I could stay depressed about my bad memory, but that's a negative way to live. Let's look on the bright side and list the advantages of having a bad memory. (1) You can reread a book and see a movie over and over and enjoy it as much as the first time. (2) If you make an inconvenient promise, you can pretend that you forgot about it and still be forgiven. (3) This is the most important thing: you can keep coming up with ideas without being held back by convictions or the past.

Since the waiting time required during the rendering process has been dramatically shorter in the last 10 years, I think that CGI animation has finally become practical. It is a fact that I processed the Steamboy work based on the assumption that the machine spec would be higher. In that context, young 3D animators have also gotten more skillful in recent years. But what I didn't expect is that the skills of traditional 2D animators have become worse, and notable young animators have not come out to the scene. This is a big issue for the industry.

During the production of the Steamboy film, what I put my most effort in was the process of layouts, and I did my best to check every detail. Once this process is done precisely, we will get great backgrounds from our art team. This makes the team effort fun. I can't create a movie by myself. It is worthy only because many staff bring new ideas and techniques. I think the appeal of being the director is to encounter such new things, which I don't possess. It is absolutely wonderful to create something new based on teamwork. It is something that I couldn't appreciate in my cartoonist days.

Although all studios are now moving towards digitalization, a foundation in which we draw pictures by hand hasn't changed, so I foresee that we will continue to keep it in the future. After all, we used the digital method based on a conception of expanding and advancing the expression of the traditional animation cel in Steamboy. The first goal of this project was to overcome limitations of camera angles caused by platforms. On that aspect, I won't go back to the traditional method. I hoped to combine the merits of the traditional method of cel animation with the merits of the new CGI method.

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