is without a doubt one of the finest anime directors ever, and it was a great pleasure to sit down with him and discuss his extensive career.
He is also one of the increasingly rare individuals that was at the very formation of anime as we now know it. Having worked for“I was born in 1941 in Tokyo, the year the war started. That meant when I was growing up, people were worried about America bombing Japanese cities. So I was moved to a less urban area, which in my case was a mountainous region in Nagano prefecture. This was when I was three years old, and I moved back to Tokyo when I was ten or eleven.
“Although it was a wartime era, people living in more rural areas were less affected, which meant I had quite a relaxed childhood in Nagano. After the war ended, I came to know about the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “When I was eight years old, I got the chance to watch a movie for the first time. This was because living in a rural area meant there were no movie theaters. So the only chance I had was when a touring theater came by with a large portable screen, moving from village to village. The movie I saw was based on Russian folklore and was called. I’d heard of the word “movie” before because my father wanted to work for the movie industry, and he explained it to me when I was very young.
“The movie was also all in Russian, which meant it had subtitles. As I was eight years old, I couldn't read all that well. That meant the only clue I had about what was happening was the images on the screen. However, more than the visuals, I was interested in this projector. This seemed to be the master of what was happening on screen.