As Studio 4°C’s time-looping adventure hits U.S. cinemas, Andrew Osmond talks to the studio’s CEO about four decades of animation.
Tomorrow, January 16, GKIDS is releasing All You Need is Kill, an animated science-fiction adventure from Japan’s Studio 4°C, in U.S. theaters. An ordinary woman is the victim of an attack by terrible alien monsters, and finds herself in a time loop, reliving the invasion each time she’s killed. All You Need is Kill is based on a Japanese novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, which also inspired the live-action film Edge of Tomorrow (2014) with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. However, the anime takes the story a very different way.
But, it isn’t the only new film from Studio 4°C. Last summer, it also released the film ChaO in Japan, an extremely idiosyncratic take on the mermaid legend, with some of the boldest design choices in a cartoon feature for decades. GKIDS has licensed ChaO too for future release.
Both films were shown at last year’s Scotland Loves Animation festival when it came to London. There, I interviewed Studio 4°C’s esteemed CEO and co-founder, Eiko Tanaka. She started the studio in 1986 together with the animator Koji Morimoto, and she’s overseen Studio 4°C ever since. As well as the studio’s new films, we talked about such landmarks as the urban fantasy Tekkonkinkreet, the French co-production MFKZ and the gentle mother-and-daughter film Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko. I also asked Tanaka what she thought of the state of anime now. Her answer was intriguingly ambivalent.
As well as Tanaka, my thanks go to Kerry Kasim for making the interview possible, and Bethan Jones for her invaluable interpreting.
Andrew Osmond: My first question is about Studio 4°C’s two new cinema films, All You Need Is Kill and ChaO. Given they debuted in 2025 within months of each other, I’m guessing their production overlapped. Were they being made in separate buildings?
Eiko Tanaka: They were being made in the same building, different rooms. We’re always working on multiple projects at the same time, but in this case the films happened to be reaching the final stages at the same time, so it was really difficult.
AO: How many people were working at the studio while the two films were being made?
ET: It’s a bit tricky to explain. We put together a new team for each film, and the main team members are in-house, and we’ll have external staff for each department to come in as necessary from outside.
All you Need is Kill was made by mainly 3D staff, and ChaO was made by the 2D drawing animators. It’s difficult to say, because the makeup of the teams was completely different, but maybe there were 100 people for ChaO and about 40 for All You Need Is Kill.
AO: How many full-time staff are at Studio 4°C at the moment?
ET: Around 40.
AO: I’ve read that Warner Bros. Japan approached Studio 4°C with the proposal to make All You Need Is Kill. Why do you think it chose you?
ET: We’ve had a good relationship with Warner Bros. for a long time: Animatrix, Green Lantern, Batman: Gotham Knight, ThunderCats. [Studio 4°C animated the 2011 TV version of ThunderCats and contributed to the three anthologies Tanaka names – for example, it animated multiple Animatrix episodes, including the apocalyptic “The Second Renaissance” segment.]
We’ve worked on lots of titles with Warner Bross US head office and Warner Bros. Japan knows us as well. For Berserk [the cinema film trilogy], Warner Bros. did distribution and promotion for us, so we’ve got a good relationship with them. It was really great to work with them on this.
AO: I’m wondering if companies might not realize the range of work you do, as Studio 4°C makes so many different kinds of animation.
ET: There are a couple of elements. Firstly, when Studio 4°C is making a film, the team and the way the team works depend on the type of film they’re making, and depending on the skills of the people involved, the flow chart changes.
Then, depending on the film we’re making, and the optimal team that we’ve put together, and the skills that they have, the type of film we make and the style will change. And the third important thing, of course, is what we actually want to make.
Even with directors who’ve been working with other studios, when they come to Studio 4C, we've created a place where they get to express their creativity, their originality. So, the same person might produce something totally different when they’re working with another company on another project, compared to when they’re working with 4°C.
AO: I wanted to ask about Studio 4°C’s 2006 film Tekkonkinkreet. My understanding is it was the very first time that a non-Japanese person, Michael Arias, ever directed an anime feature film. [NB: In 2016, I interviewed Arias about his career here.]
ET: Arias was the producer of Animatrix. And he was the US translator of the Tekkonkinkreet manga, and he loves it very much and he loves its author [Taiyo Matsumoto]. So, he had great respect for it. With directors, the most important thing is that they love the story, so I asked him to become the director of Tekkonkinkeet. And there were many talented people gathered: director, animation director, background director, art director and CGI directors… There were many directors together, and together we made that film. So, I was not concerned if he’s American or not. We were like a family together.
AO: The decision makes complete sense. I was just wondering if there was any reaction to the film not having a Japanese director from the Japanese press.
ET: It was something very special to us. It would have made sense, I suppose, for there to be a reaction, but I don’t really remember. But I do remember, with Arias being American and not speaking such good Japanese… Tekkonkinkreet was based on a Japanese manga, but Arias based his script off the English translation of the manga, and then when that was translated back into Japanese, it was something completely different. So, we had to go back to the Japanese manga and kind of rewrite what he’d written
But we discovered that Arias and the Japanese staff each had a different understanding of the manga and different things they wanted to say based on it. We had a lot of discussions around it, and we sort of had to rewrite it a bit. I remember having those sorts of issues at the time because of the language differences and the different understandings of the manga that people had. But I find that that helped deepen our understanding of it overall.
I don’t remember the media reaction. I do remember that when we were invited to Berlin International Film Festival, it was very reassuring to have Arias there because he spoke English.
AO: Moving on to the studio’s animated anthologies, Genius Party and Genius Party Beyond, one of the Beyond short films was Wanwa the Doggie, directed by Shinya Ohira. Many anime fans see that as an exemplary case of Studio 4°C taking an artist with a very unusual, exceptional vision, and letting him stretch his style as far as possible.
