This was already the third original anime Sora Kamakawa had produced. Even though he had only been in the industry for a little over a year, he already understood the production pipeline inside and out, to the point where every stage of the process had become almost instinctive to him.
At the audition venue, it was only natural that the main seat belonged to him.
To his left sat Yumi Noriko. Dressed in a long red dress, her hair falling loosely over her shoulders, she carried herself with the calm ease of someone who knew exactly how much weight her presence held. As the project's angel investor, her place there was more than justified. Even though she held only a 7% stake in the company, for Re0 she had reinvested the full 15 million yen she had originally put into Natsume Yuujinchou.
To Sora's right sat Sumire. She had stayed with the company during its darkest hour and helped Sora drag Yume Animation through its greatest crisis. On top of that, she was the company's third-largest shareholder and the project's vice-kantoku. That seat was hers by merit, not convenience.
Even in Tokyo, where some older veterans in direction and episode staging might still have surpassed Sumire in raw technical skill, Sora was not the kind of person who abandoned someone the moment he had crossed the river. Besides, Sumire was improving at a visible pace, and the bond she had with Yume Animation, as well as the tacit understanding she had built with him, was something no newcomer could hope to replace anytime soon.
The three of them, together with Fumiyoshi Soma, the Southern Alliance TV group leader responsible for animation operations and for coordinating directly with Sora, made up the core members of the production committee for Re0 kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu.
But at a voice audition, there was one more person whose presence was indispensable: the dubbing director, Taisoku.
When it came to voice performance, Sora's opinion still carried the most weight, while Taisoku's came second. As for the others, in that setting, they were more like qualified participants than the ones making the final call.
The whole morning passed like that. Wearing headphones, Sora remained inside the booth, listening one by one to the voices of the seiyuu who had come to audition for the cast.
Rem, Emilia, the Bowel Hunter, Reinhard, the Seven Witches, the Archbishop of Sloth...
Re0 had too many fascinating characters, too many roles that needed voices which felt right not only in tone, but in presence.
In truth, voices like Emilia and Rem were not especially hard to find. The industry was full of seiyuu capable of conveying gentleness, softness, and that clean, composed dignity both characters required. On top of that, among voice professionals, being able to sing well was more common than not. The idea of having the actresses for Emilia and Rem perform their own theme songs and ending tracks was entirely feasible.
The real problem lay elsewhere.
What made Sora furrow his brow the most was the voice of the Archbishop of Sloth in the first season.
In his previous life, the character had been voiced by Yoshitsugu Matsuoka, and the madness he poured into that role had been almost mesmerizing. It was sickening, theatrical, excessive, revolting, and yet strangely captivating all at once. A kind of insanity that did not feel empty, but dense with emotion, texture, and venom.
The problem was that, in the seiyuu market of this world, it was hard to find anyone capable of reproducing that same level of vocal depravity.
When the first day's auditions ended, Sora and Taisoku ended up arguing inside the room.
The main point of conflict was the choice of certain supporting-role voices.
Whenever possible, Sora tried to find performers whose sound came as close as he could to the style of the version he had in mind. But Taisoku kept shaking his head, not because he thought Sora's vision was bad, but because among the people who had auditioned that afternoon, he saw alternatives more suitable than the ones the kantoku favored.
In a production, the kantoku was without question the highest authority. The final decision belonged to him.
But that did not mean the opinions of the core staff could simply be ignored.
After reading the script, Taisoku had also formed his own understanding of what kind of emotion, cadence, and timbre each role needed to express. And as a local professional, he had a sharp instinct for the tastes and sensitivities of the Japanese anime market at that moment.
Some choices that would have worked perfectly in the version Sora remembered from his past life were not necessarily the best fit here.
It was the same kind of difference that appeared with certain classic anime. There were original dubs that were flawless, iconic even, but that still did not stop parts of the audience in other regions from preferring different versions because they felt more immediate, more immersive, more emotionally familiar.
In the end, after listening carefully to everything, Sora let out a slow breath and gave ground on a few points.
The Japanese anime industry of this world was still extremely strong. It might not have had a master on the level of Miyazaki in front of him at that moment, but when seasoned professionals truly applied themselves, they could still find plenty of details capable of pushing a work beyond what had once seemed definitive.
On the second day, now that the voices for the main characters had more or less been decided, settling the supporting cast became a little less exhausting. Even so, the voice Sora wanted for the Archbishop of Sloth still had not appeared.
Some candidates did manage to sound unsettling.
But it was the wrong kind of unsettling.
The performance lacked that overflowing, seductive madness. What came through instead was only a dry, distorted kind of psychological damage, like someone warped by frustration and resentment. Something was missing. The grotesque needed to feel alive. The character needed that perverse magnetism that made him unforgettable.
Taisoku was beginning not to understand why Sora was being so demanding about that role.
After all, he was only an arc boss who would show up for a handful of episodes before dying. He was ugly, disgusting, deranged, and in theory would never become popular with the audience anyway. Was there really any need to take it this seriously?
But while Sora could accept Taisoku's advice in almost every other area, on this point he did not retreat even a single step.
When it came to choosing the voice of the Archbishop of Sloth, he held his ground to the bitter end.
On the third day, the five of them ended up spending yet another full day interviewing candidates for that one role alone. Even then, none of them satisfied Sora.
It was only on the fourth day, at last, that he found what he had been searching for.
