Rising’ Filmmakers On Showing A New Side Of The Superhero

Ultraman has been a prominent media franchise in Japan since the television series Ultra Q first premiered in 1966. Even from a distance, the character made an impact on a young Shannon Tindle growing up in rural Kentucky, who would go on to become the writer-director of Netflix’s animated Ultraman: Rising. Along with co-director John Aoshima, the pair brought out a new side of the kaiju fighting giant with a focus on caretaking rather than destruction.

The film follows Ken Sato (Christopher Sean), a baseball star who returns to Japan to take the mantle of Ultraman when his father retires. Though his brash and self-centered attitude doesn’t get him many fans, his outlook soon changes when he becomes the caretaker of Emi, a newborn kaiju. 

Deadline had the opportunity to sit down with Tindle and Aoshima, as well as VFX supervisor Hayden Jones and composer Scot Stafford at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) to discuss the animation.

Tindle has had the idea for this film in his mind for the past 23 years, and it’s always had the same basic premise. But it wasn’t until he became a parent that he truly understood how deep the familial relationship between Ken and Emi should be. “Before my daughter, I of course knew the experience of being a single, selfish person who gets to do whatever you want to do pretty much anytime you want to do it,” he says. “But when a kid comes in, there are certain sacrifices that you make, and it’s hard.”

Aoshima also had a personal connection to Ken, as he is also a Japanese American who felt out of place when he was younger. “I started to share some childhood stories,” he says. “I mean, at the time they may be categorized as some trauma, but as an adult looking back, it really showed what my journey was and that journey is what I wanted to share with Shannon that can help give a real, authentic experience to the character. We don’t go into details in the film, but you can sense it. You can feel what the chip is on Ken’s shoulder.”

The idea of family ran so deep that Stafford decided to create a single “family theme” for the score and branch character themes off of that. “I needed to have everything interconnected,” he says, “so my two solutions for that were to have every single musical theme interconnect and orbit around the family theme, just to have everything be the same DNA structure, and then I needed to have one instrument that just kept it real.”

That instrument was the harp, which Stafford says was the heart of the score and the most versatile instrument he could use. The best example, he says, is the first scene of the film where a young Ken is making ramen and watching baseball with his parents. “I needed the music to feel like the beginning of a classic superhero story, but also have a depth and an intimacy to it, and just feel like the biggest, warmest hug I could possibly make, because the second it’s pulled away, I wanted that to hurt. In order to do that, you need to have the most lovely, tender, intimate sounding instrument, and I kept coming back to the harp for its ability to do that but also for its ability to change just by slightly changing the technique of where the player holds their fingers.”

Although the harp was the main instrument, the score also used 8-bit sounds and Polyphia guitarist Tim Henson to score the action. Henson’s electric guitar made sense for the kaiju fights, but Stafford had a bit of difficulty at first in figuring out how to incorporate the 8-bit synthesizers without seeming like they were purely there for nostalgia. “What 8-bit sounds did really well was in the middle of an epic scene, where there’s all kinds of incredible action sequencing and choreography, but something isn’t going well… that’s where 8-bit comes in,” he says. “It’s the sound of Ken failing, whereas Tim Henson was the sound of Ken kicking ass.”

Both sounds made sense for the action sequences, as the animation style was reminiscent of anime or graphic novels but with a unique visual style thanks to the visual effects. “We did a lot of looking at different styles of anime fights and impact frames, where you just invert the color or give it a slightly different style for a couple of frames,” says Jones.

In addition to the impact frames, Jones also says they removed motion blur and added smears to the animation to emulate an anime style, which is something totally new for ILM. “It made you feel like the movement was really quick and really fast, but it wasn’t motion blur like we’d normally use at ILM,” he says. “So, you cast in artists who can almost unlearn how they’ve been doing it for years and years, and go, ‘OK, we’re taking away all these tools you’re used to having and we’ve got to come up with a new set of tools.’ And working at ILM, it’s like having the best toolbox in the world.”

Working together with the filmmakers, Jones and his team were able to figure out new ways to incorporate an anime aesthetic while maintaining the original style. “Lots of inclines, lots of smears, lots of just echoing anime references we’d grown to love,” he says. “And by bringing them all together, we could really, really style Ultraman: Rising into this superbly unique visual look.”

A large part of that look came from recreating an authentic version of Japan, which was important to everyone involved in the project. “We had a lot of team members who were living in Japan or who are from Japan,” says Tindle. “There’s the Tokyo you see in movies, which tends to focus on places like Akihabara solely, but we wanted to give that nuance. It’s a big and amazing city.”

Jones says the research to get the city right was extensive, beyond just looking at maps and buildings. “Netflix had a Japanese cultural committee put in place that made sure everything we were making was really authentic and they also gave us little briefing sessions on what it was to be Japanese and live in Tokyo,” he says. “These were great at informing the artists on things that were important… Some areas of Tokyo have a certain style of building than others, and we were really careful to make each are look and feel like the area we were in.”

“What I love is that some of our Japanese artists who came from Japan have shared how they’ve learned to understand what Japan is from a Japanese perspective,” adds Aoshima, “because it may not be a city that they’re around, but they kind of understand it… If you’re to really evaluate it so you have a proper representation of the city, then it puts this extra weight and responsibility to portray your home country properly, so I think that’s where a lot of that love came from.”