Mitsuo Iso

Career

After dropping out of university, Iso began working as an animator in the mid-1980s.

He joined the 1988 film Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack. He was credited as a key animator under both his real name and pen name Mikio Odagawa, and also served as mechanical animation director under the name Odagawa.

The battle scene at the beginning of the 1989 OVA Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket made a strong impression on the anime industry and anime fans about Iso.

The scenes Iso drew in what he called a 'full-limited' manner shocked animators of the time, so much so that a collection of copies of key animations was circulated.

Director Fumihiko Takayama gave him the opportunity to do some niche design work, and he designed some of the mechanics and military equipment.

He was with Studio Ghibli from 1990 to 1992.

He was recruited directly by Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli, who saw his work on the television film Like the Clouds, Like the Wind (1990), which many Ghibli staff participated in.

Iso drew keyframes in Only Yesterday, Porco Rosso, Ocean Waves.

Iso joined Roujin Z (1991), based on Katsuhiro Otomo's manga, as a mechanical animation director at the request of director Hiroyuki Kitakubo.

However, he was not involved in the actual production as he was asked to participate in Only Yesterday at the meeting stage.

He then only worked on additional designs at the request of Kitakubo.

After leaving Ghibli, he lived in Shanghai for four months to work on Madhouse's OVA Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals.

He then joined in the omnibus animation film Memories (1995), for which Katsuhiro Otomo was the executive producer and general director. He received an offer from Studio 4°C to work on props for Episode 1: Magnetic Rose, directed by Kōji Morimoto.

He also participated in the planning meetings for Morimoto's Noiseman Sound Insect (1997).

Iso joined the Neon Genesis Evangelion television series (1995–1996) and the film (1997).

As an animator, he drew scenes for episodes 1 and 19 of the TV series, episode 21 of the video format version, and the movie The End of Evangelion (episode 25 of the video version).

He initially joined the project as an animator, but the storyline from the middle of the series onwards was largely undefined at that point. So he came up with various plots and ideas and proposed them to director Hideaki Anno.

His plot for episode 13 was then adopted, and he co-wrote the script with Anno and screenwriter Akio Satsukawa.

Iso also created the supplementary settings for episodes 13 and 15, including the design of Lilith and Seele marks, rough sketches of underground facilities, etc.

Apart from those, Iso also provided settings and ideas for the entire series, albeit uncredited, and many of the dialogues and plots he created were used in the middle and later episodes of the TV series.

Iso's idea for the plot of the last episode was not adopted, so he diverted part of it to the final episode of Den-noh Coil.

In Ghost in the Shell (1995), he not only drew the key animations, but also designed all the firearms.

As an animator, Iso was in charge of the shoot-out at the museum between the main character Motoko Kusanagi and the multi-legged tank. In order to draw the spider-like tank, he actually captured a live spider and placed it in a beaker to observe its complex leg movements, centre of gravity shifts and other behaviour all day. The layouts were filled with detailed explanations, instructions and requests to the art direction, and sometimes this was not enough, so he went directly to the art director for explanations and meetings.

In FLCL (2000), he drew the key animations. He worked with director Kazuya Tsurumaki for about six months on a preliminary project, titled Furi Chiru. Some of his ideas were adopted, but the project itself was never realised. This is because Iso created most of the settings and storylines, although Tsurumaki came up with the terminology and character names.

Iso joined Blood: The Last Vampire (2000), which marked the beginning of the trend towards digital animation production in Japan. He worked in visual effects as well as key animation.

He negotiated directly with director Hiroyuki Kitakubo and accepted the key animation on condition that he would handle the entire process, including visual effects and cinematography (digital compositing). He then completed all of his own keyframe parts using self-taught After Effects.

Director Quentin Tarantino made a live-action film Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), inspired by this work, and asked Production I.G to produce the animated inserts, which Iso also participated in.

In RahXephon (2002), Iso worked as Digital Works and cinematographer positions throughout this television series.

As for Digital Works, he retouched key animations and art with special effects and computer graphics.

As a cinematographer, he prepared samples of images in advance and coordinated between the episode directors and the cinematography studio.

In episode 15 (The Children's Night), he wrote the script, storyboarded, and directed, and was also in charge of some of the drawing and cinematography, overseeing a cross-section of jobs that were originally divided.

