Leviathan is a series of young adult novels from 2009 which focuses on an alternate steampunk World War I setting. The series was written by Scott Westerfeld and illustrated by Keith Thompson. In June 2024, Netflix announced an anime adaptation of Leviathan. The anime is produced by Studio Orange (Trigun Stampede, Land of the Lustrous) along with Qubic Pictures. Leviathan is coming to Netflix in 2025.
Anime NYC 2024 hosted a press conference with several people behind the production of the Leviathan anime. We got the chance to attend the conference and ask questions. Read the full interview below!
Location: Anime NYC 2024
Interview Date: 8/24/2024
Speakers:
- Justin Leach, producer at Qubic Pictures
- Scott Westerfeld, author of the Leviathan novels
- Yoshihiro Watanabe, producer at Studio Orange
- Daigo Ikeda, manager at Studio Orange
Watanabe translated the Japanese responses from Ikeda.
We were unable to identify one of the outlets that asked a question.
This article has been edited for length and clarity.
Manga Mavericks: What inspired the idea to adapt Leviathan into an anime? And for Justin, as a long-time bridge builder between Japanese and American animation industries, how have your previous production experiences in Japanese animation informed your approach to producing the series?
Justin Leach: I first started working at Production IG as an employee in 2001 to 2004 on Ghost in the Shell 2. That was my first exposure to working with an anime studio and I started to see the potential for ways to collaborate from that experience. It’s always been my life’s mission. I love Japanese animation so much and I’ve wanted their work to be seen across the world and accepted by a wide audience. As I progressed through my career over the years, I was lucky enough to have some opportunities to produce anime content with some creators that I knew. I slowly tried to find the right opportunity for this kind of collaboration. I’ve been very lucky.
This project in particular was a project that Netflix approached me about making. Before that I had worked on Eden with Netflix. I feel like I’m always trying different configurations of how to collaborate with Japan. Eden was very different from how Leviathan worked, for example. With Eden, the idea was to have a team of Japanese artists, like Yasuhiro Irie who directed Fullmetal Alchemist, and Toshihiro Kawamoto who was a character designer from Cowboy Bebop. We take that, and maybe also work with other studios outside of Japan, and see if that configuration works. That was one way that we tried. Then for the next configuration we had the opportunity to work with Orange. They had been such a great partner in this sort of production and we wanted to be closer to the studio. Have a closer partnership on the Japan-side.
When we approached Orange, we wanted to include them as an equal partner in the creative process. So we would include them as well as Scott because he was there from the beginning. Really, just trying to figure out: can we all work side-by-side and bring our ideas to the table? That was our focus for this production and I think it’s really interesting. We also have Christophe Ferreira directing, who is from France, and he brings his cultural experience to the project. I feel like this sort of configuration was very fun to see come to fruition. Makes me happy to see the cycle of production.
Scott Westerfeld: When people ask me if I want to see Leviathan come into some other medium I always thought anime was a good idea. That was always one of my answers. I mean, a girl flying around the world on a giant whale is the most Ghibli thing you can imagine. These phantasmagoric creatures and walking tanks even though they’re from 1914, are both staples in anime. It sort of always fit into that. Which is weird because Keith’s illustrations in the original book are very much like Edwardian/Victorian engravings. To see it move into a completely different medium is really amazing and interesting, but I think the things in that world already fit into anime.
Yoshihiro Watanabe: By reading the novel, we at Orange felt that it strongly had adaptable elements to anime in it. As for ourselves, when we were growing up there were a lot of juvenile adventure shows but that sort of went absent in the world of animation so we thought it was a great opportunity to take on. The theme of the book is something that really resonates to now, even though it’s set in a fictional World War I setting. All the themes, the characters, the conflicts, the emotion the characters felt, we felt that it’s something that should be told now. So we thought that it was a great opportunity. Through anime we’re retelling Scott’s story into this world.
Anime Corner: Scott, how do you feel about seeing your work adapted into an anime by a big studio like Orange and how closely have you been involved in the new adaptation process?
Scott: I always talk about how when I brought Keith on board to do the illustrations. There’s so many in the books, so he was illustrating at the same time I was writing. It changed a lot of the things that I wrote. I would write a cool thing, he would draw it, and I’d be like “oh that thing has to do more”. Like I was only going to have it in one chapter before but it needs to hang around now because it’s so awesome looking. Having something visualized changed the way I wrote the book. It changed the way I approached the characters and thought about the characters.
