I really loved Tsuki ga Kirei, so I decided to have a go translating an interview with the director of the show. I didn’t have very much time so it is slightly rough in areas, but nevertheless I hope it’s interesting. Please be aware of any possible inaccuracies and please let me know if further clarification is needed.

– After watching ‘Tsuki ga Kirei’ I felt that it was a surprise that something like this didn’t exist before. How did this project start?

Kishi: Minami-san started the conversation asking “Like to try a romance?”. At the time he said “You can do it right? Of course, you can decline if you want”, so I had no choice but to say “All right, let’s do this!” (laughs). Though, saying just romance isn’t enough as there are many different types, so after thinking about what sort of a romance it should be, I thought that there might be some appeal in the normal and casual life of middle schoolers, so we set up a plan to carefully depict a romance during adolescence. There have been many works of romance depicting middle schoolers focusing more on comedy, but I don’t think there are many that have a focus on true love. And since these sorts of projects don’t usually get brought to me, perhaps this was why it left an impression of being quite new.

– Minami-producer, what was it that you saw in Kishi-kantoku that lead you to bring this project to him?

Minami: I think ‘Seiji Kishi has no particular genre of speciality’

– ‘no genre of speciality’?

Minami: Yes. I consider that for Kishi his ‘speciality’ is just something assumed by the general public after looking at all the stuff he’s worked on until now. I think that Kishi-kantoku isn’t the sort of person to direct anime for the sake of working on specific material. So, by giving Kishi-kantoku material that he’s never worked on before, I thought it would be a good step for his future in raising his value. Also, from working with him up till now, I knew that whatever I gave him he would produce something that would be above a certain level, and that there was motivation to be found in Kishi-kantoku. These were my intentions at the time.

– Yuuko Kakihara-san, who was in charge of series composition and the script, was someone that you (Kishi) had worked with before. Did you ask Kakihara-san especially due to this theme?

Kishi: That’s right. As it was a romance, I also wanted a female point of view. What lead to this was that we thought, from the work we had done so far Kakihara-san should be just right, so we spoke to Kakihara-san and she managed to make the story. For the point of view of an old man, two is enough (laughs).

Minami: We old men can only understand the reasoning of a man, you see. In a romance, just the words ‘I love you’ are completely different whether you’re a man or a woman. She didn’t need to explain it, but we just wanted it to hold a place in the script. In fact she did explain it to us but I just thought “Yeah, I really don’t understand women!” (laughs).

Kishi: I think even with some of the behaviour from the heroine Akane, there are a lot of instances where from a male perspective people may not be able understand her reasoning. This sort of behaviour and mentality from a female perspective was written and depicted by Kakihara-san.

Minami: There are certain things that boys just don’t know about girls, aren’t there? Thinking as much as “They all go into the toilet together, but I wonder what they’re doing?”. A man can’t write this. Although there were many parts where the voice actors improvised, just putting it into words and having them talk isn’t enough – there needs to be something else to support it. In other words, we needed a factor to make them think “This much has been written into the script so we should act up to this point”. So in that sense, we needed a female script writer that could understand the feelings of a girl.

Kishi: She performed her job very well, didn’t she? This time we were to make a romance between a girl and a boy in middle school not living in a city centre, but even if the relationship was awkward, she very well managed to compose and make it into the form of a story.

– First you decided on a setting for the story, then you looked at characterisation?

Kishi: We pretty much did both at the same time. At first, we did already have a vague idea for the characters, so we decided on a setting at the same time. In depicting the relationship between two middle schoolers, I felt that there would be too much information if I set the story in the city centre, so the awkwardness wouldn’t come across. Also taking into account location hunting, I was wondering whether there were any good places in the suburbs. I then managed to find a town called Kawagoe. At the stage where I was going to present this as an idea, I once went location hunting to Kawagoe, and after walking around I thought it looked quite interesting so we decided to use this town as the setting.

– So was it at that time that you noticed the taiko, festival and such to use in the story?

Kishi: That was much later. After deciding on Kawagoe as the setting, we went location hunting in more detail. At a shrine we visited just by chance they told us “we’re practicing ohayashi at the moment”. We were introduced and went to visit them on the day as we thought that it would be interesting to put this into the story. This was in a place called Renjaku chou. So these things were decided really just by chance.

– It’s as if you were producing it in live-action.

Kishi: It was an anime original so we thought that we could put elements of the city into the story.

– In terms of making anime, it’s quite refreshing.

Kishi: Ah, it was. We have a number of times been to Kawagoe for research, but that town also felt quite nostalgic. The atmosphere with people getting together for the ohayashi and the traditional neighbourhood association – it’s very much an ‘everybody knows everyone’ sort of community. Everyone living in the town knows everyone else, and if some children did something bad the old man next door would come rushing over to tell them off. These sorts of situations still exist in this town. Whilst we were collecting information, someone from the group playing the ohayashi told us “there’s no one here that’s gone astray”. There are some mischievous children but, they do hold a certain respect for those above them and they have strong bonds between those above, below and to their sides. It was nostalgic, and thinking back on it, it was a refreshing and touching place.

Source: https://akiba-souken.com/article/30166/?page=1

Image: https://tsukigakirei.jp/#!/TOP