Interview with Christophe Ferreira, Justin Leach, and Katrina Minett at Otakon 2024

Christophe Ferreira began his career as a dougaman at Telecom Animation Film under Yasuo Ootsuka and Kazuhide Tomonaga, passed from project to project and position to position, took a detour outside the industry into comics, ducked back in for color scripts and storyboards on Hirune Hime, and now takes the director’s chair at Orange for an adaptation of Scott Westerfeld’s novel Leviathan.

Needless to say, when I saw Otakon had invited him as a guest, I had many questions for him – and he was kind enough to let me ask a few.

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Notes on Leviathan at Otakon 2024

Director Christophe Ferreira, Qubic Pictures producers Justin Leach and Katrina Minnett, Orange producers Yoshihiro Watanabe and Kiyotaka Waki, novelist Scott Westerfeld, and vocalist Diana Garnett came to Otakon in order to tell us about their cartoon called Leviathan, and now I’m here to tell you what they told us.

-but not everything, because the panel was an hour and a half, and this is a sakuga blog.

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Sonny Boy’s visual identity – creative freedom as a way to convey the artistic intent

Anime, just like pretty much any other creative medium nowadays, is heavily commercialised, hence a lot of the decision making is done by the producers and not by the creative staff themselves. Sometimes there are exceptions to that state of things, when the producers give the artists free reign and total control over the project. Sonny Boy is such an example: a show envisioned, directed and written by Shingo Natsume, who explicitly stated before the broadcast that this is the first and probably last time when he’ll be given such freedom to do whatever he wants. He even called his work on the series downright selfish and egocentric, because he wanted to include in it as many elements important for him as possible. This freedom became a key factor shaping the entire project, including its visual identity.

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