The Artistic World of Bakemonogatari

Bakemonogatari Visual Director Nobuyuki Takeuchi

On the subject of creating the artistic world of Bakemonogatari, I had some reference material in mind when I asked Ryubido’s Mr. Hisaharu Iijima to create the very first storyboards. It was just a book that I happened to own myself, a photo collection called Under Construction: The Nippori Toneri Line, 13 March 2001 by Sadahiro Koizumi (pub. Little Gallery, 2001). The atmosphere of the photos printed there matched my image of the town that Bakemonogatari’s characters lived in. I had a meeting in the stairwell where I showed the book to Director [Akiyuki] Shinbou and Mr. [Tatsuya] Oishi, and they both liked it as well, so I asked Mr. Iijima for a few storyboards based on the photos.

Mr. Nisio Isin’s original novel doesn’t describe the town where Araragi and the other characters live in very much detail, so I was anxious about how to depict it on screen. Araragi mentions that it’s in the “countryside,” but I wondered if that couldn’t mean less of a vast pastoral landscape, and more of an emotional “countryside.” Araragi is a bit oblique, so I thought that he might have been looking at the town he lives in from a more interpretive angle, and seeing it with all its modern buildings as having the features of an emotional “countryside.”

Thinking of it that way, we no longer had to depict a literal country town, so I tried to visualize the kind of scenery that you can see in every city in Japan, no matter the region. The one common point that I thought of was the sight of something under construction, and I felt that this photobook overlapped with the world that Araragi lives in.

I thought a contrast with large buildings under construction, and the cold inhumanity of concrete, would emphasize the feeling of alienation that leads Araragi to dismiss the town where he lives as “countryside.” Back in the old days, I went on bicycle tours, and I’d spend nights camping out in places like the old National Railway terminal and Sapporo’s office district. There were always so many people passing by, but I had no connection to them, and I had a strong feeling of being alone, which I think came from that contrast with all the huge, artificial concrete buildings. Looking at Mr. Koizumi’s photobook was like a flashback to that time.

From that overlap between Mr. Koizumi’s photobook and the world of the work, I asked for the storyboards using the photos as a reference, and had Mr. Iijima fill in the details of textures and so forth. I made him pledge to stick closely to the photos when drawing the boards to preserve realism in the contrast. When I laid out each cut, I made calculations to bring out that realism by deepening the difference between the characters and the contrasting objects. One technique I used was to place electric poles, posts, and such around the screen to use as an easy basis for comparison.

Moreover, although the buildings under construction shown on-screen don’t have any meaning in themselves, I wanted to use their size and inhuman feeling as a substitute for the mob characters (the people passing by in the background). Ordinarily, there would be secondary characters in the background serving as the mob, but in Bakemonogatari that role is taken by the buildings.

Although I proposed using the photographs as a basis for the entire world in this way, I left their translation onto the storyboards to Mr. Iijima. The interesting things that Mr. Iijima thought up, like the colorings of the sky, probably set a direction for the rest of the work. I think it’s thanks to him that we were able to create an artistic world that doesn’t exist in any other work, something different from any anime up to this point.