Now to see them have a new life, the animation has also changed the way that I feel about the characters. The style of the books is black and white. It looks like an engraving. Very old, fusty, and everybody sort of stands in it in a 1914 stuffy way. To see these characters be really colorful, expressive, and make manga gestures when they talk has been really wonderful. I feel like their internal lives are being shown in terms of color, light, movement, and expression. So that’s really great.
Your other question: how involved was I? I was in the writing room when they were doing writing meetings. I was there every week. Every Wednesday I’d get up early and they’d stay up late so that we could go through every script together. I’ve seen every script. I’ve seen every, what do you call it, animatic? Like the super rough cut. Which is sometimes just a sketch of a person going [expressive noises]. They showed me that version. They showed me the version with the wireframes. I’ve seen every episode like twelve times. [to Justin] I’m sure you’ve seen ’em like a hundred or a thousand times.
Justin: [laughs] Yeah…
Scott: But, you know, it’s really great to understand the entire process and to see the layers get added.
Jotaku Network: You spoke before about how certain things with this were perfect for anime. Were there any expected or unexpected challenges you faced when it came to adapting a work like Leviathan?
Justin: There’s always technical challenges. I think one of the hardest challenges is building an expansive world. I think Ghibli is very good at doing this. That’s very important. It was a big challenge: how do we make this world feel like it’s big and expansive while also having more intimate moments with the characters. One of the things Orange really impressed me with was, they were already doing amazing animation, but they also built out a background painting team within the studio. All the paintings would just blow me away once I saw them. Those paintings really helped build out that world and made it more believable. The creatures were a challenge too. Making big creatures scale is always a challenge on the technical side.
Scott: I think one of the weird things about Leviathan is that it’s grounded in history very much. The way its politics works is very much the same. The history of how World War I started is day-by-day exactly hooked up to the way it is in the history books, but these completely banana-pants objects are wandering around in that history. To try to keep it grounded in this very dark part of history while at the same time opening up to fantastical things, without one of them stomping on the other, is something that was tricky to do in the book. I’m sure it is really complicated in the anime process, but they did an amazing job of it. Like the clothes are all great.
Daigo Ikeda (translated by Watanabe): In Trigun Stampede we had very dynamic action sequences, so the characters are much more dynamic. But as Scott and Justin said, with the Leviathan reality, the historical facts are a very important part of the theme. In order to illustrate that, not just story-wise but technical approach-wise, it’s really important to consider what we do to create that reality. Instead of them just jumping around, the important thing was the weight. So weightlessness, how things look actually heavy, and the gravity of things happening. That’s something we approached with director Christophe to how we technically approach this show.
Scott: Right, so the physics matches the history.
Manga Mavericks: How would you approach taking inspiration from Keith’s illustrations from the novels in designing the characters in the world for the anime? Especially his style being so richly detailed while the anime style is definitely very distinct from that. What was the process of tweaking designs for the medium of animation?
Justin: We met with Keith early on in the project and basically asked him to give us all of his drawings and digital files. We studied them very carefully. Christophe and everyone was a big fan of his work so we were trying to figure out how best to make the transition. We worked with another concept artist named Alex Alice who’s a French comic book artist that’s also very skilled and knowledgeable in history and war machines. We brought him on to help with the concept design, and working closely with Christophe I think that they found an anime angle that’s also faithful to the motifs in the design language that Keith did. We’d always check in with him and he was a big wealth of information. He’s super detail-oriented. Little things that he would add on. Like on the Stormwalker, for example, there’s a little kind of sleeping bag attached to the top. So we made sure there was a function for the design and the elements that were added inside of the Stormwalker. I wish Christophe was here to speak more to it but that was kind of our history in terms of how you try to bring pieces together.
Scott: When Keith draws one side of something, he always knows what it looks like from the other direction.
[unknown outlet]: I was wondering how the Clankers and Darwinists in the novels are representative of different political philosophies or ideologies in Leviathan’s World War I era, and have these differences been highlighted more in the animation due to stylistic choices?
Scott: The Darwinists are very much more about science and the way science challenges us. Technology is not just something that you use to go faster or to be more powerful, science is something that increases your wisdom and your understanding of the world. Whereas for the Clankers it’s more about how technology makes you more powerful and how technology can crush other people or other ideas. That collision between metal and flesh is sort of at the core of the book.
Justin: In terms of style, we echo the same thing Keith was doing in the books, which I think is representative of the different political points of view in the story. The Clankers have very hard edges and are boxy, you feel the weight of their technology. Whereas on the Darwinist side they’re something more organic: nautilus Fibonacci designs, shells, and organic forms. It represents that side and point of view.
