In this column, Shudo talks about his first meeting with Akemi Omode. Omode would go on to be a mainstay screenwriter for Minky Momo's second series (Umi Momo) as well as the cowriter for the Bridge Over Your Dreams OVA.
One day, when I was utterly exhausted from searching for a screenwriter for Magical Princess Minky Momo, a screenwriter acquaintance called.
"There's a promising young writer I know. Should I introduce you?" he said.
I had received countless similar calls from various sources before, enough to make me sick of them.
But most of the people introduced to me up to that point seemed unlikely to be able to write "Magical Princess Minky Momo."
I immediately replied, "I'll meet them. Bring the scripts they've written so far..."
The next day, though, that screenwriter called back. He said the young writer he'd intended to introduce "had to leave Tokyo due to personal circumstances and it didn't work out."
Then, though it wasn't the person he'd wanted to introduce, when he contacted that person, the one who answered the phone said, "I'd like to try writing instead, is that okay?" and he asked what he should do.
"A stand-in for whoever you wanted to introduce?" I was a bit deflated, but thinking that if it didn't work out, it probably wasn't meant to be anyway, I casually replied, "Well, I'll meet them just to see them."
That's how Omode Akemi ended up appearing before me.
In short, if I had met the person I was originally supposed to be introduced to, I probably never would have met her.
From what I heard, she was from Hiroshima... though that's beside the point... After coming to Tokyo and graduating from an animation technical school, she joined the animation company Eiken. She handled literary management duties for "Sazae-san," and when scripts for "Sazae-san" were delayed for various reasons, she often wrote them herself. By the time I met her, she had apparently become part of the core team of scriptwriters for "Sazae-san."
To be honest, when we first met, I thought, "Oh, this is going to be problematic."
I don't place much trust in people who studied screenwriting at vocational schools, though there are exceptions.
Many of them know the rules for formatting scripts on manuscript paper inside out, but they can only write stories and characters that feel like patterns seen somewhere before.
Because it's school, the curriculum tends to focus on teaching generally accepted script formats and structures rather than the teacher's originality. It leans heavily towards teaching screenwriting as an academic subject, so to speak.
In other words, what schools can teach is the technique of writing a screenplay. But even with that technique, if the author's vision, their originality, isn't reflected in the script, all they can produce are scripts that follow generally accepted formats and structural patterns.
Teaching the actual craft of writing a script is distinct from teaching what a script is.
Someone who writes interesting scripts isn't necessarily suited to teach scriptwriting.
This is because each screenwriter's individual originality and sensibility is unique to them and cannot be taught.
Therefore, even if you bring in a screenwriter who writes compelling works as a teacher, it's nearly impossible to teach scriptwriting techniques that all students can share.
If a screenwriter could teach universally applicable techniques to all students, it would mean they lack the originality unique to themselves.
Therefore, screenwriters who write compelling scripts can only share their personal worldview, sensibilities, and journey to becoming a screenwriter in school, rather than technical theory.
This can sometimes be helpful for students.
You gain some insight into a particular screenwriter's way of life, their worldview, their way of perceiving things.
But you, the student, are obviously not that screenwriter.
While the path to becoming a screenwriter that the lecturing screenwriter took can serve as a reference, it won't fit you because you haven't lived the same life as that screenwriter.
Moreover, the more distinctive an individual's personality, the more unique their screenwriting method tends to be. There's no way they could teach a creative method that works for the multitude of students attending a school.
It is fundamentally that person's personal creative method.
Or rather, I think most interesting, successful screenwriters are so busy they have no time to analyze their own methods; they just keep writing in the way that comes most naturally to them.
They might have knowledge of general creative methods or technical theories, but they aren't consciously thinking about them while writing a script.
It's safe to say that the act of writing a script, which demands individuality, is fundamentally different from critiquing scripts or analyzing and researching them.
Recently, with the proliferation of screenwriting schools, it's common for people who haven't written many scripts themselves to become screenwriting instructors.
If you want to teach screenwriting technique, critics or screenplay researchers could do it. In fact, for public lectures, skilled screenwriting teachers might be better than many active screenwriters, who are often not great speakers.
Still, it feels odd that there exists a separate profession: screenwriting school teachers who don't write scripts themselves.
In any case, such technical schools attract people who share the same interest in wanting to write screenplays. Consequently, the topics of conversation become similar, interactions are limited, and the world feels narrow.
For screenwriters, real-life experiences and interacting with diverse people, observing them, are crucial.
This becomes difficult if confined solely to the school environment or interactions only among like-minded peers.
While individuals might have had originality to begin with, when they're all taught the same things and start forming a group, they become homogenized.
What was originally unique turns into "monkey see, monkey do" – aspiring screenwriters who will only write... or rather, can only write formulaic stories with similar characters and predictable patterns.
When I met Omode, looking back now, it might have been my own prejudice, but just hearing she was from an animation vocational school made me feel negative.
In other words, I felt uneasy about whether she could write something original.
Moreover, thinking rationally, being the literary manager for "Sazae-san" and writing scripts for it is, ordinarily, an impressive career for a newcomer.
Sazae-san is a long-running, popular anime that had been going strong even before I started writing scripts.
Plus, its setting revolves solely around the Sazae-san family and their immediate circle. The stories are mostly formulaic, and even the era is stuck in the nostalgic Shouwa period, depicting an ideal family with no hint of moving forward.
An anime that maintains such a formulaic pattern while retaining such strong viewer support for so long is nothing short of mind-bogglingly mighty.
Actually, I was involved with Sazae-san just a little bit myself.
When I was in my twenties, I wrote about three scripts for Sazae-san filled with chaotic slapstick. I was politely told, "Sazae-san's style isn't Tom and Jerry..." and, naturally, they were rejected.
