Q: What was the most important thing you kept in mind when directing this?
Kitakubo: This is an Egawa Tatsuya story. There are many anime based
on manga. The feel in those have been slightly changed to fit the
animation medium. But I wanted to do this in a way that it would still
feel the same as the Egawa Tatsuya manga.
Q: Egawa-san's characters have a lot of facial expressions, deformed
faces and such. Was there any difficulty animating those?
Kawamoto: The director wanted to make this as close to the manga
as possible. So I used a lot of the art from the manga as is,
and put it on the cel.
Q (to Egawa Tatsuya): How do you feel about this first episode?
Egawa: Since they really took care to make it like the manga,
I'm very happy. I think it's funnier to watch the anime than
to read the manga.
Q: Is there any aspirations that you get out of one of your works
getting animated?
Egawa: Now when I draw Kintarou, I imagine Iwata-san's voice.
Also I feel that my manga can get animated. Someday I would like
to draw some of the story boards and such.
Q: Is there any talk of Golden Boy being turned into a game?
Egawa: There is no talk about it now. But if there is a good staff
willing to work on it, I might consider it.
But I don't know what kind of game this will be..
Q: Is there any concept that is different from the manga in this anime?
Kitakubo: If it is done right, the manga can turn into an anime.
With many manga based anime, the anime has turned into an anime story.
We tried to do it so that this anime will be a manga that changed
to animation.
Q: How do you decide which stories get animated?
Kitakubo: We just talked about it, and it got decided very quickly.
Egawa: We try to do the ones that are easy to animate.
We try to do the story that the younger viewers of the anime will enjoy.
So there aren't that many left..
Q: Who is writing episode 6?
Kitakubo: I will do it, but I will do it closely with Egawa-sensei.
Q: What type of character do you want to do?
Kanai: That's a difficult question.
Q: What kind of image do you have of the golden Boy characters?
Iwata: I'm happy that I was selected to do Kintarou.
I didn't know about the Golden Boy manga.
But I was a fan of Egawa-sensei from his other work.
At first I just read the script and didn't see the pictures.
I couldn't get an image of what kind of character he was.
But after reading the manga and seeing the pictures from the anime,
I discovered that Kintarou was a very wild character.
I asked Egawa-sensei if he was supposed to be this way,
and he told me to do it any way I wanted to.
Tsuru: After being chosen, I read the manga and found out that the
female president was a very sexy character.
I thought that I couldn't do it. But it was a very fun role.
To answer the first question, I don't want to do just one kind of role.
I would like to try different kinds.
Kanai: This time I was an OL. I was happy to be part of this.
In the 6th episode, I'll be the main character.
Although the story doesn't exist yet, I'm looking forward to it.
Q: The ending song will be sung by the voice actors?
Kanai: It's a very fun song. The lyrics are very strange.
Q (to Tsuru Hiromi): You had some English lines in this episode
(when you talked on the phone). Did you study English before?
Tsuru: Those lines were recorded separately.
I was very nervous, and I made a mistake.
When I was younger I went to an English conversation class for
about half a year.
Q: This story deals with computers. Do you use computers yourself?
Egawa: I have a MAC at home, but I don't use it. The people around me
use it. When I was in college, I used large computers and made programs
in assembly language. But I haven't used any since then.
Kitakubo: I can use a calculator.
Kawamoto-san is thinking about buying a MAC.
Kawamoto: I would like to try some character designing on a MAC.
Iwata: I used to do design work, so I learned some of it.
There is a MAC in the office so I can use that.
I'm very interested in the Internet, and I don't want to be left
behind, so I want to learn more about it.
Tsuru: I don't know anything about it.
Kanai: I can play Shanghai. But when I was playing it I couldn't
figure out how to stop it, so I ended up pulling the plug.