Also in the story itself we use music to describe this relationship between these two different sides. There’s a part in the story where Sharp sings a folk song that she grew up singing and then Alek plays a song that he was classically trained on from his side. That’s inspired by a Dvorak piece called “Going Home” which was presented as a folk type of music as well as traditional classic music. They sound like two different songs but they actually came from the same composer. It’s an interesting theme we talk about in the story.
Scott: And I think that also goes back to the weight. The Leviathan itself is full of hydrogen, you have to throw everything away, it’s balanced with the air, it’s the same density as the air. Whereas the Stormwalker is a rock [laughs].
Justin: When the foot goes into the water it splashes. You feel it digging into the ground. There’s a part in the trailer where it kind of skids into the ground and just sinks. You can see it sinking down into the mud.
Ikeda: We can’t clarify who the creative designers are but we have two designers, one designed the Clankers side and one designed the Darwinist side. We established that not only do they have an artistic difference but also that their methods were different in designing this world. On the Clanker side they actually went straight to 3D models and then designed on the models, so we have a more hard vision concept that’s directly in the method. And the Darwinists side was first drawn as illustration to design the creatures.
Scott: That’s so cool, that’s great!
Jotaku Network: What would fans of the Leviathan novels be most excited for when they actually watch the adaptation? What will they appreciate the most?
Scott: That’s a really interesting question. One of my tics as a writer is I write a lot of action scenes around kinds of personal flight, like hoverboards, people jumping off of things, and swinging from ropes. All of that stuff is very much a part of the anime. The action scenes are amazing. Watching the Stormwalker move and the Leviathan fly is really great. It’s also really nice to see the characters being expressive of their inferiority. I always imagined Alek as someone who always stands at attention all the time, but to have them moving and animated is really great.
Justin: I really like seeing the characters come to life, and Sharp is such a wonderful character in this show. Seeing her with Alek and the way that they play across from each other. We can’t mention the voice actors yet but the performers that were cast are really good. It was a great fit. It’s cool to see all those pieces coming together but I personally really like Sharp’s character a lot. Really enjoyable when you fall in love with a character whose personality is kind of contagious.
Manga Mavericks: Sharp is a very resonant character for trans and gender non-conforming fans of the series. How will their gender identity be explored in the anime? Especially since the conversation about gender identity has evolved so much since the novels first came out fifteen years ago. In what ways does this portrayal differ from the original story?
Scott: I think when I wrote it, it was largely the trope of a girl pretending to be a boy so that she could do something cool. It was about not getting exposed and not getting found out, so that was part of the dramatic tension. Now we’ve had an opportunity to think about it differently and to update it. But I will say, back when I was doing it, that trope often had a moment where the girl who’s pretending to be a boy puts on a dress and everyone goes “oh now you’re beautiful because you’re your real self again”. I never put that in the book. I was like “that will never happen” because that’s not who she is. In dressing as a boy she is finding out who she is. By happenstance, by getting what she wants, by going for what she wants, she finds out who she is.
So we leaned more into that for the anime. When you get to the third book, episodes 9, 10, and 11, Sharp really does talk about their identity in a specific way that doesn’t happen in the books. It probably wasn’t accessible to many to some extent to the broader culture of YA writing in 2009, so it has been updated and enlarged here. Made more interesting. We leaned into what was already there. What people have identified with all along. Part of that is because my fanbase has taught me things. That’s another thing that happens in addition to illustrations bouncing back on the work and adaptations teaching you about your work: the way that people read your books makes you understand them better. It’ll be fascinating to see how that circle gets closed when fans now see that in the anime.
Manga Mavericks: How has your collaboration with Qubic and Orange on the anime compared to working on the production of the Uglies movie which is going to be out next month?
Scott: [laughs] Very different. Like I said, I was part of the writing process from the beginning with Leviathan. I did get to see the script of Uglies but it wasn’t until a draft was done. I did pitch some scenes for Uglies and some of them got shot. So I was part of the creative process, but not in the same way. Like Leviathan was written in a group. In animation you have to get the script right before you start, so I think it was much more of a group effort and by committee. I was part of that committee in a way that I couldn’t be for Uglies. I did get to do a cameo in Uglies which I didn’t get to do in Leviathan [laughs] and I got to go on set, so being part of the production in that sense was entirely different. But in both cases it was wonderful to work with people who respected the work and my contributions. They’re just completely different media, and part of the learning process is seeing how different those two things are. They were going on pretty much at the same time too. They started around the same time and now both are coming out within six months of each other. It’s pretty fascinating to have been involved with both.
Manga Mavericks: Justin, how was the Qubic collaboration process with Orange?
