Yuri on Ice interview with Kubo Mitsurou – A summary

thatshamelessyaoishipper:

Alright, so it wasn’t exactly an interview, it was the last episode official YOI web radio called Yuri on Radio, which you can listen to here. (Unless the videos get deleted which happens quite a lot, but it’s still there at the time of writing). Regardless of what you want to call it, it featured a few questions to Kubo (who, as you know, is the author of the story to YOI) and her answers and I’d like to deliver them to you.

Note: This is only a rough translation, not a word for word translation, though it should hopefully convey the most relevant information. Feel free to correct me if you think I got something wrong!

With that out of the way, let’s dive into the most important/interesting questions and answers.

Okay, so this first bit isn’t really a question, but more of a fun fact
from behind the scenes but let me keep the format similar to the rest of the post:

The seiyuu received manga drafts from Kubo to use as
references before recording sessions to better understand the characters. At
first they were around 70 pages long (around the first episode) but by the last
episode, there were about 120-130 pages of manga dedicated to each episode.
The manga drafts were essentially drafts for the episodes and Kubo and Yamamoto
had to carefully select the content they wanted to include in the anime because
unfortunately there was too much she wanted to show in just 23 minutes per
episode. Kubo said that it was a difficult choice because there were many
scenes that she wanted to be animated but a number of them had to be thrown
away and never used in the anime.

[I know that some people will ask so let me say: I doubt
that the manga draft they made for references will ever be fully published. I’m
assuming it wasn’t a proper manga and more like sketches with speech bubbles
that look nothing like the neat little volumes you may usually purchase. It
wasn’t meant to be beautiful, only useful to the seiyuu and it was a way of
presenting stories with which Kubo was most comfortable and which she found the
easiest to create.]

How close is Kubo with Yamamoto (the director) and how long have they
known each other?

They haven’t known each other very long; Yamamoto approached
her in the Summer of 2014, asking whether she would like to write a story for a
figure skating anime. In the Summer of 2015 they met practically every day in
Kubo’s place to create the story and often ended up cooking and eating together
(she explained it by saying that they got so excited over writing it that it
made them hungry lol). Kubo also highlighted that Yamamoto has great love for
anime and for figure skating and she was glad to work with her and create Yuri
on Ice with Yamamoto’s advice and her help in terms of details.

Why was Hasetsu (based on Karatsu in Saga, Kyushu) chosen as Yuuri’s
hometown?

There are few famous figure skaters from Kyushu and Kubo
wanted to show such unlikely origins for a famous skater for a change, and also
wanted to present Yuuri as the ‘hope of the region’. She also hoped to make it a generic
town where you could find anywhere (which would make it relatable and easy to
picture for many viewers). She also thought that making it into a town located
around a castle would leave a good impression (and would look nice to
foreigners watching the show). So they searched the region and finally chose Karatsu as the perfect basis for creating
Hasetsu. Up till now Karatsu wasn’t a famous travel location (being rather old
and small and offering nothing special in particular), but it seems that the
anime is already inviting more tourists to the city (which apparently was also
what they hoped for).

Who was the easiest character to draw?

Kubo didn’t hesitate to say that it was JJ. She felt like
she knew exactly how he would look and act so putting it down on paper was
essentially simple. She said that Yurio was also quite easy to draw.

Now what’s interesting is that Kubo said that Yurio was the first character she came up
with but they decided that they couldn’t make him the main character because “he
couldn’t pull the story along”. He didn’t have any clear weaknesses the way
Yuuri did, he didn’t have the desire to get involved with others or the
predisposition to interact with other people the way Yuuri did, and they
realized that the story progressed and developed much better when they paired
Victor and Yuuri and the narrative began partly depending on them. She said
that Yuri on Ice became what it was thanks to the decision to focus on Yuuri
instead of Yurio (because they couldn’t find a good way to move the story forward with Yurio as
the MC). She also said that Yurio was more of a tragic character and if he was
the main character then the anime would become a sad story and they wanted to
prevent that. They preferred to make it into a story overflowing with
love. They chose not to speak about Yurio’s family in the anime in order not to
give him a handicap and instead showed his relationships with many people who
would support and help him in the future. She also said she wished she could
show more of Yurio and Otabek’s friendship and she had a few scenes in mind but
in the last episodes she had to cut out all of the lines that weren’t
absolutely necessary. She said that she actually wanted to include many more
scenes for many of the characters but it was a story about Yuuri Katsuki after
all and she wanted to prioritize it in the end.

That’s about that for the relevant information, although they did mention the big seiyuu event featuring Kubo that will take place on April 29th, 2017, and, I presume, will also include some announcement regarding the second season.

I hope you found this post informative! Thanks for reading!