[Honey’s Anime Interview] Studio Orange @ Anime NYC 2022!

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Legendary Studio Orange needs very little introduction. Known for their amazing animation works like Beaststars, Dimension W, and soon, Trigun Stampede, this talented studio has wowed us all with some wonderful anime series! We here at Honey’s Anime were fortunate enough to sit down with two of Studio Orange’s members, Chief Producer Kiyotaka Waki and Producer and PR Yoshihiro Watanabe, to ask some questions about their creations and the upcoming Trigun Stampede series. Here is our interview that hopefully, you all will enjoy as much as we did!

Studio Orange

Honey-Chan

Interview with Studio Orange

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Are there any changes to Vash’s attitude in this new version of Trigun, Trigun Stampede?

One of the biggest things we focused on while developing the show was that the previous anime was released during the time the manga was still releasing. We started after the manga was done so that’s a big difference. In the manga series, the first half was more western and the latter half was more sci-fi and we looked at that as a whole from every aspect. We did have staff that let us expand the world of Trigun but the series is rooted in the manga version so essentially all the manga, anime, and current versions are the same Vash.

Was there a consensus effort to update the visual style to make a more contemporary look?

We never really had the discussion to change the design. When we first started developing the show we had more designs that looked closer to the original. Our designs changed when we discussed the world and when the world built up that’s how we made the designs fit more into that world. We never really intended to update or modernize any of the designs. We were approached to understand how creator Yasuhiro Nightow looked at it for our designs. Of course, it's manga so what you see in front of you is what is described. By reading deeper into the manga we felt Nightow has this entire foundation created so that is what we tried to look into ourselves.

Does Studio Orange have any interest in reviving other series aside from Trigun in the future?

We don’t really approach things in that sense. There are some directors who would be best with these shows and that is how we look at it, who would best be suited for a series.

Studio Orange released a short-form anime on YouTube called Home, about the search for a crashed commercial vessel on mars. Do you think that YouTube is a good venue for testing concepts for longer stories?

The funding for Home came from the Japanese government. With that, we were able to challenge things that we usually can’t for the commercial format. Such as staff that was starting young but wanted to challenge other positions. We had more technology to use and with that, we were able to show people what we could produce.

Studio Orange has done a lot of series that have heavy CG elements but have been able to blend the traditional and CG in a seamless way. Land of the Lustrous is a great example of this. Is the goal of being a master of the new and traditional mediums a conscious effort to become the go-to studio for that kind of work?

Our CEO is a CG animator and how he approaches things is to remove that slight uncanniness from what we create. It isn’t we’re trying to approach more traditional animation or to utilize CG but to make things as natural as possible. Of course, our studio is located in Japan and focuses on anime so we are always focused on traditional anime. But at the moment we don’t know how we will move forward but there is a possibility to go further!

You got to produce one of the most iconic Toho properties, Godzilla: Singular Point, is there any hope that you will be able to produce other kaiju-related properties?

We are definitely interested in working with more kaiju! Not just kaiju but anything with imagery of things fighting with some gigantic thing. A lot of our staff love kaiju!

What anime to this day has been one of the most difficult for the company?

Trigun…Trigun Stampede.

Beastars had a unique style with its open animation…what inspired the stop motion style that is used?

The director who did the opening sequences was Kato Michiya who we were involved with on another show, Rideback. Honestly speaking when we approached Kato, who owns a company Cyclone Graphics that uses CG, we thought he would do just that, something CG. But when we made the first offer we didn’t specify to use CG so he thought most likely to do anything he wanted. So he gave us two options, one of which was the stop motion which looked very attractive so we went with that!

So how did it feel/does it feel to do Trigun Stampede so far?

Whenever we start a new show we try to raise a certain goal for technical challenges. For every technical challenge we clear we want to extend it and include everything in that show and in this case, that would be Trigun Stampede!

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Final Thoughts

We are so grateful to have spoken with both Kiyotaka Waki and Yoshihiro Watanabe from Studio Orange and truly hope Trigun Stampede does incredibly well! We learned a lot during our interview and equally saw the passion from those who truly love anime as much as we do! Let us know in the comments below if you liked this interview and want us to do even more like it!

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