Hi guys Redditors,
I wish to remain anonymous. I had been in contact with the moderators and the general reply I have been given is that it is not their place to get involved. Nonetheless, I hope to be heard. You can contact the mods and confirm that I am not lying about contacting them at least. It is also your choice to believe what I have to say or not. You are free to use this information and cross reference anything at your disposal or directly try to contact the parties involved. While the information I am about to give is privileged, I am not gagged by contract and a lot of the following details are from events in which I find out from internal documents and directly from staff, so I am acting independently and have not been suspected of carrying all this information.
I have worked with a sister company of Creative Intelligence Arts which had dealt with musical production for The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi, Romeo x Juliet, Soul Calibur, IV and Odin Sphere. I often participate in meetings and phone conferences with CIA projects but have often been able to ask other staff members where I’m absent. In fact, a lot of staffers knew what was going on inside CIA. It’s actually nothing new around the office.
So why did Creative intelligence Arts leave as production for under The Dog? Well we need to start from the beginning to get the whole picture.
Originally, UTD was incepted to assist Jiro Ishii in getting his work across to the international community, mainly focusing on the western community. His work was never localised overseas so he was ambitious to work on a production that will involve people outside of Japan. It is a well known fact that Jiro came to Hiroaki for the help.
Knowing Hiroaki Yura directly; it has been one of his pursuits to produce an anime with western influence. We’ve had dinner back in Australia, I recall it’s almost a decade ago when the company had went beyond just music for one of its projects. We said how awesome it would be if one day, an anime can be created to really let Japan and the west relate together instead of the west being observers of Japanese content. Bring a stronger sense of community involvement. Note that this was years before crowd sourcing was a thing.
So naturally, a lot of talks went under way with Jiro using the idea of crowdsourcing. From here, the idea of producing UTD had been realised. UTD itself was born from an original manuscript which was plotted around 1997. It was written around that time when Jiro was employed under a company called Nikkei Eizo. I wonder if the ownership is actually Jiro’s now that I think about it. It was obvious that the blueprints for UTD were made with Nikkei Eizo’s company resources.
I still remember how excited Hiroaki was when he talked to me about UTD, that it’s finally starting to happen. From memory, I remember he had put a lot of his personal assets and finances to start up UTD. He gave off the aura that it was absolutely instrumental for this project to succeed. And why shouldn’t he? Just a year before, I had discussed the anime industry crash in the United States with him, going into detail about how the Japanese industry then reacted and what a lot of critics would refer to as the decay of modern Japanese anime. It was quite serious as (A) For something like Hiroaki’s dream to succeed, it would need a healthy industry to reinforce demand, and (B) we were not entirely sure if UTD would take off on Kickstarter, regardless of Project Phoenix (as it is a video game, which is an entirely different industry.)
In the early stages of UTD, Kinema Citrus was involved, but they were not very confident about Kickstarter either. It is unchartered territory for both KC and CIA. KC was actually in a bad financial position and wasn’t ready to put anything on the table. There were even talks about KC straight up ditching CIA and the project should the Kickstarter failed, including a risk assessment. The scenario of what has actually happened now was actually discussed but nobody thought they would dare to take over the project in such a fashion.
Graphnica was then approached but director Masahiro Ando had voiced concerns of his confidence with Graphnica and was dropped in the early stages. This was when CIA went back to KC and renegotiated.
In reflection of this uncertainty, Jiro had also failed numerous times to reach deadlines to have at least a draft script posted and shown on Kickstarter when the campaign first started. (You can cross reference this on the Kickstarter page and look up the delays.) From recollection, I remember Hiroaki requesting a script around March in 2014 but Jiro refused.
In fact, the general attitude of Jiro was so unenthusiastic, that a few days before the campaign ended, Yusuke Kozaki (the character and mechanical designer) threatened to leave the project because of Jiro’s “unprofessional negligence” (referring to the lack of scripts.) Kozaki had initially boycotted the project due to Jiro’s inaction just before the start of the UTD campaign and the announcement at Otakon last year, but have since gone back after Hiroaki made an apology on behalf of Jiro.
At this point, you can kind of get the idea that Jiro had very little faith with the project. This left a lot of work to be done. I remember Hiroaki had come up with the names of the characters in the story along with the overworld setting.
Everything started to change when the Kickstarter funding goal was reached. Jiro started to show signs of interest. Even saying that that “we” will be world first. Eventually, this went on to become demand for higher pay, that all extra income should go to the creators. I remember Hiroaki agreeing quite positively about this since we’ve known from the start that one of the issues with the anime industry is that the creators are often paid peanuts. But paying for pre-production will come out of Hiroaki’s personal expenses. The greedy demands started tinkling in. Eventually, from the protest of Hiroaki, Jiro threatened to disallow usage of the IP and even demanded that Hiroaki steps down as producer and hands over all financial handling from Kickstarter along with a non-credit on the staff roll. It was at this point that it was obviously about money. Jiro went directly to KC and completed an agency agreement. He also stopped all communications with Hiroaki and his wife Mizuki.
It was around mid September of last year when all this started happening. It has taken months of negotiations but eventually, Hiroaki had to step down in order to keep UTD alive. That announcement a few days ago? Ever wondered why it didn’t answer anything? Hiroaki, and I suspect a lot of CIA staff, were put on a non-disclosure agreement. Currently, I do not know what the deal is but not only does CIA loses any production rights, the campaign backers are basically paying for an episode long anime that isn’t about connecting communities. Hiroaki did have the option to pull apart the whole thing and start from scratch, but it would mean that the Kickstarter campaign backers will have to suffer the consequences. He now has no control of the project at all, including the updates. All this is handed over to KC, and CIA will have no hand in the project from now on.
Perhaps, Jiro had never intended to have too much western influence in his work and had done what he did. I originally felt this way but was later confirmed first hand by another staff.
For any backers reading this: Don’t be afraid. You will still get what you paid for. Hiroaki had made it so that he can ensure this, that is unless KC decides to throw and cancel the project entirely, that would not be under his control. The only real difference with UTD now; the production is now entirely made like any other anime you can download as fansubs.
On a sidenote, the majority of staff on UTD were willing to create a new anime with Hiroaki. Kozaki was very outraged by Jiro’s actions as well. Even a famous external anime production house in contact with CIA had pledged to help if KC was dropped as a result of the downfall. But that would sabotage UTD itself and this would in effect, change what the backers had paid for.
It was quite a surprise when we had later found out Jiro’s troubled professional history. He was accused for stealing credit while he worked in Chunsoft, where he essentially didn’t so any work and took all the credit. When Jiro worked at Level-5, again he was accused of lack of work. He also had arguments with Akihiro Hino during production of Timetravellers. Majin Station, another title that was in development was also suspended without further notice, speculated within the industry again as Jiro’s fault.
Yasumi Matsuno, also had a bad run with Jiro. Yasumi had started a game between game creators called Jin Roh. It is basically a game similar to Cluedo but instead of finding the murderer, you find the wolf pretending to be human through group interactions. All intents of this game was casual and for fun. However, Jiro eventually decided that this should be played much more seriously than just being a casual game. To the protest of Yasumi, Jiro told him to leave the game.
As you can see, Jiro’s negative influences spans more than with UTD. It’s only now that it’s known by people within CIA. Again, it is up to you to believe whether all this is real. I claim them to be but I hope I’ve also given enough clues for you to question not just the legitimacy of my claims but also all the people I have described here. There’s no worth for me to prove my identity as the content of what I have said can be taken as true or false with or without my identity.
If you are interested to know more or have a question, you could drop a line here.