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Appear! Movie Details #9: A Special Movie Pre-Premiere Interview with Director Yuyama #1

"Pokémon the movie XY: The Archdjinni of Rings - Hoopa/Pikachu and the Pokémon Musicians" finally premieres this weekend!
To commemmorate this, we will hold a special interview with Director Yuyama about the movies' highlights, subjects, etc. There will be four parts in all!

The two first parts of the interview will focus on the short, "Pikachu and the Pokémon Musicians"!



Q: The story is described as "For the first time ever! A musical performance using Pokémon cries!", so it's obvious it has a music theme. What kind of movie is it?

"Pikachu and the Pokémon Musicians" is actually something I've been wanting a chance to make since all the way back when the Pocket Monsters TV series first began.
Back when the TV series first began and we decided to have all the Pokémon have individual cries, then got the voice actors to provide these Pokémon voices, I found the "sound" of the cries really interesting.
Right from the get-go, I started thinking about whether we could use these sounds to create music.

Even though the thought had entered my mind, though, I really didn't know what would be the best way to go about it.



As such, it wasn't until this year I decided to finally do this thing.
However, I couldn't really just explain to the production staff how the entire "create music with cries" idea was going to work. So we did a demo, an "initial template" so to speak, by getting the voice actors to sing Pokémon cries, then when we heard something we thought worked, we added that to the scenario.

Doing a musical that used nothing but Pokémon voices is something I really wanted to do, but seriously... being in the planning stage for over 10 years?
If you go by when I first thought of the idea, this movie has been in the works for 19(?) years now (laughs)



Q: This short has a somewhat different feel to it than previous shorts! Could you tell us some details about the production and the trial-and-error process it went through?

We made this short in a completely different way from how we've made previous ones.
First and most importantly, we had to record the voices in advance.
Usually we do the dubbing at the very end, after everything else is done, but this time we had to start off by recording the singing to first create the initial template demo, then a demonstration version. We didn't just record once either, we did it at least 3 times, then used those recordings to create the template that would be used for the demo...



This time we made songs for the short itself, ones that went with the scenario.
That meant we had to draw the Pokémon singing along to this song to get it properly lip-synced. The recording of the singing for these drawings then got split into 3 or 4 parts.
This time only the actual acting to the finished animation got recorded like normal, while the singing was recorded separately, in two or three portions.

We've never done anything like this ever before!

Every time you try something for the first time, you end up fumbling around not really knowing your way around.
Week in and week out, we noticed things that needed to be done, started working on that material, and then as we were doing so, we'd discover something else that needed to be done as well.



To be continued in part 2!

Source: http://www.pokemon-movie.jp/pokemovie_ch/?p=1255