This was the first time he had worked on storyboarding and directing, and this process was like making a whole short film.

He decided to join the work on the condition that he would work on an entire episode by himself.

In 2007, Iso directed his first animated television series, Dennō Coil.

He wrote the original story and the screenplay for all the episodes, and won the Nihon SF Taisho Award and the Seiun Award as a science fiction writer.

The work depicts everyday life in the near future, when wearable devices called Dennō Glasses have become widespread, and has had a profound influence on later XR technicians and artists.

The project had been in the pipeline since around 2000 and finally came to fruition after seven years with the cooperation of producer Sanae Mitsugi of Tokuma Shoten and producer Masao Maruyama of Madhouse (at the time).

In 2016, he gave a presentation introducing his original animation projects Les pirates de la Réunion et les dodos (レユニオンの海賊とドードー鳥, Re-Yunion no Kaizoku to DōDō-dori; lit. The Pirates of the Reunion and the Dodos) and The Orbital Children (地球外少年少女, Chikyūgai Shōnen Shōjo; lit. Extraterrestrial Boys and Girls) in a series in an anime magazine. In the same year, Iso and French animation studio yapiko animation announced at Japan Expo 2016 that they would jointly produce Les Pirates de la Reunion Le Reveil des dodos.

However, the project has been put on hold because The Orbital Children project preceded this one.

Iso announced the production of The Orbital Children in 2018, and began full-scale production of the film in 2020.

The Orbital Children was released exclusively worldwide on Netflix on 20 January 2022, and was released in theatres in Japan as a two-part film, the first part on the same day as Netflix and the second part on 11 February 2022.

He wrote the original story and screenplay for the work, and directed it. He is also credited for the cinematography.

Kenichi Yoshida was brought on as character designer and Toshiyuki Inoue as main animator.

Style

As an animator

Mitsuo Iso is known for his jerky yet detailed animation, full of dense sophisticated motion. He refers to his own style as "full limited". In traditional animation, animation with a drawing count below one drawing every two frames (or "on twos") is considered limited animation. Mixing twos, threes and fours in a balanced form of timing, Iso draws every keyframe without passing his work to an in-betweener, allowing him full control to create the most detailed motion possible with a balanced and efficient number of drawings, hence the term "full limited".

Iso's idea of "full limited" is a method for controlling the image from the animator's standpoint, and he has the calculation that if he draws everything in key animation, the timesheets will not be modified by the director.

Iso is one of the animators who played a central role in the movement from the late 1980s to the 1990s, when the expression of "realistic" animation matured in the Japanese animation industry.

He has changed the technique of animation and has done so many times.

His thoroughgoing style of painting has won him high praise not only from anime fans, but also from fellow animators.

He has pioneered new expressions in animation with movements that give a sense of the mass and inertia of objects, and effects such as explosions, smoke and flames, and has influenced many creators.

The methods of depicting clods of earth, rocks and other debris as a coherent mass, or depicting explosions as moving in three dimensions, were copied by everyone and became the industry standard.

His drawings are very realistic and photorealistic, and the reality of his movements comes from his thorough, scientific observation. His drawing philosophy of building up a series of possible phenomena on the screen had a major influence on later realistic drawing.

As a director

Iso is a director who can create all the ideas for producing an animation work by himself, including visual aspects such as character, mechanic and prop design.

He is involved in almost every step of the director's work, including the original, and controls everything himself.

This production style is rare in Japanese animation, especially in TV animation, and is similar to Hayao Miyazaki's Future Boy Conan in terms of consistency from script and storyboard to layout and drawing, and to Makoto Shinkai's personal work Voices of a Distant Star from his indie days in terms of comprehensiveness with the addition of cinematography.

Even in music production, he repeatedly discusses with the composers of theme songs and soundtracks until he is satisfied.

Unlike when working as an animator, Iso focuses more on dialogue and story development and does not try to move the animation too much.

Iso makes as many variations of the story as possible when creating original works. The number of drafts reached 30 for Dennō Coil and 100 for The Orbital Children. By writing different patterns of plots and examining them all, he explores storylines he had not thought of and decides whether they are interesting enough for him as an audience.

Iso controls the footage in the final production process, cinematography, to ensure perfection.

He controls all final footage through digital compositing work in After Effects, which includes not only the compositing of the video material but also directorial decisions such as adding effects and adjusting key animations.