Interview: Shuzo John Shiota, President of Polygon Pictures

In December 2022, I had the privilege of visiting the Polygon Pictures Digital animation studio in Tokyo when it was about to enter its 40th year of production. One purpose of the visit was to learn more about the studio’s latest TV series, Kaina of the Great Snow Sea; however, I was also able to interview the studio’s President and CEO, Shuzo John Shiota.

Shiota has been working with Polygon since the mid-1990s, starting with consulting work for the studio before he became its President and CEO in 2003. In the interview, he talks about his first experiences in the CG animation industry, the mixed fortunes of the industry in the late 1990s and early aughts, and his efforts to find American corporate clients. I also asked him about Polygon’s partnership with Netflix, what Shiota thinks about “AI animation,” and how Polygon switched to remote work.

ANDREW OSMOND: I’d like to ask about your early years at Polygon Pictures. When you think back to when you first started doing consulting work with Polygon in the 1990s, what things do you feel most nostalgic for?

SHUZO JOHN SHIOTA: Personally, it’s the fact that I was so naïve and basically stupid and did not know much of the industry. There was much to look forward to, so that was kind of great. In retrospect, it was quite a bold move, having had no prior interest in animation or computer graphics and just jumping in. That basic naivety and stupidity is something that you can’t plan for. You do it once but never again because you get smarter.

The year was 1996, and there was this digital content bubble brewing both in the States and in Japan. There was a mood of euphoria, and Polygon was in the midst of that, with Rocky and Hopper [penguin characters] – we’ve not been able to capture that kind of success in terms of IP ever again. Everybody was very optimistic; if not for that, I might not have joined Polygon, even with my stupidity or naivety.

You’ve described how the studio had a “lively, euphoric” period in the late 1990s, bolstered by the first Toy Story and the first PlayStation lifting the profile of CG animation. However, you said that the attitude of the Japanese animation industry towards CG soured only a few years later, especially after the flop of the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in 2001. I wondered if you could say more about that turbulent time in Japan and if there were any particular moments from that period that you remember which reflected the changing attitudes towards CG in Japan?

It wasn’t just Final Fantasy‘s fault. We played a big part in that negative sentiment as well, in that we spent about $30 million and produced a total of about three minutes of footage.

Was this the penguin film (Hopper, a Japanese-American co-production)?

Yes, it was not Polygon per se, but it was something Polygon had driven: the Dream Pictures studio, a joint venture between Namco and Sony Computer Entertainment back then. We were present for about two full years, and created a whole studio, hired a lot of people, but we couldn’t come up with the right story, and it folded.

At least Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was finished. I think the Japanese were soured in that a lot of money had been spent to no avail, and they had a counter-example in the likes of Evangelion. There was also a new crop of digital artists like Makoto Shinkai coming out around the same time and Riichiro Mashima‘s Ski Jumping Pairs, which were very crude animated shorts, but they sold quite a bit of DVDs.

The other argument was, “Okay, if there are these hand-drawn animations that are created with significantly lower budgets and are making a lot of money, and there are these up-and-coming artists who are using digital tools and are creating shorts with significantly less money because they’re basically a one-man band, then why bother with studios like ourselves?” I remember talking to a prominent Japanese distribution studio at that time, and one producer asked me full-frontal, “Why should you guys matter if there are the likes of Shinkai and Mashima making animation on their own? If we need a bunch of people, what’s the point?”

That’s still engraved in me. There’s an answer to that; my answer was, “Okay, can they produce multiple titles within a certain timeframe?” Kudos to them that they created something, and it came to some sort of prominence, but how long do you have to wait before the next thing comes?

It stuck in my mind, it kind of fueled me, and I said, “Fuck it, I’m going to go to the States and try to find something.”

In the 2000s, you traveled to America, initially on your own, and knocked on the doors of Hollywood companies, seeking work for Polygon. Your success was incredible, but how difficult was it to get a foot in the door? What were the main factors in your success in getting Hollywood commissions?

I was hanging on to the few straws I had; I had no other choice. I was naïve to the point that I did not know what the difficulty was; again, that’s nostalgic. I was trying to call upon my friends from Dream Pictures, whom we’d worked with and who were in the industry… It was trying to go through friends, doing some cold calls, emailing everybody, and trying to find representation. It didn’t seem that hard back then because it was the only thing I knew, the only entry point.

But I still remember… Once we got representation from AniManagement [an animation agency based in Burbank], Aaron Berger [its CEO] introduced Polygon and me to Warner Brothers. We visited, and Sander Schwartz was leading the animation department – I’d see Aaron hugging Sander and hugging basically everybody and think, “Gosh, I’m never going to make it into this little village because it seems so tight-knit.” It did seem like you had to be in the know to be part of this community.

