Anime is a widely popular television medium that’s been finding its way into the hearts of Americans ever since it was introduced to the U.S. audience in the 1980s. Traditionally, animes are produced by Japanese writers, artists and animators, but local producer David Pinter is breaking new ground with an American-produced anime called “Indigo Ignited.”
The Daily Lobo talked with Pinter to talk to discuss this project.
DL: So you’re writing an anime that is going to be produced in Japan, right?
DP: “Yes, it’s being produced currently, we just wrapped on pre-production on the storyboards here, so we partnered with a Japanese animation company to make that happen.”
DL: What’s the plot of the Anime?
DP: “For the whole series I’ve got to keep it a little bit vague, but essentially for the pilot we’re going to be revealing (that) a boy is captured and the main antagonist is trying to remove his powers from him and is doing it via a torture device. So it’s a pretty brutal scene in a lot of ways.”
DL: How did the idea for the anime come about?
DP: “The original writing for the idea was based on a dream sequence I had. I started writing it just based off personal experiences, I used to write in a journal a lot and I didn’t want anybody to find that journal. But if they did find it, I wanted it to be able to be hidden, so to speak, so I’d always write in that journal in a different character, a different character every story, just things I was experiencing and going through.
Then I tended to turn them into stories over time with a little more exaggeration and better feel for them as I if I had a better grip over the situation and things like that. The best parts of that I adapted; I kind of adapted the beginning parts and presented them to my business partner, artist Samuel Dalton, to adapt that and to adapt characters into his own art style.”
DL: Why did you choose Anime instead of another medium?
DP: “Anime, I think for Sam and I, we grew up watching it. That was something that a lot of people weren’t watching when we were growing up. It felt more personal to me and closer to my heart.
I felt like American cartoons are a little surface level when it comes to plot. They don’t really have adult themes to them, they’re a little silly or they take it in a silly way. That’s changed recently over the years, but growing up, watching American cartoons it was always this ‘not serious’ tone to them that made it hard for me to engage in the world.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
I always felt like anime could really be a part of the world. I worked as a producer for a production company here in town called NIJIAN Productions, I own it, and even making commercials, films and short films, everything like that I personally — it probably sounds bad to say — I never feel fully immersed in the film setting. I always find myself unconvinced by CGI.
I felt that with anime, and animation in general, you can take the world and make it exactly how you want it to be, and that’s what we did with ‘Indigo Ignited.’”
DL: How many years did it take for the project to form?
DP: “I went and saw a therapist when I was 12 or 13, and he said, ‘You should really keep a diary’ and I was like, ‘I’m not keeping a diary, people will read that.’ He said, ‘Well, then why don’t you do this version and just write down stories.’ That was when I was 12 or 13, and it’s just progressed and progressed.
Then I started continuously writing in it and eventually, about two and a half years ago, Sam and I sat down and began adapting the best writings from that and we put it into a script.”
DL: What were the challenges you faced along the way?
DP: “There’s a lot of challenges. This hasn’t been done before, this is something very new. Big companies will go and outsource animation to Japan, Korea or China because it’s cheaper, but to have a straight, direct approach over to Japan is strictly unheard of, especially as an independent production.
That was the biggest challenge and we got 38 ‘No’s’ from Japanese companies, and some of them said ‘Hell no’ and some of them found insult that we would even ask that of that company because it’s their art medium, you know, that’s their style, that’s their everything and here we are as Americans approaching them for that.
So the biggest challenge when we started was getting that studio lined up to actually produce it and even that had several nightmares. You have people who were finding out we were Americans and things like that and some people just aren’t interested in working with you as Americans. Even though you line up the studio they still were like, ‘Ah, I don’t know if I really want to work on this project because it doesn’t have any famous people attached to it yet,’ and, ‘They’re American, I don’t know if I’d really like to be a part of that project.’ That sort of thing.”
DL: Since this is such a new idea, could it be the first of its kind? This American anime?
DP: “Yeah, it’s definitely the first of its kind to be produced in this way. You hear a lot like, ‘Oh, it would be so cool to do an anime.’ I mean, we had no roadmap of where to go and how to do this at all because it’s never been done.
Even when we asked animators here in America, ‘Hey, is this possible?’ almost everybody laughed at us. We met with local guys, we met people from California and said, ‘Hey, we want this done in traditional anime style’ which is very different from American style, because everything’s hand-drawn, and everybody was like, ‘There’s no way we’re doing that.’
And I was like, ‘Then how would you go about doing that?’ and they said, ‘We don’t even know, it’s not even possible.’ and I was like, ‘Anything’s possible, you just have to want it.’
That was scary. You’re stepping into waters where no one’s really done this before, but you just have to be confident in the water, you have to be confident in your abilities and in yourself.”
Fin Martinez is the culture editor for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @FinMartinez.
