these days.
• Richard asked Yuasa-san if he got the idea for Kick-Heart by being a fan of pro-wrestling…or perhaps of masochism? Yuasa-san said that as a child he watched and was a fan of Tiger Mask, and that although he isn’t personally interested in S&M it fascinates him as an idea.