Leviathan is one of the most exciting upcoming productions in the anime industry. A collaboration between studios Qubic Pictures and Orange, it unites artists from Japan and France to adapt a popular English language young adult novel series by Scott Westerfeld into 3DCG animation. The Otakon panel “Can Whales Really Fly?” united staff from both studios to discuss the upcoming series. They were met by a packed room of fans, many of whom adored Westerfeld’s original novels.
The panel began with a cast of usual suspects. Justin Leach, the executive producer of Leviathan, represented Qubic Pictures. He introduced himself as an experienced 3DCG animator with credits on Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and the Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series. (When he started work at LucasFilm, he said, only seven people were there–not even David Filoni!) Leach was joined by Yoshihiro Watanabe, a producer from Orange and frequent Otakon attendee. Watanabe expressed his hopes of uniting East and West with Leviathan’s dieselpunk aesthetic. The Leviathan books include airships, daring escapes and even giant robots, he said. It might as well already be an anime.
200 meters away
Another voice on stage was Katrina Minett, a producer at Qubic Pictures who began her career at the anime studio OLM. The panel audience gasped when she said that she previously worked on the 2021 anime cult classic ODDTAXI. Last but not least was Leviathan director Christophe Ferreira. Comics readers might recognize his art from Milo’s World, a series written by Richard Marazano and published in English by Magnetic Press in 2019. (The series was originally published in France in 2013.) Anime fans, on the other hand, might have seen his name attached to the 2021 Netflix production Eden as character designer.
Leach was impressed enough by Ferreira’s contributions that he hired him as director. Since Eden had been a CG production, he hoped to advance further in that direction and create something even better the next time. Ferreira, though, was unsure. Could 3D animation really capture the appeal of 2D? If their next project had to be in 3D, he insisted, it better be the best. Little did he know that his future collaborators at Orange lived just 200 meters from his residence in Japan. The solution to their problem was literally around the corner.
Qubic Pictures and Orange were a good match for each other. Qubic’s past credits include launching Kick-Heart—the very first successful anime Kickstarter—as well as gathering talent for the first season of the Star Wars Visions animation anthology. Orange, on the other hand, is among the best 3DCG anime production studios in Japan. Watanabe made sure to mention that the studio’s lead producer and artist, Eiji Inomoto, was “spending every second of his life on Leviathan.” Ferreira called the studio “one artist [referring to Inomoto’s contributions] that I supervise from the outside.”
No matter what I wrote next…they would have to publish it
New guests continued to appear throughout the panel, dramatically walking from the audience up to the stage. The first was Scott Westerfield, the author of Leviathan. After thanking Qubic Pictures and Orange for “making something incredible,” Westerfield admitted that he was shocked by Leviathan’s success. After all, it’s a high concept story set during World War I, or as he joked, “everyone’s favorite war.” Who would want to read about that?
What Westerfield came to realize was that after the success of his children’s novel Uglies, “no matter what I wrote next…they would have to publish it.” He brainstormed a list of his favorite things including biopunk, “girls dressing as boys to do cool shit,” and the breakdown of European diplomacy after Archduke Ferdinand’s death. These concepts became the foundation of the Leviathan trilogy.
An illustrative history
When Uglies was published in Japanese, Westerfeld noticed that the new edition included illustrations. He couldn’t help but be confused: who bothered to illustrate novels these days? It was a 12 year old fan on the internet that told him about light novels, a type of novel for teenagers published in Japan. Since Uglies was published as a light novel in Japan, of course it would have illustrations. Why not?
After additional research, Westerfeld discovered that illustrations were also once prominent in English language novels. They were also frequent contributors to newspapers and catalogs. If your house burned down, Westerfeld said, an illustrator would draw it burning down for the local paper. The birth of photography relegated draftsmanship to a fine art and put many people out of work. Even then, though, illustrators had some power. It was illustrator Sidney Paget rather than Arthur Conan Doyle who gave Sherlock Holmes his iconic deerstalker hat in the 1891 Strand Magazine serialization of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
What kind of jellyfish should this be?
