Transcription
[Music] foreign has been a long time coming. Before the anime, before the manga, even before and yet the town moves. The author's previous hit work, the ideas, imagery, and scenarios for Heavenly Delusion were still swimming around in his mind. It was only in 2018 that he got the chance to release all of these ideas out into the world. In a way, it was a change from what we expected from Masakazu Ishiguro, an artist who'd cut his teeth on comedy for over a decade. But in another way, it was consistent with his love of science fiction and mystery, something he'd been sneaking into his works for a long while.
In interviews with the anime staff, the first thing they mentioned is that the manga is bizarre, and that they tried to recapture their energy for the series. It would have been all too easy to make Heavenly Delusion feel dark, a typical post-apocalyptic series where we all muse on humanity's wrongs and watch pure-hearted characters suffer. It retains the weirdness, the curiosity, and the joy that comes from solving a good mystery with a bunch of fun pals. It just so happens to also have monsters, bandits, and creepy old women.
[Music]
We first saw Heavenly Delusion animated in 2018 to celebrate the release of the first volume. A studio called Mini Cutter Laboratory was given the offer, a team Ishiguro was already familiar with. Back when he was planning the series, he had the idea that the characters would be traversing a desert. But then Minakata released a viral Hatsune Miku music video with superstar Kenshi Yonezu, and realizing his own PV would end up looking like a rip-off, Ishiguro changed the setting of his own work to a ruined cityscape instead. In the end, it's a good trailer, recreating the joyful curiosity of the apocalypse and, more significantly, adapting the character designs perfectly. So perfect, in fact, that when it was announced that Production I.G., a studio with veteran character designers, would be turning it into a TV show, they brought on the animator of this trailer to adapt the designs of the whole series, making for their first role in TV anime.
And speaking of debuts, this is the series directorial debut of Hirotaka Mori, a storyboard artist and episode director who mostly works with A-1 Pictures than I.G. In a series preview over on Polygon, the writer notes that although the trailer looked good, the show didn't have many big names aside from Kensuke Ushio on the soundtrack. And I think that's a trap that many, myself included, can fall into. When we look up the leads on an anime, we shouldn't just be looking at their titles. We should also be looking at the names they've worked alongside in the past. For example, sure, Mori's never directed a show before, but he was assistant director on Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale, on which Tessia Takeuchi did both animation and uncredited supervision work. And then a couple years later, Mori directed an episode on 22/7, and Takeuchi supervised a cute karaoke scene in that same episode. Therefore, it's not a huge surprise that Mori would task him with opening up episode 1 by storyboarding a stellar action scene that introduces our two leads. And hey, it was on Ordinal Scale, the film that is today renowned for its impressive VFX and compositing that changed the look of SAO forever. Yeah, Kanta Waraki is the compositing director here as well.
Now, I probably should say that none of this is a given. You can absolutely have people work together for months only for them to leave and never speak to each other again once it's done. Or maybe they do want to work together again, but their schedules just never line up. Point is, just because someone's well-connected doesn't mean their show's gonna be great. But you know what helps? An exciting adaptation at a renowned studio.
Production I.G. is big, has a celebrated history, owns a pizza restaurant that's attached to their studio, and probably the most important part, has the bargaining power to make a well-managed production more likely. For an animator, it's a more attractive prospect than, say, working on The Iceblade Sorcerer Shall Rule the World over at a studio that's apparently called Cloud Hearts. They are an assembly of the best people. The core team has worked with plenty of Production I.G. greats who want a break from working on Psycho-Pass, and anyone who just feels the need to always be within a mile radius of a wood-fired pizza oven. Even without the pizza, it's an attractive show to work on, exemplified by Weyland Zhang and much of his team working remotely to create a shoe-in for best opening of the year. Instead of adopting the aesthetic of the show itself, it goes in a whole new direction with lineless designs and striking imagery that represent the story of Tengoku. My favorite shot is one by Haku Ugo, where Kiruko runs so fast that they escape their online work before coming back together at the end. It's a cool sequence to watch, but also a fitting metaphor for their personal story. Weyland Zhang's been frequently brought up as one of the most talented new animators of our age, but I didn't expect to be calling him one of the most exciting new directors of our age as well. Just from this short sequence, we've seen him assemble a talented crew to create something that looks like I've never seen before.