Justin: At Qubic we’re passionate about bringing anime to a wider audience and we wanna work with the best, most talented people. I’ve always been a fan of their work for a long time, and I’ve been watching them get steadily better and better on every production. When we discussed who we want to work with and I talked with Christophe, we felt that Orange was a good fit. Then they kindly decided to allow us to work with them.
I wanted to build this like an equal partnership where we’re working together side by side creatively in every aspect of production. I’m just a very collaborative person by nature. As a producer I get the most talented people together in the same room then try not to get in the way too much. Let them do their thing. So we tried to create that type of environment along with a lot of communication. It’s a challenge. Sometimes there’s language and cultural differences. There’s also different ways that people typically work in the West versus Japan, so we try to work through that. We try to be understanding of how Japan works, so we go in with that philosophy when we’re working together.
For Christophe, I think it’s his first time directing a show and he’s been doing very well considering a big production like this. He, by coincidence, happened to live a block away from the studio. It almost felt sort of like destiny. That it was meant to happen. He’s been a great director on the project and I’m lucky to have these people that help make things go smoothly. Christophe brings a lot of his French aesthetic and comic book experience, and Orange has a lot of experience with anime production. We built a team to work with different designers in Japan and help make the adaptation.
Ikeda: It’s a first challenge for a lot of people, it’s not just one side. Each person had their own challenges. Something new to contribute to this project. But because all those challenges are being overcome we’re able to accomplish something really great.
Watanabe: Anime is an ensemble of many different creatives, so it’s not just people who draw. I mean our animators don’t draw, they animate it with CG, but it’s basically the same thing. Drawing out the motion. But there’s music composers, the compositing team, creative development directors, and storyboarders. At each layer, the people are coming from different areas. They’re adding so much of the best from what they have learned in their careers. This itself feels like it’s in line with the theme of Leviathan. We’re all trying to make something better in this world from a different perspective. We all have our calling that we have as to why we’re involved in creating animation. Those reasons are all different but we all believe in this one thing. In Leviathan, it’s about how to stop the war. In us, through animation, we’re trying to bring a new world into this one. Leviathan will be the result of trying to bring fascinating things, new and familiar things and this idealistic story, into this world.
Justin: It’s interesting how Leviathan echoes the real world through making the show itself. Two different clusters coming together to achieve a kind of goal.
Scott: But also I loved that you had a more CG-oriented designer for the Clankers and more drawing for the Darwinists. Was that super intentional?
Ikeda: Yeah, it was intentional. Keith’s designed mechas have so many details, and for an individual to draw out the details takes a lot of time. So if we do this in a CG approach then the details can be put in there. As a design approach, that was the reason we chose to approach it with the CG design. And with the creatures the softness was really important. By doing it by hand first, as a drawing, that creates a softness to these designs. From there the designs were turned to CG models. The whole design, a hundred percent of it doesn’t transfer all the way, but there’s something in there that remains with the final screening.
[brief aside chit chatting about Ghost in the Shell]
Justin: Ghost in the Shell was a very important, very influential movie for me. Personally, that’s the bar I’m aiming for. Those are movies that had such a big cultural impact on the world: Ghost in the Shell and Akira. I haven’t felt this way in awhile, but looking at Orange’s work I’m starting to feel like we’re starting to hit the bar again. And I’m like, yes!
Scott: When I was living in New York in the late 80s/early 90s, there was a bar called Max Fish on Ludlow Street that just showed Akira for like a month. [laughs] Like with the sound down, music up, it was just on all the TV screens as a background light. I was like “what the hell is this, what is happening?” The scenes where the tentacles are exploding and exploding, more and more and more… I’d never seen any visual idea taken to that extreme. That was my first experience with it.
Manga Mavericks: Now anime is very accessible over here. Multiple theatrical releases of anime that are wide releases. And it’s quite amazing to see how anime has become so much globally popular. In the case of Leviathan and many other anime productions right now it’s such a cross-cultural collaboration. You have animators and artists from all over the world contributing to various productions.
Justin: Yeah, when I was working in Japan there were almost no foreigners anywhere since it was very rare. Now it’s very common to see foreigners working. A lot of foreigners want to go to Japan. They want to learn the Japanese way. They want to live there because they love it so much and it means so much to them. It makes me happy to see its reach. It’s really changed what the younger generation wants to make now. They’re very much influenced by anime right now. It’s interesting to see that change from the Disney world, to the Pixar world, and then seeing anime being so popular now. We’re kind of in a big change that’s happening. There’s a big contrast between that and American animation productions. All the Japanese studios are booked for like three or four years in advance. There’s not enough animators. It’s completely different. But I feel very lucky to be working in anime.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed, make sure to follow us on Twitter or leave a comment down below.
