I found myself at a very interesting world premiere. It was the premiere of Make a Girl, an anime film that marks the feature debut of up-and-coming independent online short filmmaker Gensho Yasuda, one day prior to its Tokyo festival premiere and nearly three months prior to its standard Japanese theatrical release next year. It closed a festival here in LA, Global Stage Hollywood, held at the TCL Chinese Theatre. What made it interesting was that this was announced only four days ago, with no appearances from Mr. Yasuda or anyone else involved in the production, and the North American cooperation handled entirely by the website Anime Trending rather than any licensing company.
With less than a week of notice, anyone who would’ve had to plan ahead couldn’t have made it, and as such there was only a smattering of viewers throughout the theater, despite being the first people in the world to see this movie. I hadn’t heard of the Global Stage Hollywood festival, but there are pretty much film festivals every weekend here and I’m still fairly new to the game, especially when it’s mostly outside the realm of anime. My brief experience was about as far as one could get from the preconception of a Hollywood world premiere at a film festival in the famous Chinese Theatre. Like many of these festivals (most familiar to me is of course Animation Is Film, which happened two weeks prior), Global Stage Hollywood was held in the Chinese 6 Theatres in the upstairs of the Ovation complex, not the iconic main building we all think of. Animation Is Film still feels fairly small but certainly has a bubbling sense of energy. This felt more like a county fair, or more appropriately like a film club that got their hands on a few choice screeners to show their friends.
Although I knew nothing of Mr. Yasuda’s online presence, I was surprisingly well-informed about this production because I happened to attend Kadokawa’s panel at Anime Expo four months ago, which prominently featured not only promotion for Make a Girl but an extended appearance by Mr. Yasuda himself, in which he spoke about his career and the film. I hadn’t found it especially interesting, but I’m always eager to hear from creators in person, and the way it was presented as the theatrical debut of this independent auteur gave it a more intriguing flair than your average anime being pushed by a major corporation. Kadokawa seems determined to find a western audience for Make a Girl, having both featured it at their Anime Expo panel and last-minute preempted its intended world premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival, which is not only in their home country but much more prestigious.
By whatever divine providence, Kwok-Wai Hanson of Anime Trending happened to secure this premiere from Kadokawa in the eleventh hour, ready with English subtitles, likely thanks to the international nature of TIFF (that’s Tokyo, not Toronto, remember) drawing a significant amount of English-speaking visitors. It was delivered with little fanfare, just an appreciation that they got this premiere before Japan and that anyone showed up with no little notice. It could hardly have felt less like a world premiere, but for those of us who live here and had that Sunday evening free, there was no reason not to check it out.
It was an interesting film, akin to the early works of auteurs like Makoto Shinkai or Yasuhiro Yoshiura in how much you could feel a single artist’s presence, transitioning from doing everything himself to the probable eventuality of relinquishing much more of that control as a compromise to make more ambitious productions that necessitate larger teams and more diversified delegation. The most obviously unique element to his work is that it’s 100% 3DCG, made primarily in Blender. It’s still not an aesthetic that quite works for me even after all these decades, but it makes perfect sense as a tool to help a new creator make short films independently, and with the additional resources afforded to him for this production, the level of visual complexity on display was still impressive for a relatively small team. If things go right over the course of his career, Gensho Yasuda could become a leading 3DCG anime filmmaker in the same sense that Shinkai became a leading 2D anime filmmaker from humble beginnings. That’s the best-case scenario that everyone in that position probably dreams of, but at least Yasuda has his niche and seems to have a very strong grasp of its potential.
Its story is similarly about the innovative usage of cutting-edge technology to create something new, in this case, a very pressing subject in recent years: AI. The film rarely addresses contemporary concerns over AI directly, but viewing it in the context of the time of its release naturally weaves those themes into its narrative. The romantic drama on the surface is much less compelling than the implicit dilemmas over scientists creating their own replacements and questions around sentience of AI and how much its creator’s intent factors into its thought processes. We’re in such a surreal time that a film needs only casually allude to these philosophical quandaries to engage an audience in debate, even if it offers no answers or even raises those topics explicitly.
Particularly bizarre for a screening with no guests was that the premiere still included not only an introduction but an extended post-movie Q&A session, just not with anyone who had worked on the film in any capacity. Instead, we had Douglas Montgomery from the festival and the aforementioned Kwok-Wai Hanson from the website Anime Trending. Although Mr. Harrison was able to work with Kadokawa to get Global Stage Hollywood this premiere, he hadn’t so much as met Mr. Yasuda, so questions and answers were limited to general speculation about the anime industry at best. He has certainly stepped into that industry more than your average American anime fan, so it’s not as if his insight had no value, but perhaps it would fit more in a general anime convention panel than a Q&A for the world premiere of a new film.