It doesn't take long for it to become apparent that Tengoku is a place for artists to shine, and there doesn't appear to be any kind of rules as to how realistically or cartoony characters should move. It all just depends on tone, and that's something they've managed to maintain throughout the entire run. Except once. There is one episode of the show where the tone is thrown out of the window entirely, but honestly, I'm not even mad. Episode 10 adapts the Wall Town mini-arc from the manga, a kind of side adventure that shows a new dimension to this world and tells the story of the dark side of human nature, but it's overall not essential viewing. And so, for this episode, they appear to have just handed it over to Kai Ikarashi, the famed Studio Trigger episode director who brought us iconic chapters of Cyberpunk, Dino Crisis, and Gridman, and just let him do whatever he wanted.
On one hand, it's kind of distracting. The adaptation in general has removed a lot of the crassness of the original, so having one panel of boob grabbing extended out into a longer sequence ends up characterizing Jouichi in a different way. Likewise, Kiriko isn't actually this smitten with Mario wearing a wig, but it's still funny. Everything within this episode is heightened, whether it's the cartoony jokes with its fun dynamic poses, or the threat of the Iceman Eater being made even more apparent by having the acclaimed Koji Yoshimari draw the characters freezing over with a unique, detailed style, complete with heavier linework and frosted textures. It's an episode filled with ideas. The team just making the decisions that they felt best. But since this is a side quest of sorts, I can just sit back and appreciate it as a work of art.
It tells me charms in my mind. The healthier production of Tengoku gives us a better view of what great storyboard artists are capable of. Sure, Ikarashi's always worked with premium schedules over at Studio Trigger, but the last video on this channel was about Near Automata and how its disastrous conditions meant that despite having a great team, it wasn't able to live up to its full potential. And now, two of its stars, Tomohiko Ito and Toshimasa Ishi, of 86 fame respectively, boarded episodes of Tengoku as well. And their episodes are night and day, with more convincing action, strong imagery, and framing. Even if these last two episodes of the show made for a deeply uncomfortable watch, I can't pretend they didn't adapt the author's vision beyond expectations.
And speaking of adaptation, even though this is a video on animation, we can't not talk about the script. The screenwriting team here are all people with experience in crafting original stories, and the lead screenwriter, Makoto Fukami, in particular, is well-acquainted with cramming big-brain sci-fi into limited run times. Basically, from a manga reader's perspective, Heavenly Delusion runs at a breakneck pace and cuts a lot of stuff from the original. Some of that, as I mentioned before, are crass jokes, but there are also conflicts, moments of body dysmorphia for Kiriko, and valuable character vignettes. But in doing so, they've covered six volumes of material. If there was a greenlit season 2, now there's not much currently available to cover. However, even with all this talk of cutting and cramming, I believe that to someone who hasn't read the manga, it doesn't actually feel rushed. The moments they've cut are detours or digressions. Of course, I'm sad some of it didn't make it in, but it still feels like we're joining Kiriko and Maru for every step of their journey. And the school sections already felt fragmented to begin with.
Instead, and this is where I think the crew's experience in original storytelling lies, they trust the rest of the creative team to fill in the gaps. There are parts their personality that can be expressed through character animation and voice acting. There are parts of the world that we can see in background director Yuji Kaneko's gorgeous artwork that needs no further explanation. Why have the characters sit and explain where they're going to go when you can just have one of the industry's greatest artists draw them all? In fact, because of this, not only does it still feel like a respectful adaptation of the original, but there are cases where things are actually made even clearer through editing. I'm still debating whether they count as spoilers, but the identities of Man-Eaters and the secrets behind the timeline are made even more explicit in the anime version. Hey, maybe I'm just an idiot, but there were a lot of things that took me way longer to figure out in the source material. But even with that said, you should absolutely still read the manga. Even with the excellent character animation, the cool fights, the detailed backgrounds, and the engrossing voice acting, it's still worth remembering that Ishiguro himself is also an excellent artist and storyteller. Anime isn't a replacement for manga, it's just another version. And this story, with all its mysteries, hints, questions, and then questions about those questions, deserves to be experienced twice.
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