I was part of the swimming club when I was in high school.

Why did I swim?….The answer is simple.

Because I love water! And because I love physical beauty!

Haruka, the protagonist, is also someone charmed by water.

I want to depict water’s appeal and the friendship, bonds, and that general really cool feeling (!) of these five high school boys through swimming races.

Hiroko Utsumi

Source: High Speed! (the planning name for what became Free!) proposal - 2012

Free!’s beginning

In 2011, the original draft for the TV series Free! and Free! -Eternal Summer-, High Speed!, was awarded one of the “2nd Kyoto Animation Award Honorable Mention” prizes for its manuscript. At first, it met the conditions to be animated, but there were countless discussions about whether any animation planning could truly come to fruition given the characteristic atmosphere and expressions of the manuscript, the main characters’ ages, and foremost, the water motif. Also, from a producer’s point of view, it would take time to find the assumed target audience, medium form, and publicity form based on the characteristics of that manuscript.

At that moment, the woman with a passion for male characters and who had grown to excel at depicting subtleties, Hiroko Utsumi (director and genga staff member at Animation Do), presented a plan. By luck of encountering someone who swam in their high school days, the planning began to take a concrete form bit by bit.

Early Days of High Speed!

While the submitted manuscript for High Speed! was in consultation for being brushed up for publication by the KA Esuma Bunko, the animation planning team was formed. Centered around Hiroko Utsumi and scenario writer Masahiro Yokotani, the staff members would meet monthly to discuss how plans were being implemented.

The utmost worry of the planning meetings was the age of the main characters. If the anime were to have elementary school male characters as protagonists in a late night TV broadcast slot, it was thought that the target audience would be immensely small and it would be difficult to gain widespread reception for the show.

It was there that the High Speed! media mix plan was developed. High Speed! would be published as a novel from the KA Esuma Bunko while the animation would depict a story where the characters based on the novel would have advanced to high school. The project began to move on two sides to lively disseminate the appeal of the work using the novel, which held the profound nucleus, and the TV animation, which was able to widely disperse the universe to more people.

And then it was May 2012. As a way to see how “male high school swimmers” would be received, the temporary designs drawn by Hiroko Utsumi were published onto Animation Do’s corporate site unannounced. It was from the response that was received for these illustrations that the animation planning for High Speed! was formally decided to advance.

From High Speed! to Free!

The animation production objective was to “Make a stylish, cool, hot-blooded friendship adolescent drama with the boys by any ways possible!” At this point, it was determined to make it into a 1-cour TV animation series. Afterwards, when the character design trends and the story were tangibly in sight, Hiroko Utsumi’s concept of “friendship x bonds x adolescence x upper bodies” was struck upon.

It was hypothesized that the target viewers would be women. In order to depict “really cool” swimming high school boys, Hiroko Utsumi, as well as the character designer Futoshi Nishiya, could not crumble depicting these boys for the viewers.

And then in September 2012, Hiroko Utsumi was formally placed as director, Futoshi Nishiya was placed as character designer/chief animation director, the planning/manufacture was Kyoto Animation, and production would be jointly held by Kyoto Animation and Animation Do. The production committee, Iwatobi Swimming Club, would be formed that same month.

Next production advanced through various forms. The “composition meeting” determined the axis of the story, the “read-through” plugged in the gaps in the scenario, and the “location scouting (locscout/lokehan)” produced the production’s location setting materials. The title and cast were also discussed during this time.

There were many titles discussed, including the long titles that were en vogue at the time as well as coined words. Free! was chosen due to being catchy and easy to learn as well as being a symbol for the story and the protagonist, Haruka’s, quirks. The “ree” of Free! were placed in lowercase letters to show that the characters were still immature. The “!” at the end was representative of how male high school students would eagerly and freely leap around.

The veteran director Tatsuya Ishihara also participated in the composition meetings and read throughs as an advisor for the new director, Hiroko Utsumi. Additionally, there were various schemes and trial-and-error experiences like women only meetings and opinion exchanges to gain a wide span of female opinions on the production.

Also, to ensure the project was linked together, there were various sharing of opinions about what people found charming about the character backgrounds, names, and relationships to ensure there wouldn’t be any discrepancies between the novel and animation. There were a few points that were changed due differences in impressions between text in the novel and how something would sound or look in the video version. For example, Rin was initially called “Tadashi” (唯). The kanji character was settled upon due to it having a possible impression of “a girlish sounding name.” However, there was concern that the viewers wouldn’t get that impression when “Tadashi” was said out loud, so various methods were attempted to better represent that characteristic like changing the pronunciation to “Yui.” Eventually it was changed to “Rin.” That was one example of how many staff members concentrated their ideas and passion to make the project a success.

Free! prototype

Various methods were needed to portray and produce the first production centered around male high schoolers produced by Kyoto Animation and Animation Do. One part of that was the “Kyoto Animation Business CM -Swimming Ver-” commercial which publicly engraved itself as “A New Challenge.” Following the broadcast of the prototype footage produced by Free!’s main staff, there was a greater than expected response with many, many, requests for it to be made into a TV series.

The CM’s character designs were brush-ups of the initial designs director Hiroko Usumi made for Free!. Together with Futoshi Nishiya, they tried many things such as adjusting head heights and adding fearless facial expressions. In order to get a female point of view of the characters, they thoroughly included a summary of opinions from the female staff members.

Free!, Free! -Eternal Summer- and then…

On April 26, 2013, the Free! series was announced at the “Kyoto Animation New Work Announcement” event and later shown in June through a “preview screening.” It aired from July until October that year. Each episode had a larger response than the previous one with many requests for a sequel arriving following the final episode.

In response to those feelings, many business meetings were held to determine how to continue the completed Free! story. As a continuation wasn’t assumed, it would take a while for a response to come out. However, once “Sousuke”’s image came to mind, “graduation” and “career plans” were settled as keywords, and the appearance of a sequel began to come into sight. Once again, composition meetings and read-throughs were held. At the “I’ll talk you an event you’ve never heard before” talkshow event in January 2014, a second season was announced. Also, the title, a heart-rendering symbol of the eternally strong bonds between the characters, Free! -Eternal Summer- was announced as the subtitle. Various solutions had to be found to ensure there were no inconsistencies with the background for the first season with the difficult voyage of Sousuke’s appearance and to highlight the good balance between the drama at Iwatobi and Samezuka. Many subjects were challenged again as progress on High Speed! 2 unfolded at the same time production of the second season was ongoing much like the first season.

Free! -Eternal Summer- had a public PV in April 2014 and was broadcast from July until October that year. Many warm messages arrived following the final episode.

Repeating the many new challenges and trial-and-error experiences from the first High Speed! novel and Free! TV series, the staff were able to finally come through and produce the sequel novel and Free! -Eternal Summer-. And then it was determined that they would spread their wings towards the grand stage of making a film.

The many emotions that propped Free! and Free! -Eternal Summer- have now been handed over to High Speed! -Free! Starting Days-.

Recorded July 2015