– Did you research and interview real middle schoolers?

Kishi: Not at Kawagoe, but we did manage to collect information from middle schoolers through our acquaintances. What those students were doing at the time is something we eagerly took and put into the anime.

Minami: At first we were using a recorder to record the conversations, but this changed to video in the middle of production. This was because third year middle schoolers move in a unique way. For example an adult talking like this doesn’t move very much, but these students would very easily move around.

Kishi: Their reactions are more exaggerated and when you say something it sticks with them. Boys are all the same in that regard, but once in front of people they tend to shrink and show something more of a gentle side. I’m sure it depends on the person, but we didn’t see this with the girls. During the last scene of episode 1, to annoy her sister Akane decided to take take lots of screenshots on her sister’s phone. This was taken straight from what we had heard during the interviews (laughs).

– Looking at the boys, the main character Kotarou’s shadow boxing left quite an impression.

Minami: If you’re a boy you’ve definitely had done this sort of thing before.

Kishi: The theory you always talk about, “boys are always fighting something” (laughs).

Minami: Continuous training is needed preparation for middle school boys, in case of possible battle when push comes to shove (laughs).

Kishi: Our male viewers are probably thinking “they’ve gone and done it!” (laughs).

Minami: But it hasn’t appeared in anime before has it? That’s why I wanted to have a go putting it in.

– Also, the animation was fantastic.

Kishi: That was thanks to our super animator Takehiko Matsumoto.

– Was this in the field of action sakuga?

Kishi: No no, not many people can animate something like this, you know? That’s why we put him in to do this part. Saying “go back to those days and animate yourself!” (laughs).

Minami: Ah, those weak punches, right?

– What about the Muhammad Ali poster in his room?

Kishi: Despite appearances, Kotarou actually likes martial arts. Who decided that just because he’s into literature, he can’t also like martial arts? For the character profile, often once one thing is decided people build around this. For example Kotarou, he likes literature – he likes books – so his room should be full of books? No no, people aren’t like that. In Kotarou’s room there are things like a plamodel castle and a dumbbell in the corner. He’s a person that’s correctly following the path such a boy would take, so we can’t have him dyed a single colour. We’re depicting him properly as a single individual. So just as one part of his character, we made it so that he had a strong interest in literature.

– Though all the characters were made with that much care, the story was mainly focused on Kotarou and Akane.

Kishi: We did have some story for the other characters in the form of short stories, but for the main story we just didn’t have the room to depict this. Once placing the camera on the two, even at this slow pace it took all we had just to follow them.

Minami: Originally there was the idea for it to be something like a romance with an ensemble cast. But once we started writing, we realised that it took all we had just depicting the two of them. Left over ideas for the other characters were sometimes placed at the end of the episode as short stories. There was a reason as to why these short stories weren’t placed at the end of every episode.

Kishi: For this work, the voice acting was recorded through prescoring. If it was done normally by after recording, the director would decide the timing and instruct the actor on the length and spaces whilst acting. But with this work we left it to the voice actors to decide how to act, making the total length of all the lines unpredictable. So as a result it could sometimes lead to some time being left over from the normal episode length. Although it was planned from the beginning to add these short stories, we did on one side need to adjust the length of these short stories.

Minami: The pace of speaking of the female voice actors was especially fast, wasn’t it?

Kishi: Faster than I imagined. They ran through it at ridiculous speeds. But it’s all right like that. Because that’s what’s real. Though we have the approximate lengths written on the storyboards, we let the voice actors do as they please. A guide is just a guide, and if the pictures were influencing the pace of the acting, we would sometimes get them to act whilst these were hidden. That is to say, the timings thought up by an old man just weren’t that important (laughs). The main goal was for the actors to neatly create that feeling and the conversation when completely going into character as middle schoolers. Not on the level of “you’re allowed to change it” but more “please change it completely”. Even the scenes where they’re talking in a group, the script is only a guide. It ends up becoming something fierce, so to make it into a picture makes me go pale (laughs).

– Was there consideration for this when casting for the characters?

Kishi: Yes. We wanted actors who could move as close to middle schoolers as possible, we so in the end we chose relatively young actors. They were all very good despite their young age. This time we wanted voice acting not typical of an anime, and so they managed to act just as though there was a group of middle schoolers just there talking. In particular, if the voice actor is closer in age to a middle schooler it makes quite a difference to how convincing the acting is. After the middle stages of production I was just like “I’ll leave it to you” (laughs). Kakihara-san had made a proper scenario for us, but there is a feeling created in real time by these young people that just can’t be recreated in writing. So this film is very much thanks to the acting from these voice actors.

Source: https://akiba-souken.com/article/30166/?page=2

Image: http://www.animatetimes.com/news/details.php?id=1487325566