Ishihara Q&A at Anime Expo 2019

The Q and A session began with Ishihara Tatsuya commenting on the audience’s reaction to the movie. He was relieved and pleased that the American audience almost had the exact same reaction as the Japanese audience, laughing at the same scenes and feeling emotional by the conflicts.

Q: ‪Why did you decide to make the second-year story a movie, rather than a regular TV series? What was the thought process behind keeping certain scenes from the source material and leaving others out?
A: Had we chosen to animate the whole second-year story into a full-season TV series, it would have been fairly repetitive w/ the first-year story. A movie makes more sense in that regard. Since the movie has to be constrained to 100min, we at least tried to keep the main plots in the movie, while maintaining a reasonable pace throughout the story, so we had to leave certain stories from the source material out for that reason. However, we notice that some scenes for sure will please fans, so we added them later impromptu to the storyboard, such as the swimming pool scene. They weren't there at the screenplay stage though.

Q: Why were those smartphone-style clips added?
A: 1) The source material was narrated from Kumiko’s perspective. We chose to stick to that narrative in the TV anime series. For this movie, we wanted to try something new - to add narratives that aren't seen by Kumiko, we added these footages that were shot by anonymous club member(s) to provide different perspectives. We also included the scene in which Yoshikawa Yuuko crying and Natsuki comforting her after the Kansai competition, unbeknownst to Kumiko and other club members.
2) Most of these smartphone movies have backgroundfus in them. Having them featured in these footages increases ppl's awareness of them, in preparation of the next third year anime, where they are going to play major roles.

Q: Do you have any plans to adapt the Rikka stories into an anime?
A: I read ppl's comments on twitter and facebook. It's well heard. There's no plan so far. Think about the technical difficulties - now we not only have to animate them playing instruments, but also girls dancing and jumping and doing crazy movements. It will be too challenging to us.

Q: The backgroundfus are so down to details, each seemingly having their own backstories, profiles, etc? Who designed those and how are the backgroundfus designed?
A: The backgroundfus were designed by Ikeda (awkward long pause) Shoko. The added complexities behind these characters (incl their detailed hairstyle, the little hairpins they wore, hobbies and backstories) gradually accumulated and took shape as the screenplay got closer to being finished.

Q: You work with Yamada a lot? Do you guys ever run into arguments or disagreement?
A: We barely run into arguments against each other, since the source material is already there.

Q: Why did you decide to make them fail Kansai?
A: The competitions are hard. Maybe they were lucky in their first year and got into the nationals by chance. But in reality, the competitions are incredibly tough. We wanted to provide a narrative that's closer to the reality. It'd be rather boring to have them always win, right?

Q: What are the challenges that you faced as the director of the movie?
A: (I can't recall the details but here's a gist of it: it's the feeling of it that matters (それらしさが大事). For example, making a robot anime is easy, you can draw and animate the robots, but it won't form a story w/o treating them as humans. The band members in Eupho are people than just characters as well. Animating the instruments itself isn't interesting to the audience, giving it a narrative and making it episodic is hard.