You can’t break into the circle…

Exactly. For a Japanese person like myself, it would take quite an effort to get in there. That’s when I thought: this is going to be very difficult. But luckily, when I started bringing VHS cassettes of our past work, at least we were already 15 years in, with a company history, and we had some things to show which were quite original and pretty high up in terms of quality. I think that was really helpful.

Obviously, your showreel was very important, but do you think other factors helped, such as the state of the American industry at the time?

Up until we got our first gig, My Friends Tigger & Pooh, it was just trying to meet as many people as possible and doing some tests, mostly on spec, and trying to prove we were worthy. God bless Disney at that time; we saw all these people that we’re still friends with now, who trusted us.

We were more expensive than the Indian companies that had started surging a lot and the Canadians who had subsidies that we did not. But we were very efficient and transparent management-wise. We had a lot of inner struggles, and we didn’t show everything, but the producers trusted us with pulling off the gig without them babysitting us; that was big.

That relationship turned into things like Transformers Prime and Tron: Uprising. When CG went into boys’ action, complicated stuff, we had it in our blood because we have a rich history of anime backbone (narratives). In contrast, the Canadians were mostly into animation for preschoolers. The Indian studios could execute, but not without being handheld creatively and management-wise.

We had a style in CGI animation that not many people had in the industry back then; plus, we had a history of coming up with different styles and looks. That’s because of the nature of our company, but it’s also because here in Japan, there’s an industry that has experimented quite a lot in animation. Being Japanese ultimately did help us in getting into the industry.

Since that time, Polygon has been trusted with an incredible range of established properties, ranging from Winnie the Pooh to Godzilla, Star Wars to Pacific Rim. Do you think Polygon has grown bolder in adapting such properties over the years?

It’s in our blood to develop different styles and experiment. We never stay put in one genre, look, or style. We started out developing applications, and we went to creating characters like Rocky and Hopper, and then we went into preschool with Pooh, and then we went to boys’ action skewing older. We’re constantly transitioning. Even in the early 2000s, we had Polygon Family, a polygonal black-and-white animation with very limited movement. We always come up with different stuff; that’s our mission statement. That’s what people come to us for, what they seek.

The harder part was back in Japan. The industry and the market here had a very peculiar liking for what they wanted to see. CG animation wasn’t part of that, and it’s not their fault because hand-drawn animation has such a strong footing, and when you do it right, it looks awesome. What it can do by hand didn’t really cater to what we can do with CGI, just inherently… because, shoot, CGI is a simulation tool. It’s got to be physically correct, most of the time.

It took us a while to reach a point where CGI looks as “free” as hand-drawn animation and to come here [to Japan] and produce CG at a doable budget scale. It took the likes of Netflix coming in to allow us to roam around in this industry. But even now, we still have to prove ourselves to the anime crowd here and internationally. Actually, the international anime crowd scrutinizes CGI animation more than the locals [in Japan].

Really?

I think so. They’re more diehard, you know? That’s been the bigger challenge, finding our place in the industry, in the market here, utilizing CGI… Not trying to completely emulate [hand-drawn animation] because we can’t, but trying to find just the right place within the industry.

Knights of Sidonia was Netflix‘s first original anime in 2014. Since then, there’s been a boom in anime funded by foreign streaming platforms and a growing amount of speculation about whether this model is in trouble. For example, this October, a report in the Weekly Toyo Keizai criticized Netflix‘s handling of anime and suggested that TV broadcasting was still more profitable for anime producers. [The Japanese article is available here and it was summarized on the Cartoon Brew website.] What’s your perspective on this?

The fact that Netflix came in with such a bang is so important. We would not have made it within the anime industry if not for Netflix; they played a huge part in bringing underground fans to the surface and making fandom legit. By doing so, they brought the rest of the world to recognize that animation is not just for kids, widening the fandom, so I think they and other streamers are wonderful.

Having said that, though, they’re not the total solution. We want to connect with the fans, and eventually, we want to go beyond the animated series; we went to create an IP, we want to grow a secondary business using the IP, and we want to milk the three to five years of our lives that we spent, as much as possible. But the streaming platform is not very much suited for that because it’s a constant barrage of new content. That keeps the streamer’s subscription alive; that’s the whole concept – you’re not paying for one thing; you’re going for a platform where they constantly serve you with different things.

It’s not their fault. It’s just that their business model is counter to what we, as producers, hope for, which is for our market to see our stuff and only our stuff. After a few years, we realized there was a divide and we needed to pick and choose what we wanted to attain with our stuff.

A lot of us have found out that having a weekly engagement with our fans on terrestrial [television] is very useful in creating a community among our fans and possibly creating a hit that makes loyalty that goes beyond the episodic. Many of us have found that maybe we don’t get the highest licensing fees off-hand because [a terrestrial broadcast] is not exclusive. However, if we have the upfront money to fund [an anime], which the TV stations do, we get to cultivate a relationship, and then we get to work with each streamer after the fact.

