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Takushi Koide Keeps the '90s Alive with Goodbye, Lara's Thick Lines, Hand-Drawn Animation

Art and storytelling, like many things in life, tend to follow trends, whether it's aesthetics, story concepts, or even technology. In anime, the industry has almost entirely moved towards digitally assisted animation, offering flexibility, consistency, and powerful new tools for editing and storytelling. But as technology saturates every facet of human life, there are creators who still dream in 2D and find ways to keep old traditions alive.

Meet Takushi Koide, the director and creator who's keeping the 90s alive with the thick lines and hand-drawn animation of this summer's mermaid romantic fantasy Goodbye, Lara. Koide, himself a seasoned animator (Made in Abyss, Revue Starlight), was a special guest on Day One of Anime Expo, where he appeared after a screening of the first episode to discuss his passion project. “It's always been my dream to direct an original anime,” he said with a smile, even though it comes with its own challenges. Unlike many adaptations, which can have lightning-fast turnaround times and time-sensitive production schedules, Goodbye, Lara is five years in the making. Just fleshing out the original concept took about two years, followed by a long period of shopping the proposal around to several studios.

The story takes its initial cues from Hans Christian Andersen's famous “The Little Mermaid” (with some inspiration from the classic Disney adaptation as well), as the first episode takes viewers through much of the classic tale of land-bound love, transformation, and tragedy, but a surprise waits at the end. After the mermaid Lara meets a tragic end, she finds herself reborn in modern-day Japan in a bustling city on the shores of Lake Biwa.

According to Koide (who believes the quickest way to charm anyone from Shiga Prefecture is to complement Lake Biwa, a source of immense local pride), one of the hardest things about working on an original project is also one of the most rewarding—the difficulty of having to craft everything from scratch, from the premise to the character designs.

“The time management is hard, too,” he confesses. But it also allowed him and his team to craft the exact visuals that he envisioned for the project. For instance, all the background art is meticulously hand-painted, as reflected in the series' lush settings. Koide worked with Mari Fujino from Studio Pablo, one of three remaining studios that still specialize in hand-drawn backgrounds. “I'm so happy we were able to apply that style to this anime,” said Koide. “I never want to lose the hand-drawing method.”

It's not just the backgrounds that nod back to a more nostalgic time. Even the character designs, a collaboration with Shiori Tani, are a throwback to '90s anime. “We both love 90s anime,” Koide said, saying that they intentionally wanted something that was different from the modern trend of thin lines and pastel color palettes. “That's why we wanted the opposite—thicker lines and more vibrant colors.”

It may sound cliché, but Koide agrees that there's a magic to the human touch. Even if the animators at production studio Kinema Citrus may have long eschewed celluloid for tablets, you won't find a lot of 3D-CG or AI-assisted art on this project. “It's traditional, but I still see the potential of hand-drawn animation.” Goodbye, Lara may be about a mermaid who has the opportunity to experience modernity 200 years from her time, but maybe certain things—like love—be it for humans or the art of animation—are timeless. Goodbye, Lara will officially premiere on July 5, and will be available to watch streaming on Crunchyroll.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.