Interview With Anime Producer Masao Maruyama

Note: Due to circumstances outside of our control, this will be published on Anime Herald's main site on July 26. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Interviewer: Seth Burn

Editor: Samantha Ferreira

Anime Herald: Osama Tezuka’s The Greatest Robot on Earth. Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto. This is one of the greatest manga stories ever written. What is special about this particular production?

Masao Maruyama: I’ve planned this project because I started my career working for Osama Tezuka at Mushi Production. I have strong feelings for Tezuka-san and his works. I’ve also worked on the adaptations of Naoki Urasawa’s works, such as Yawara!, Master Keaton, and Monster. Pluto is the culmination of all those experiences. I felt that this was my responsibility and I had to do it.

Anime Herald: To tell this story over eight (one-hour) episodes, you had to move at a fairly brisk pace. Are you happy with the final result?

Masao Maruyama: I believe we were able to fully cover the entire story. Tezuka-san’s The Greatest Robot on Earth was about two volumes. We expanded on that, adding elements of horror and mystery. We’ve also made it more contemporary. I believe we needed this much time to cover everything we wanted to cover.

Anime Herald: The tornado in episode two was some of the best animation I’ve ever seen. Did you put particular effort into that scene?

Masao Maruyama: We love and root for hand-drawn animation. However, you see a lot of CG used in this art form. We worked on fusing these elements. It was a difficult challenge to do so. If we make it too real, why don’t we make it live-action? That’s not what we wanted. The original story was entirely hand-drawn. We wanted to use modern technology and keep it contemporary. We had to do a lot of trial and error to establish what we wanted to do visually.

Anime Herald: Do you have any stories from the production that you’d like to share?

Masao Maruyama: We struggled and suffered on a daily basis. If it was only for a year or two, we could endure it, but it went on for around a decade. We just hung in there. That is why every cut was very special to us.

Anime Herald: What gave you the strength to keep going year after year after year?

Masao Maruyama: We desperately wanted to complete this project. The volume of work was enormous because we didn’t want to cut anything. We wanted to perfect the project, so all of this work was necessary. When you consider the time from initial planning to completion it took about ten years. We really wanted to complete it in a perfect manner. We are very grateful for all of Netflix’s help. It took a long time, but we were finally able to complete it.

Anime Herald: When the project was finally finished, how did you celebrate?

Masao Maruyama: When we finished, I had no energy left. Instead of having a huge sense of joy, I had a liberating sense of relief.

As a team, we had a sense of joy that we were able to tell Tezuka-san’s and Urasawa-san’s story.