Next up for today's translation post alongside the Frankenstein coverage I put up earlier is a 3-page section completely focused on composer Yuji Ohno being interviewed by Animage 🙂
The Frankenstein post was originally going to be separated into 2 parts, but I decided to merge everything into one single blog post since it didn't turn out to be as long as I thought it'd be. Not this time though. The amount of info in here is massive and would be ridiculously overwhelming for it to be contained into a single blog post, so for this one I will definitely be splitting it into two or maybe three posts, depending on how much text I can reasonably stuff into each post.
Same credits as the last post: magazine scans were provided by @brenten958 from Internet Archive—translation was provided by OverworkedSalaryman (@osalaryman on Twitter).
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| Sept. 18, 1953 From the score used in Lupin III's composition |
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| Right now, start watching Animation Music closely!! |
Yuji Ohno — Profile
Born in 1941. 37 years old. From his time in Keio University, he was already active in the music scene as a Jazz pianist.
After graduating, he began to look out to broaden his music from the Jazz scene—doing commercials (Xerox, Meiji, Toyota), TV theme songs ("Daitsuiseki"), movie music ("The Inugami Family", "Proof of the Man", "Never Give Up" / "Proof of the Wild"), and other projects.
When it comes to animation music, he has been in charge for "Lupin III", "Bandar Book", and "Captain Future".
Right now, animation and sound are changing massively. The speed of quality improvement is rapid. You have likely realized that, too.
Anime music's sensitive antenna is quickly catching on to this shifting trend. As such, we've had composer Yuji Ohno, the man partly responsible for that marked shift. In charge of the music for "Proof of the Man" and "Never Give Up" / "Proof of the Wild", you could say he is one of the faces of music in Japanese movies.
This man has now turned up in the animation sound scene.
On the latest work, "Captain Future", we here at Animage have come to speak to him in an interview on sound design.
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—I want to treasure this "direction" of mine—
First off, when it comes to your biggest work (the theme for Lupin III), could you speak on what led to its inception?
Ohno
I've always been a fan of the "Lupin" TV series. There are plenty of anime out there that are targeted at children. Within that, you have shows like Lupin, where adults can find them interesting as well, and that may have been the first one to make me feel that way.
Until then, anime has always been the thing you use to tell kids what they can and cannot do, but Lupin broke that mold to create the world we see in it, didn't it? Lupin cast aside all the conventions of easy success. Saying "You can't say things like that" in a show is something that you put in there on purpose. Fujiko and Lupin's relationship is a good example of this if you look at it, but... what I'm trying to say is that it is very "modern".
That's why when talks of the theme for Lupin came to me, I was extremely enthusiastic to give them the OK. With a show like this, it's very easy to direct down the target audience of the music. That's because there is essentially no target. No nationality, no specific location—whatever I do, it's still Lupin, and that means I can be forgiven for a lot that I want to do. So all I had to do was make a song I really loved.
But the interesting thing is that conversely, the people working on the anime were likely working on the lyrics in the same way. The freedom we got made it a lot easier for them to get a mental image of what they wanted to do, it seems. In that sense, we were both getting directions pointing further outward in broader directions. If we were constantly working in a space where "it can't be this nor that", in a way, it turns into a completely different form, right? If that happens, then it just makes everything boring. Basically, it makes everything too stiff.
So the lyrics for the Lupin theme were done really quickly?
Ohno
However, I was really troubled. There's the previous theme that was written by Takeo Yamashita, you know. But if I was going to do this, I wanted to put my own color into it...
But strangely, for an anime fan, they will reminisce about how "the previous one was better".
This means that I needed to consider how much to focus on this percentage of people. Or to focus on the percentage of people who have never seen Lupin before. That was what I was troubled by.
But in the end, I decided to forget about the people of the past. I'm going to be doing my own new Lupin—so, I chose to forget all of that and put into sound what I thought was interesting in Lupin and this theme is the result of that.
Is that what you would considering the most difficult part of composing?
Ohno
That's right. For example, when composing the song for CF (Captain Future), when you've done this for years, you start to get a sense that if you use lyrics like these, it'll be a "hit!!" for the target audience.
But on top of that, I wanted to bring meaning, bring my own taste to the composition. Trying to decide on these two percentages always has me racking my brain. But, at this phase of decision making, I want to focus on what I'd say are my feelings—"I want to treasure this direction of mine", is what I feel.
So, was the Lupin theme approved the first time around?
Ohno
Yes. Oh right, next time around, the ending theme is changing. I made it one which feels like Fujiko is singing. From here on, I'm thinking of framing all the songs on the various personalities, to give each of them their own individual themes. Like a theme for Goemon. Wouldn't that be interesting?
■Testimony 1
When we left the second work's theme to Ohno, many around us were saying "I feel like Ohno-san's Jazz songs wouldn't fit the anime art" or "It's so highbrow, the children won't understand it" and things like that. But the happy mood of Ohno's music and this international vibe it has really fit well with the border-less world of Lupin, which is why I asked him to do it.
-Lupin III Producer: Souji Yoshikawa
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