Before starting a new production, many anime companies liked to set goals for themselves.
Top ten ratings on the broadcast network. Top five in the region. Average Blu-ray sales of thirty thousand, forty thousand, fifty thousand copies.
But most of the time, they were just slogans.
No matter how loudly those slogans were shouted, a flop was still a flop. Plenty of people in the industry had long since gotten used to treating the grand declarations made by directors and producers as a kind of entertainment in themselves.
But Sora Kamakawa was different.
Just two months earlier, he had walked away from the Tokyo Anime Festival with three awards. Natsume Yuujinchou had been the highest-rated anime in Japan the previous year, and one of the top three best-selling titles in Blu-ray sales from the festival circuit.
And everyone in the industry knew it: if Akane no Sora had managed to beat Natsume Yuujinchou, the platform backing and traffic support behind it had played a crucial role.
Now that Sora Kamakawa was working with Southern Alliance TV, his declaration that Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu would dominate the summer season - even that he wanted it to become the best anime of the entire year - did not sound like empty fantasy. Ambition like that was firmly supported by the performance of his previous work.
And yet, even knowing that Touga Kuze and Natsuyuki Shirasawa had teamed up again for the summer season, and that Seiun TV had invested 90 million yen into the high-profile production Ryuen no Ibuki, he still made that declaration without hesitation.
His intentions were obvious.
The chairman of this newly expanded anime company, its director, Sora Kamakawa - he refused to accept defeat.
He was not like the other directors in the industry, the kind who lost their nerve the moment they heard Touga Kuze's name.
Just like Touga Kuze in his early days, this young man had also been branded a genius director.
So then, which one of them was the greater genius?
Among the ninety-seven new employees who had joined the company, quite a few stared at the confident young man speaking at the front of the conference room and felt their thoughts drift.
Southern Alliance TV ranked fifth among Japan's television networks.
Seiun TV ranked first.
Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu had a budget of 50 million yen.
Ryuen no Ibuki had a budget of 90 million yen.
Both were set to air continuously across the summer and autumn cours.
One was the genius who had once dominated the entire year with Nangoku no Yume.
The other was only a boy who had won Best New Director last year.
And yet, despite falling behind on every front, Sora Kamakawa had still declared that he would take first place for the entire year.
No one in the room felt like laughing at him.
They could tell the difference between someone shouting empty nonsense and someone truly setting a goal for himself.
Sora Kamakawa looked at the newly recruited employees before him. They all remained silent, watching him without a word, and he did not say much more either.
It was not so much that they lacked faith in him.
It was that they lacked faith in themselves.
But no one was born standing at the top.
The people Sora Kamakawa had recruited for the Tokyo headquarters were all industry professionals. Their skill was not in question. As for confidence, that was something that could be built slowly.
Once Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu truly began to take off in the summer season - once it started producing results strong enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with Ryuen no Ibuki - that confidence would come naturally.
February arrived, bringing with it the disruption of the New Year holidays and time off, which inevitably slowed the pace of production. Even so, before the holiday break fully set in, Sora Kamakawa had already laid the initial groundwork for the anime's production.
The storyboards for the first half had already been drawn up through episode eight. Key animation for episodes one and two had already begun. From key animation and background art to in-between work, photography, post-production sound, 3D environments, and coloring, nearly every stage of the production was now being handled by staff directly employed by the company.
When he had produced Hoshi no Koe and Natsume Yuujinchou, the poor quality of outsourced work had frustrated him more than once. This time, he would not have to worry about that.
Take key animators, for example. Between the Tokyo headquarters and the Tokushima branch alone, the company already had more than forty of them.
And before the holiday break, the character design drafts for Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu had also been mostly completed.
So, on the official NatsuYume account for the anime, production-related updates finally began to appear.
For an isekai adventure series, character design was absolutely crucial.
A lot of anime fans decided whether or not they would follow a show just by looking at the visual style.
The moment the official account released the character sheets for Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu, Sora Kamakawa's fans sprang to life.
The Japanese version of the anime was not a blind copy of the version from his previous life. Instead, while preserving the original flavor, it had been refined in several key details.
The logic behind that was simple. The Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu anime Sora Kamakawa was making in Japan had a larger budget than the version from his previous life, more staff, and a level of visual quality that would far surpass it.
If he reproduced everything exactly as it had once been, that would not actually be a good thing.
The action scenes were a clear example. In the earlier version, there was an obvious sense that the animation still had room to improve. Budget limitations had forced the storyboards to be more restrained, keeping them from aiming for truly grand-scale visual set pieces.
That was especially true in the battle from the first arc, the clash between Reinhard - this story's absolute ceiling of combat power, a near-broken existence, a blessed child of fate born with every possible advantage - and the Bowel Hunter.
To Sora Kamakawa, Reinhard's aura in that sequence had still not been pushed far enough. The sense of overwhelming presence, of a man standing beyond common measure, needed to be stronger. In the Japanese version, that would be corrected.
As soon as the design sheets went online, the number of comments under Sora Kamakawa's account multiplied several times over almost overnight.
"Natsuki Subaru, Emilia, Rem, Ram... oh, I like this art style."
"Is this a harem anime? Why are there so many girls?"
"I'm excited for Director Sora Kamakawa's new work, but the second I hear it's an isekai adventure anime, I can't help worrying a little. The plots, templates, and settings in this genre already feel so fixed. It's hard to do anything fresh with them now. Even if it's good, can it really compare to those classic isekai anime Japan has produced over the last twenty years?"
"Why overthink it? Is Director Sora Kamakawa the same as everyone else to you? Just because you think isekai anime can't do anything new doesn't make it true. I've got a feeling Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu is going to be something genuinely fresh. It'll be the number one anime of this summer."
"Come on, you've got way too much faith in Director Sora Kamakawa. No matter how you look at it, Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu is only airing on Southern Alliance TV. First place in the summer season? That's a tall order."
"Heh. A true genius? That actually makes me laugh. If you Sora Kamakawa fans said that at some other time, maybe I wouldn't even bother arguing. But this anime - whatever it's called, Re:Zero - is going to air in the same season as Director Touga Kuze's Ryuen no Ibuki, and you still dare talk like that? Number one in summer? Are you people serious?"
"What's there to doubt? Director Sora Kamakawa's results with Natsume Yuujinchou last year are obvious to anyone. As long as he this year - "
"You do realize Natsume Yuujinchou was last year's work, right? What does last year have to do with this year? Just because someone got famous last year doesn't mean they can't flop now. A director and writer who got famous making a supernatural slice-of-life anime is now jumping into an isekai hero story. You seriously don't think that kind of shift could backfire?"
"Then by your logic, what the hell are you praising Touga Kuze and Natsuyuki Shirasawa for? Sure, they were amazing before. So what? What does 'before' have to do with now? I'm saying right now that they'll flop in the summer season and get crushed under Director Sora Kamakawa's third work. Can you refute that?"
"Haha. You Sora Kamakawa fans really are unmatched at one thing - delusion. You've already started fantasizing that he can stand on equal footing with Director Touga Kuze. I'm dying here."
"If that's how you want to talk, then when Touga Kuze loses so badly it turns embarrassing, don't you fans go hiding and pretending to be dead. I'm going to dig up every single one of these old posts when the time comes."
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