Production
Nemo was the brainchild of producer Yutaka Fujioka, then president of Tokyo Movie Shinsha (TMS). He had long realized the limitations of the animation business in Japan and wanted to enter the U.S. market, so he started a new animation studio and planned to distribute U.S.-Japan co-produced animation films worldwide.[2][3][4] He founded Telecom Animation Film in 1975, and embarked on a film adaptation of the legendary comic strip Little Nemo, which was so well known in the U.S. that two film adaptations were proposed during Walt Disney's lifetime.[2][3] As the first step towards realizing this project, in 1977 he personally flew to Monterey, California, to convince the McCay descendants to allow him to obtain the film rights, and he finally won it in the summer of 1978.[4]
Fujioka had another dream: to make a "full animation" (not Japanese limited animation) film that could compete with Disney.[4] For this purpose, Fujioka hired newcomers with no experience in Japanese TV animation and had them trained by Sadao Tsukioka, followed by Yasuo Ōtsuka.[2][4] Incidentally, the 1980 pilot film was created by Tsukioka.
However, a lack of funding and inexperienced animators made it difficult to go into Nemo production, so he hired veteran staff away from other studios to work on Lupin the Third Part II, Hayao Miyazaki's film Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, and Isao Takahata's film Jarinko Chie. And he frequently held screenings of those two films of Miyazaki and Takahata for film professionals in the U.S. to showcase his company's capabilities.[2]
In the spring of 1981, Fujioka launched the project after securing a 4 billion yen investment from consumer finance company Lake.[4]
Fujioka initially approached George Lucas, who was then at the height of his career with Star Wars and Indiana Jones, about co-producing the film as a foothold to penetrate the American market.[5] Lucas, however, declined the offer, citing difficulties with the initial draft plot. Fujioka also approached Chuck Jones, but Jones also declined.
So he asked Gary Kurtz, who had been recommended by Lucas to replace him, as producer of the American side, and Kurtz readily agreed, appointing Ray Bradbury as screenwriter.[3][4]
In February 1982, it was announced that Kineto TMS, an American corporation, would be established as a joint venture between TMS and Kurtz's Kineto Graphic, Inc. for the purpose of producing a Japan-US co-production film.[5][6] At the same time, Fujioka and Kurtz were appointed as executive producers, with Kurtz handling the film's content and Fujioka managing the budget and other aspects of production.[5][6]
In the summer of 1982, Kurtz had Bradbury and his newly hired Edward Summer completely rewrite the story to reflect his intentions. Bradbury realized that the name "Nemo" (the nobody), when read backward, would be "Omen" (the omen), and prepared a script that said, "Nemo, guided by his split personality Omen, dives deep into the dream world, defeats Omen and returns to the real world." In contrast, the original draft by Hayao Miyazaki was the prototype for the later Laputa: Castle in the Sky, which considered the "dream world" to be an alternate world that existed in reality and was "the story of a boy, a kingdom of abandoned robots and their princess, and airship bandits."[5]
At the same time, Fujioka brought in Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston from the "Nine Old Men," a legendary group of animators from Disney's early days, as advisors in order to produce "full animation" in the Disney style.[4][6] At the invitation of the two, a total of 12 Japanese staff members, including Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki, Yasuo Ōtsuka, Yoshifumi Kondo, and Kazuhide Tomonaga, traveled to the United States to receive training in American-style character animation. However, when they saw Miyazaki's sketch, they were puzzled: "We have nothing to teach them." The Japanese staff was also greatly inspired by their creative approach.[4][7]
The main staff then traveled back and forth between Japan and the U.S. to work jointly with Andy Gaskill and Roger Allers, who were introduced by Thomas and Johnston and who would later support Disney's work.[8]
Miyazaki and Takahata, who was scheduled to join the project as soon as his previous work was finished, were the two candidates for the Japanese director, but Miyazaki was negative about the project itself from the early stage, saying, "A film that professes to be set in a dream world will only make the audience blank out.[6] After reading the first draft of Bradbury's scenario, Miyazaki wondered if it could be considered an entertainment film, and submitted a report to Kurtz summarizing the elements of what he considered an entertaining film, but it was rejected.[6] Next, Miyazaki proposed Fujioka with ideas such as "the story of a young man turned into a beast and a princess in the age of provincial wars," which later became Princess Mononoke, "the story of Demon Extermination of a princess and her wolf," which was based on the American comic ROWLF, and Yara the windmaster and Princess of the dorok derived from it, which later became the image source of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.[4][7][9] However, Fujioka had no authority to intervene in the scenarios, and Kurtz never adopted them.