What I realized back then was that it was an anime I could never write.
Even to my 20-year-old self, it felt like an anime depicting a family that was old-fashioned.
The world of Sazae-san, preserving family relationships from the mid-Shouwa era, felt almost like a period drama.
To write a period drama, you absolutely must know the events and the atmosphere of that era.
Having been born in the mid-Shouwa era, there's no way I could remember that time.
In fact, it seems the scripts for Sazae-san have been written by veterans since that time, continuing all the way to the present day.
Even back in my twenties, I believed Sazae-san was impossible for young people.
Yet, Omode, who came saying she wanted to write Magical Princess Minky Momo, was still in her twenties at the time.
I was stunned she could handle the literary management or scriptwriting for Sazae-san... but it only made my own attitude more negative.
Sazae-san and Magical Princess Minky Momo are just too different.
Sazae-san is the epitome of formulaic repetition, and its characters aren't exactly unique.
On the other hand, Magical Princess Minky Momo was anything goes, and I wanted the characters appearing in each episode to be unique.
Sazae-san and Magical Princess Minky Momo had different worldviews and different senses of humor. You could say they were completely opposite types of anime.
Omode had watched the "Sky Momo" arc of Magical Princess Minky Momo.
But just because she watched Minky Momo as a child, could she really write Magical Princess Minky Momo?
But before meeting Omode, I had already met over 20 screenwriters unsuited for Magical Princess Minky Momo.
I had even resigned myself to the idea that adding one or two more such writers wouldn't matter.
The saving grace, if there was one, was that she had worked in literary management, meaning she had read countless scripts.
Whether it was scripts for "Sazae-san," depicting the everyday lives of ordinary people, or others, they were still scripts.
Most of those scripts were written by people with veteran techniques.
I'll say it again: "Sazae-san" scripts look simple, but they must be incredibly difficult.
Surrounded by such scripts, even though she was young, Omode must have absorbed veteran techniques.
My curiosity began to stir a little about what kind of script she would produce.
Then Omode said:
"Truthfully, I'd rather write robot stories than 'Sazae-san.'"
I was somewhat surprised.
The person writing "Sazae-san" wants to write robot stories?
With those words, I made up my mind.
Omode wanted to write something completely different from her usual work.
I felt I saw a connection between "Sazae-san" and "Magical Princess Minky Momo."
I suggested to Omode, "Why not try writing 'Minky Momo'...?"
Surely it wouldn't hurt for the "Sazae-san" world to appear in "Magical Princess Minky Momo" once... After all, it's the anything-goes "Minky Momo."
At that point, I never imagined Omode would become a regular writer for "Magical Princess Minky Momo."
As an aside, several years after "Magical Princess Minky Momo," Omode would go on to write scripts for the "Gundam" series. In that sense, Omode's wish was fulfilled.
To be continued
---
â— The Me of Yesterday (not so much a status report, but how anyone can be a screenwriter)
Perhaps because I worked on "Magical Princess Minky Momo," I was once asked by quite a few aspiring screenwriters, "Isn't an 'it was all a dream'-ending a bad thing?"
This was likely a reference to the finale of Part 2 of "Sky Momo," where the entire story turned out to be a dream experienced by a human baby.
Indeed, screenwriting schools and books on screenwriting treat "it was all a dream"-endings and "it was all psychosis"-endings as taboos in storytelling.
In other words, no matter how absurd or illogical things get in a movie, no matter how bizarre the characters are, if it ends with "it was all a dream" (meaning a dream while asleep), then anything that happened is forgiven.
This is seen as extremely convenient.
Similarly, no matter how strange the characters or inexplicable the crimes or suicides, ending with "it was all done by someone mentally ill" allows the story to wrap up neatly.
This too is considered overly convenient and careless in screenwriting.
But I don't think "it was all a dream"-endings or "it was all psychosis"-endings are necessarily that bad.
Dreams during sleep are said to be manifestations of a person's subconscious, and perhaps the dreams a person sees reveal them most clearly.
It all comes down to how the dream is portrayed.
It's true that excellent films using "it was all a dream"-endings have been gradually increasing lately.
The same goes for mental illness.
Severe mental illness patients are another matter... though such people would likely be confined to hospitals... Mild mental illness always has a reason behind it.
Things that seem insignificant to outsiders become major problems for the individual, causing their mental state to deteriorate.
Depicting this accurately could make for an excellent social drama, and depending on the approach, it might even give birth to a horror masterpiece.
Watching newspaper and TV news, it seems like in today's modern society—filled with stress and rampant irresponsible behavior—most people suffer from mild mental illness.
People who build defective apartments without a second thought, people who plagiarize news stories, people trying to make huge profits from stock market fluctuations, bullying, suicides and murders with unclear motives... In Japan today, I feel like people who need psychiatric clinics—though not serious enough for hospitalization—walk the streets with utterly unmoved expressions.
In fact, I feel most people in Japan today, myself included, carry some form of mental illness within them.
While I certainly believe we should avoid facile "it was all a dream"-endings or "it was all psychosis"-endings, in this modern age where the boundary between dream and reality is blurred, I feel such endings have their place in depicting a society that seems undeniably mentally ill.
For example, compare someone who wakes up from a nightmare relieved to think, "Ah, thank goodness it was just a dream," with someone who agonizes, "Why did I have such a nightmare?" The latter type seems to be increasing.
The present era is clearly different from the time when scripts featuring "it was all a dream"-endings or "it was all psychosis"-endings were criticized.
While careful handling is obviously necessary, am I alone in thinking that "it was all a dream"-endings and "it was all psychosis"-endings have become effective tools for depicting modern people?
Either way, it is a troublesome era.
To be continued