It’s a matter of how you go about these relationships; what’s the priority? It’s not a one-stop shop anymore.

Recently, there has been speculation about the advances in AI Animation, with some people speculating that it will cause a revolution in the animation industry in the near future. What do you think?

It interests me and is a huge talking point among our peers. My Facebook timeline is inundated by AI stuff… I’m not an artist myself, and artists have different sentiments, but for me, AI is a tool, a very smart tool, but it still needs a human companion for it to be useful for the foreseeable future. I’m interested because I would like to use that tool to make our production more efficient and create more added value for audiences, but it depends on us – the studios, the artists – to make it useful. It’s not a tool that makes itself useful.

Obviously, we are coming into new terrain. Artificial Intelligence has to be fed a lot of things for it to get helpful. The biggest discussion is how do we rule on what it gets fed. That’s the biggest thing that angers the artists who are involuntarily feeding these AIs to get them so-called “smarter.” I think there needs to be some sort of regulation as to how the AIs get smarter and how we utilize the intelligence resulting from that.

There’s no way of stopping it; you must live with it. Of course, you can believe that it will run amok, but ultimately it’s a tool, and humans are still in a position to control that tool.

When you were interviewed by Anime News Network in 2018, you said that one of your intentions was to “really dig into remote work.” Obviously, the world has changed so much since then. At present, how many of your staff are working remotely?

Normally 80% of our total working force is working remotely. Anywhere between 80-90%, I think… Our studio space is two-thirds of what it used to be, and half is just open space. We decided that, at most, only one-third of our people would come to work in a physical office at one time. I’ve accepted that fact.

We were doing some R&D about remote work in 2018, and we didn’t realize how effective it would be until we were forced to be all remote. I would never have had the courage to say, “Let’s all do remote.” If it had not been for Covid, we would not have done it. Maybe we would have taken gradual steps… Perhaps if not for Covid, it would have been 20% of the workforce on remote, being very selective. Covid pushed us in a certain direction.

It made me really think about, “What is the purpose of a physical office?” We kind of changed the concept of our office into a place to convene rather than a place of work. We found that in terms of executing tasks, working remotely is most effective for most people, other than those who come here because they feel so lonely, or they don’t have suitable working environments in their house, bad internet connections, whatever it may be. But that’s only like 20% at any time. Some may come every day, some may come once a week, and some may come once a month. I saw a few last week who came to the office for the second time in three years.

We don’t have a regulation, “You have to come on a certain day.” We leave it up to the people to decide what is best for them. However, I do find an absolute significance in physical interaction. More than before, because when you’re working remotely, you’re “funneled” in the particular path that you’re engaging in. You don’t hear noise; noise is so important, and random encounters are so important. Learning things that you are not interested in is very important. Walking corridors and overhearing people conversing about different stuff, chance encounters, serendipity.

We’re not forcing people to come, but we’re trying to make instances when people want to come. We’re doing more events, much more open seminars, inviting people from other companies to do them so that people want to come. It’s kind of primal: serve food and liquor, and most people come…

On the subject of other companies, I wondered if you had any comment on Studio Orange, which also works in CGI animation; whether they are “the enemy” or whether they are sometimes your allies?

Of course, we are very conscious of what Orange does. We totally understand that in the anime world, they have a much better reputation than we do because they come from a sakuga world, whereas we come from a CG world. They know the protocols of how to act and create, satisfying the current fans.

We’re cognizant of that; however, we also understand we’re Polygon, and we’ll never be Orange, and we just have to find another way. It’s always good to learn; I’ve got former colleagues working at Orange, and it’s really important to hear from them. I had a similar conversation with Megalis, the CG company that did Oni: Thunder God’s Tale. I commend them for their effort. They did it for a fraction of the population that we would have done, and there was so much effort put into it and probably sweat and tears as well. The way they used the technology was much more advanced than we do; in some cases. I’ve invited them to come and give a talk about the production process.

The only enemies are people who, perhaps, get a project and lowball it or do something that creates a bad name for CG animation. People doing great work that the market commends are not enemies; we need to learn from them, we can never be them, and therefore we need to up our ante.

In the 2018 interview, you also stressed your ambition to achieve a gender balance at Polygon. Have you been able to make progress on that since then?

It depends on which department we’re talking about. Production management has always been more female than male, administration likewise; animation is creeping closer to fifty-fifty. Unfortunately, and this reflects education in general, the departments that deal more with engineering – like lighting, effects, and R&D systems – tend to skew much more male. It’s our issue, but it’s also the issue with education in general; unfortunately, more males go to engineering schools than females.

Disclosure: Andrew Osmond previously contributed text for the art book The Art of Pacific Rim: The Black (2022).