Takahata, who joined the project in just after Miyazaki had left, tried to construct a story based on Peter Pan and Where the Wild Things Are, among others.[10] He then adopted Bradbury's idea and came up with a story structure in which "the main character is split into two positions, each of which becomes a component of the story." This structure was later carried over to Grave of the Fireflies and Only Yesterday.[11] On March 12, 1983, Takahata also clashed with Kurtz over a scenario and left Telecom.[4]
The directors who succeeded the duo were Andy Gaskill and Yoshifumi Kondo, but both soon retired from production.[12]
At that time, Kineto TMS was frequented by animation professionals who had heard rumors of the project or were interested in Japanese animation. John Lasseter first met Hayao Miyazaki here and began to interact with him thereafter. Brad Bird is reported to have informally painted a few image boards.[7][13]
Brad Bird and Jerry Rees also worked on the film through the American department as animators for a month, while at the same time working on an unproduced adaptation of Will Eisner's The Spirit with Gary Kurtz. During production, the two would regularly ask animators what they were doing, and the response they were commonly given was "We're just illustrating what Bradbury is writing." Upon meeting Bradbury in person and asking him about the story he was writing for the film, he replied "I'm just putting in writing what these wonderful artists are drawing." Bird and Rees left the project soon after their meeting with Bradbury.[14]
Two years passed without a director being selected, and the project was suspended in August 1984 when the production fund ran out.[3]
Kurtz would eventually step down in the fall of 1984.[15] He was involved in other projects, so he did not show up at the Nemo project very often, and when he did occasionally, he caused friction with the Japanese staff, so he was removed from the project. However, the staff continued to change rapidly after that. Kondo went to the U.S. in the summer of 1984 to work with Kurtz and Gaskill, but returned home and began making a 70mm pilot film in September. It was a different film from the actual film, based on the storyboards Tomonaga had drawn when Takahata was a director; after completing it in December, Kondo left Telecom in March 1985.[16][17] Bradbury also dropped out.[4] Osamu Dezaki was also brought to direct for a brief while and completed another pilot film, but left as well. Jean Giraud (Mœbius), who later joined the project, saw the sketches Miyazaki had left behind and asked Fujioka closely why he did not adopt them. He and Miyazaki then began to interact with each other.[4][18]
During the hiatus, Fujioka continued to have many people write manuscripts, including Chris Columbus, Mœbius, John Canemaker, Richard Martini and many others. He then re-hired Summer to do yet another screenplay. Ultimately, Richard Outten wrote the script based on a plot Columbus wrote between May 1985 and May 1986 before making his directorial debut with Adventures in Babysitting.
When Lake agreed to an additional investment of 1 billion yen in 1987, Fujioka was the first to cancel his contract with Kurtz, and resume production at the newly established Los Angeles TMS. Fujioka himself became an executive producer and took full control of the project.[7]
On the American side, William T. Hurtz was hired at the recommendation of Thomas and Johnston, and on the Japanese side, Masami Hata, who had experience in full animation films at Sanrio, was hired as the director.[3] Many Disney Studio animators including Ken Anderson and Leo Salkin worked on individual sequences, and John Canemaker, Corny Cole, and Brian Froud provided visual development. Frank Thomas, Oliver Johnston and Paul Julian consulted to the production.
The world-famous Sherman Brothers (Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman) were hired to write the songs for Nemo. This was their first and only anime film, though not their first animated film; the pair had previously worked on most notably Disney's Mary Poppins in 1964 and several other projects for Disney, including The Jungle Book, the Peanuts animated musical Snoopy Come Home, and Hanna-Barbera's Charlotte's Web.
The film was completed in 1988 and released in Japan in 1989 and in the United States in 1992, but failed at the box office. Fujioka took responsibility for the film and left TMS, giving up all rights to the company, and retired from the animation industry before his death on March 30, 1996.[3][7]