It happened because Sumire brought him an old BD. In a detective anime from twenty years ago, there had been a now semi-retired seiyuu named Ning Meng, who had played a deeply disturbed serial killer. The moment Sora heard that voice, a near-nostalgic chill ran through him.
That was it.
That was the texture of madness he had been looking for.
As for contacting Ning Meng and persuading him to come out of semi-retirement to voice a role in Re0, that became Taisoku's job.
Fortunately, the two of them had worked together before.
Now that the company finally had money, Sora could afford to be that obsessive. He could polish details without worrying about the cost, insist until the very end, and chase the best result possible without being forced to cut corners for lack of resources.
And that did not apply only to the dubbing.
In background production, in the review of layouts and key frames, in the fine details of the 3D models, in the arguments with the color supervisor over the visual design of certain characters, debates became constant.
Sometimes Sora was the one persuading the others.
But at other times, he also realized that some of the team's suggestions genuinely added something to the quality of the work, even managing to go beyond what he had originally envisioned.
Immersed in production, Sora Kamakawa became increasingly numb to the passage of time.
Winter ended.
Spring arrived.
By April, Tokyo's weather had turned mild and pleasant.
After returning to her family home, Yumi Noriko no longer came to the company every single day. Sometimes she went to pop culture events, sometimes she spent time going out with friends, enjoying with a certain lightness this phase of her life in which she could also take pride in her identity as an investor in the anime industry. Even so, whenever Re0 had an important meeting, she made sure to be there.
Sumire, on the other hand, entered a nearly ferocious mode of study and overtime.
Re0 was going to be a series of more than twenty episodes. Relying only on Sora and Sumire to complete the entire storyboard workload would have been too much. Because of that, the company also hired several older staff members for episode direction work. Although Sumire was the project's vice-kantoku, she often stayed by those veterans' side, listening closely as they explained the tricks of the trade, the habits of the position, and the invisible details that only years of work could teach.
Storyboards, layouts, key animation, art backgrounds, 3D, voice recording, sound effects...
Because Sora had no tendency to procrastinate and never delayed the schedule of the production team as a whole, Re0 moved forward almost exactly according to the timetable that had been set from the very beginning.
By late May, the anime finally submitted its official promotional video at Southern Alliance TV's request.
In the last days of May, Tokyo's temperature had already begun to rise.
A week earlier, the average sales per volume of the six BD volumes of Natsume Yuujinchou had surpassed 130,000 copies.
During those months, the spring season anime had premiered one after another. The most successful work of the quarter was a popular manga adaptation from Shirakawa TV, whose national average rating had already surged to 4.83.
And because Sora had gone months without a new work airing, his visibility among anime fans had gradually cooled. The noise around his name was no longer what it had once been.
But on that day, Southern Alliance TV posted a notice on its official website.
Right after the tenth episode of an anime airing at eight in the evening, in the heart of prime time, the PV for Re0 kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu would play without interruption.
And that was not all.
Starting that week, the network would reserve slots every day in the morning, at noon, and at night to broadcast the PV until the official premiere.
At first glance, it might have seemed like nothing more than a simple announcement.
After all, what was so special about a TV station airing the PV of an anime scheduled for the next season?
But in practice, it meant a great deal.
Every one of those minutes could have been sold as advertising space and turned into direct revenue for the station. When people talked about S-class promotional resources, that was exactly what they meant: how much airtime a broadcaster was willing to sacrifice, during which time slots, and at the cost of how much advertising income, in order to promote a single work.
In that respect, Ryo Yukishiro and Southern Alliance TV did not try to play any tricks on Sora.
Soon after, Sora's NatsuYume account, Yume Animation's official account, and the accounts of Sumire and Yumi Noriko all reposted the announcement at the same time.
That very day, Re0 kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu broke into the top ten trending topics on NatsuYume.
"They're already releasing the PV? That fast? I feel like Kantoku Sora receiving his award at the Tokyo Anime Festival was practically yesterday."
"The main issue is that both the winter and spring seasons had a lot of interesting anime, so my attention got split. I didn't really keep up with Kantoku Sora's new work that closely. But honestly, last year was way too weak. If Natsume Yuujinchou hadn't been carrying things, I would've called it the weakest year the industry's had in a decade."
"True. An entire year went by without a single anime breaking a 5.0 national rating. And Akane no Sora still ended up winning Best Anime. The year before last at least had Nangoku no Yume going past 5.0, and three years ago there were even two shows that managed it."
"You can't pretend there's no reason for that. These last few years, isekai and escapist fantasy anime have exploded. It's the kind of thing casual viewers will watch easily enough, but the downside is that it rarely produces a truly massive phenomenon."
"No point complaining. Even Touga Kuze and Kantoku Sora went and made isekai anime. In the end, that's just the market. That's what the audience chooses."
"Honestly, if Natsume Yuujinchou had aired on one of the big four broadcasters, it definitely would've broken a 5.0 national rating. What a waste."
"And now Kantoku Sora's new work is premiering on Southern Alliance TV, right? It's not a nationwide broadcast, but the signal comes through just fine in my prefecture, so I'm not worried."
"A PV, huh... I hope it actually shows something new. I don't hate isekai adventure anime. What I hate is isekai adventure anime with nothing fresh in them. I'm already close to being sick of it."
"Better not expect too much. If it were Kantoku Sora doing Natsume Yuujinchou Season 2, I'd believe in its success without hesitation. But him doing an isekai anime... it's not that I doubt his ability. I just can't believe this genre can still produce something genuinely good."
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