Yet another interview from Pash! Dec. issue. This is also with Mitsurou Kubo, it’s basically an “extra” of the commentary that I posted the other day, with a few other random questions & facts all very interesting as usual. By the way, this is were it was first confirmed that Yuuri and Victor speak English to each other (which is something Japanese people had been wondering for a while).
Same as in the last translation, italic/bold parts are recreating how the original article was, I didn’t decide where to add them myself.
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***Re-translating into other languages is ok but please mention that this post is the source***
Mitsurou Kubo Q&A
There’s still more behind the scenes! We are bringing you a few more curiosities and anecdotes in Q&A format.Q: Why are there so many scenes about SNS?
A: Actual skaters love SNS too, and there are quite a few of them who post really often. The director and I always enjoy looking at their posts every day. We created the ED in the image of Instagram and photos posted on the SNS. We are also thinking of ending some episodes with SNS style pictures, I hope you’ll enjoy.Q: Is Yuuri on the SNS too?
A: Yuuri is the type who gets an account but then never updates it. He doesn’t really check it. He doesn’t want to be bashed, and thinks that the fans’ passionate cheering is a bit annoying. He’s really terrible at dealing with fans. But lots of people around him are SNS lovers, so you can spot him in their posts (LOL).Q: What do you especially pay attention to in this work?
A: First of all, we were talking with director Yamamoto about the fact that no matter how you perfectly animate the skating scenes, if viewers don’t feel like cheering for an athlete they will never sympathize with them. That’s why until episode 4 we have spent time meticulously showing the interaction between Yuuri Katsuki and Victor Nikiforov in Yuuri’s hometown.Q: What language do Yuuri and the others speak with each other?
A: Yuuri and Victor fundamentally speak English with each other. Yuuri studied in Detroit, so actually he can speak English very well. Isn’t that cool? (LOL)Q: Tell us something about the episode titles, which are always quite striking.
A: I thought them all before writing the storyboards. The flow of the story was already roughly decided, but we had to present the titles at the meeting first of all. If I remember correctly, director Yamamoto and I thought up all 12 titles in Tokyo station, after returning from a trip to collect data (LOL). We decided episode 1 because it sounded nice, and since we had started with that kind of title we felt like we should continue with the same trend for all others too. But I guess it’s no use to act cool in the end (LOL).Q: About “that” line.
A: The lines centered around “(the theme is) love” in episode 5 are actually something that I came up with for the recording script that was used in the cast audition, before writing the storyboard. I used the same words in the actual episode.Q: What memories do you have of the location hunting?
A: I really like the Russian representative pair skater Yuko Kavaguti. I had never gotten an autograph from an athlete before, but when we went to see the GP Final in Barcelona last year, after the exhibition the director and I spotted her signing autographs, and we got one too. We told her “We really like you!!” (LOL), and she replied “ooh, really?” with a lovely voice like a little bird, that made me so happy.Q: Where did you go location hunting?
A: We went to China, Russia and Spain, also to watch the matches. It was about 5 days for each match.Q: What did you have trouble with during location hunting?
A: We could never get appointments. In Russia we went to see the tournament in Moscow and we also went to St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg there is a famous sport club called Yubileyny, to which Plushenko and Yagudin also belong, and we tried going there even though we weren’t expecting much. Director Yamamoto was really nice and asked whether we could take a look inside, but of course… they didn’t allow us to… While we were taking pictures of the exterior we were told that now it was being remodeled and the main athletes were in another place. We tried to go there too, but again we were told that the public is not allowed inside. We still tried searching for some place we could take a look at, and we came upon a dining room. Inside there were a few Russian female athletes. We got a little hyper and were like “skaters training inside actually come here too!!” “they’re only drinking water!!”. We kept on visiting the place, trying to see all areas that were accessible to the public. In Moscow we went to CSKA, which is where Radionova is based, but here too we were not allowed to visit. So basically in the whole GP series we weren’t able to see even one back yard. Overseas you can take pictures in the main arena, so director Yamamoto, the manager and I positioned ourselves in different spots and did our best to take as many pictures as possible. We seriously had to do everything by ourselves. When we tried to go at the back we got excited because once again we could enter the dining room (LOL). Every time it was like that.Q: What kind of place is Hasetsu?
A: Hasetsu is a fictional town in Kyushu. In Kyushu there are actual skate rinks too, but we reckoned that if we used one of those it would become difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. We did most of the location hunting in Karatsu, Saga prefecture. There’s a castle too because we figured a foreigner would like that. In Saga there is a film commission, so we also went there to officially ask for cooperation. As soon as we enter the GP series they never go back to Hasetsu, but in the beginning we showed a lot of “rural*” life. We wanted it to become a place that you could look back at and think “those were fun times”.
[*translator’s note: You may think that Hasetsu is a normal town, but in Japan everything that’s not big metropolitan city is basically considered “countryside”]Q: We would like to know how you created the performances in the series!
A: We first had a meeting with the composer (Keisuke) Tominaga-san, in which the director and I participated too, and afterwards he sent us samples of about 200 songs. Kenji-sensei then gave us comments for all the songs, like “this sounds European”, “this is something an American skater would use”, “this one won’t work”. It sounds very convincing when it’s a choreographer saying it. After that the director and I did a further brush-up and chose the songs among the existing samples that sounded more similar to what we were looking for, we asked to create the actual songs, then we asked Kenji-sensei to create choreographies for them, and finally we had him perform said choreographies and filmed him with lots of cameras. Kenji-sensei listened to our explanation and told us to tell him if we had anything to say about the choreographies. He created all of them within a limited amount of time, even though the story was not fully decided in detail yet. And despite that, in the tournament scenes it happened a lot of times that the choreographies perfectly matched the scenes and made the monologues sound even more fitting, it was really magical. When I got to the point of writing the storyboard I realized once again how important the role of Kenji-sensei has been.
Yuri on Ice interview translation – Pash! 2016/12 (p15)
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Nothing but My Aching Soul 