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The Clevatess Anime Staff Were Inspired by Heidi?!

We got to sit with the staff of Clevatess ahead of the season two premiere at Anime Expo last month. Series director Kiyotaka Taguchi and Lay-duce animation producer Seiichiro Kuriyama describe their love of older cel animation and how that influenced their approach to adapting a modern fantasy series. Also, Kadokawa producer Kōsuke Arai explained how they got Ellie Goulding to make an ending song for the anime!

Even compared to other dark fantasies, the scale of destruction shown in episode 1 is massive. How did the team approach animating this moment?

Seiichiro KURIYAMA: At first we weren't sure what to expect. We were still trying to figure out how we were going to approach it, but we think director Taguchi was able to conjure what he was imagining in his head into the end product.

Kiyotaka TAGUCHI: We tried to follow the manga closely for the most part, but originally there were only a few pages of the kind of destruction that you saw on-screen. I'm a big fan of kaiju and disaster movies, so we kind of stretched that scene out to make it about 20 minutes total.

The most common race in Clevatess is a mix of Hideneans and Dunns. How did you work with character designer Sōichirō Sako to depict these unique fantasy races?

KURIYAMA: Sako-san was really great at keeping the character designs close to the source material by Iwahara-sensei. We really trusted him to adapt those designs to fit into the world of anime.

TAGUCHI: So the number one thing that we really focused on is staying true to the source material. We wanted to make sure the characters look like Iwahara-sensei's drawings while having them move. In the manga, there are a lot of small details and touches that give it a rough look, so we wanted to make sure we also brought those elements into this production. But of course, with anime, sometimes we have to pick and choose what details we want to bring over. We also tried to make the colors not too bright, making it more realistic.

The backgrounds have this painterly look reminiscent of classic OVAs. What inspired this approach to the background art?

TAGUCHI: So I am really happy that you caught that, because that was the staff's goal. I was really inspired by the look of cel animation in the '80s and '90s. That hand-drawn look was very prominent in fantasy anime, so we thought it would be a great fit for a work like Clevatess. Our art director [Atsushi Morikawa] was also somebody who's worked in this era, so we both agreed that look and feeling should be our goal. So it's really great that you caught on to that.

Is there a reason why the flashback sequences have a low-res (VHS) look compared to the high-def modern scenes?

TAGUCHI: This story often jumps through different time periods, so we wanted to make them visually stand out. So while the present-day scenes we went for a '90s look, the flashback scenes we wanted to give it a '70s look like Heidi - A Girl of the Alps. To show which scene took place at which time visually, we tried to have them match those styles.

KURIYAMA: The challenge for us was to make it look rough, but not sloppy. If we leaned too hard into that scratchy look, it'd just look bad. So there was a lot of trial and error in terms of how we made the flashbacks look older.

Viewers were surprised to hear Ellie Goulding perform the ending song. How did you approach her to participate in the anime?

Kosuke ARAI: When we were making this anime, we were looking at it from a global approach. We wanted to make it popular not just in Japan, but worldwide. Part of that is the power of music, so we were thinking, “Oh, who can we approach to have that global appeal?” During that time, we heard Ellie Goulding was actually a big fan of Japan. So approaching her kind of came naturally.

Clevatess Season 2 airs on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.