ET: Thank you for watching it! At the time, the idea was that we brought together these people who were really talented and had this real rich sense of originality, and hold a “party” for them, a genius party. I think it was a valuable opportunity for them to ask themselves what it was they really wanted to make.
AO: Did Studio 4°C make the animation for the music video by Hikaru Utada, Passion? [The song is famed as the theme song for the Disney-Square Enix crossover game “Kingdom Hearts II,” though the video above is a different take on the song.]
ET: Yes, and Exodus also. [Tanaka is referring to a series of short animated clips, collectively called “Fluximation,” which tied in to Utada’s album Exodus.]
“Kremlin Dusk” from “Fluximation” must be viewed on YouTube:
AO: When I watched ChaO, the mermaid woman in her more human form reminded me of the woman dancing in the sky in Passion. I wondered if there might be a reason for that?
ET: I think Yasuhiro Aoki [the director of ChaO] made two of the Utada animations. Maybe that’s why you feel a similarity. [Aoki is credited for two short “Fluximation” clips, “Kremlin Dusk” and “About Me” – the “Kremlin Dusk” clip link is above.]
AO: According some sources (example), Studio 4°C contributed to the 2013 DC animated film, Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox. Is that correct?
ET: (Unsure) Flashpoint does sound familiar. I don’t think it was Flashpoint Paradox… after Green Lantern.
AO: Using Green Lantern: Emerald Knights as a better example, what was the extent of Studio 4°C’s collaboration on the film? [Made in 2011, it consists of multiple stories.]
ET: We did maybe the last story.
AO: I enjoyed the 2017 film you made as a French co-production, MFKZ (known in some territories as the ruder-sounding Mutafukaz). Can you talk about how you collaborated with France’s Ankama Animations on this film?
ET: The artist who created the original bande dessinée strip, Guillaume Renault, loved Studio 4°C and he worked with Ankama to approach us to make the film. The director that we thought was the most suited to making this was Shojiro Nishimi, who didn’t know anything about France or America, but ended up making a film, written by a French person, set in the US, and being nominated for an Annie Award. [Nishimi later directed the 2023 anime miniseries Phoenix: Eden17, which was also animated by Studio 4°C.]
AO: I wanted to ask about the beautiful 2021 feature film Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko. I’ve read that it was brought to the studio by Sanma Ashikaya, a famous Japanese comedian, who at first planned to make the story in live-action. Why did he choose 4°C to make the film? [The director was Ayumu Watanabe, who previously made Studio 4°C’s 2019 film Children of the Sea, covered here.]
ET: I heard that Ashikaya couldn’t find an actor that he thought would be able to express Nikuko [the rotund mother character], but that in animation he could get that essence of Nikuko across, as well as the other characters. My understanding is that he thought that anime could represent that better.
AO: In London, the stage version of My Neighbor Totoro is still playing. You were a line producer on the 1988 Ghibli film – what are your memories of that time?
ET: Totoro started out as a 10 to 15 minutes short that was going to screen before Grave of the Fireflies. And it got longer and longer, and I think in the end it was, what, 76, 86 minutes [it’s actually about 86 minutes], but the production period didn’t change. So, it was very hard, I remember. I was a line producer, so I was in charge of budget and schedule and finding a place and making sure there were desks, and hiring the people and getting the film finished on time and getting the music done. And it was quite long.
AO: At the moment, there’s a lot of discussion about working conditions in the anime industry, and negative stories about particular studios in Japan. I have read that earlier in your career, you experienced bad conditions in the anime industry yourself. What do you think about working conditions in anime now?
ET: It’s so much better now. Japan as a whole didn't used to have the concept of an eight-hour workday. So, you could work 26 hours a day, and that’s fine. When I started in the industry, I worked 367 days a year, 26 hours a day, and now we have an eight-hour workday. And digital transformation has made huge advances, which means we don’t have to carry around heavy cels and in-betweens, and it’s much easier to stay organized as well. Pay is much better, but we still find that we were lacking people, and we’re trying to do something about that.
AO: Studio 4°C was set up to encourage innovation and creativity within animation. Anime today is very popular outside Japan. But I wondered what your view of anime is today, as a medium for innovation and self-expression. Do you think the industry is still innovative, or is it in danger of becoming creatively stagnant?
ET: I’m not entirely optimistic. And I think the commercial success of the industry is not necessarily the same thing as cultural success.
In Japan, a lot of the time we have a manga, and then the manga might be turned into a TV anime, and if it’s popular then it might be turned into a film, and those films make lots of money, and they go on to be successful around the world as well. But when it comes to celebrating the creativity of directors, I feel like we are recognized more abroad in film festivals than we are within Japan. And so, I think we need to be more proud of that success, when we are recognized overseas, and try to use that, to make more of that in Japan.
There were some figures announced last week in an anime industry report, which said that over the course of a year, the money that the filmmakers, the producers in Japan make from their anime is 400 billion yen. Whereas the money that the industry makes globally is 4 trillion yen. So, it’s just a tenth of that total that makes its way back to us as the people who’ve made the film. The rest is going to the people who make the merchandise, the manga, various other bits of the connected industry I think we need a system in Japan that brings more of that money back to us as the creators of the film.
AO: The recent film Chainsaw Man – Reze Arc, used a different kind of funding model, without a production committee as is usual in Japan. Do you think that might set important precedents for the industry?
ET: Manabu Ostuka, MAPPA’s head, used to work for us! I think it’s fantastic that MAPPA was able to fund the film themselves, that it was able to do that, and I think things will change as a result. But 99% of places can't afford to do that themselves.