Westerfeld joined forces with artist Keith Thompson for the illustrated edition of Leviathan. Thompson’s illustrations look very much like woodcuts, immediately grounding Westerfeld’s story in the aesthetic of the time. Orange brought Thompson on board at the beginning of production to guide the show’s art direction. Even so, they had to make choices about just how to interpret Thompson’s illustrations. As Minett said, they spent a lot of time at the start of production debating what Leviathan’s Huxleys (a jellyfish-shaped dirigible) would look like. “We had a lot of late night meetings,” she said, “about, ‘what kind of jellyfish should this be?’”
Color was another topic for consideration. While Thompson’s illustrations were in black and white, Ferreira and his team chose to color-code characters and technologies by whether they represented the biopunk Darwinist (hot) or mechanical Clanker (cold) factions. They also simplified Thompson’s original character drawings for animation appeal. That might sound like a bad thing–why compromise on detail? But designs built for animation are always better than the alternative.
Animation is all about exaggeration
There are other areas, though, where Ferreira refused to compromise. One is the use of 2D camera movement. Orange productions often feature elaborate 3D camera movement that makes full use of the format. While Leviathan features some 3D movement during action sequences, Ferreira prioritized 2D movement. This also fed into Ferreira’s insistence on detailed 2D backgrounds, which Yoshihiro Watanabe took as a new challenge for Orange. In the past, he said, “Orange cut corners where they could.” For Leviathan’s backgrounds though, as well as future productions, this would no longer be the case.
Appearing to explain Orange’s animation process was yet another guest, lead producer Kiyotaka Waki. Waki joined the studio nine years ago to work on the series Land of the Lustrous. He spent his time at the microphone running down Orange’s process for creating 3DCG animated series. One key element is motion capture, which lead producer and animator Inomoto has famously done himself in the past. Another is exaggerated timing and character movement. “Animation,” Waki said, “is all about exaggeration.” Something Waki said that stood out to me was his philosophy regarding the use of visual effects in animation. Visual effects should be considered not just an additional detail, he said, but an actor on screen able to express emotion as much as any character model.
Song of the sky
Last but not least came the discussion of music. The team wanted a sound that would be consistent with the setting’s alternate 1900s. They chose composers Nobuko Toda and Kazuma Jinnouchi, who have worked on the Metal Gear Solid video game series as well as Makoto Shinkai’s film Suzume. For the opening and ending theme songs, though, they went with composer Joe Hisashi: a frequent collaborator with Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki.
Diane Garnet is the vocalist for the ending theme, as well as the last guest to be introduced. Garnet hails from DC and is a frequent Otakon attendee. “It’s so wonderful to be part of such an international production,” she said. (She also insisted that “Sharpe is an icon, I’m sorry!”) Garnet wrapped up the panel by singing a live rendition of the ending song along with footage from Leviathan. While we were forbidden from recording this footage, rest assured that (while I wish the machines looked a bit filthier) it has as many exploding airships, sparks and sword fights as you’d want from a Leviathan production. Not to mention, as Westerfeld gleefully reminded the audience, this footage was pulled from just the first two episodes of the series.
Anime has the potential to embrace anything from anywhere
Going into the Leviathan panel, I expected to be impressed by what Orange had to show. What I did not expect was the degree to which the project unites folks from all over the world. Not to mention that both Garnet and Orange producer Watanabe are frequent Otakon attendees. For a moment the boundaries between Japanese and American production teams disappeared, and I saw anime as a global industry that encompassed DC as much as Japan.
If Watanabe is to be believed, that is what Leviathan itself is about: two corners of the world coming together. “Anime,” he said, “has the potential to embrace anything from anywhere.” In the wrong context this could be a threat. In this one, it was a promise.
