RADWIMPS On How They Scored The Music For The Anime Blockbuster 'Your Name'
First of all thanks to Ollie Barder for this article.
Now that the massively successful anime movie Your Name is showing in U.S. cheaters, I thought it worthwhile talking to the band that scored the movie and understand how they went about the whole process.
If you are not familiar with the name RADWIMPS, they are a very popular band in Japan. Formed back in 2003, they have gone on to great success in the years since.
I recently managed to speak with three of the four band members, that of Yojiro Noda, Akira Kuwahara and Yusuke Takeda. However, the fourth member of the band Satoshi Yamaguchi is currently on hiatus due to illness.
We started on how the band formed and Akira explained, “Yojiro and I formed RADWIMPS during high school. We entered a band contest and met Yusuke and Satoshi there.”
This was followed up by Yusuke, who went into more detail; “Yojiro and Akira formed a 5 piece band of local friends during high school. That band took a break when Yojiro had to study for his college entrance exam. After he got into college and the band re-united, there was a slight member change. That’s when Satoshi and I joined the band.”
The name of the band is also something that’s something of an interesting point and Yusuke was more than happy to explain, “RAD is like “cool” and WIMP is “sissy” or “coward”, so we put these extreme words together.”
It’s here we got to the band’s influences and they have quite a few, with Yojiro starting off with his favorites, “Radiohead, Bjork, Elliot Smith, The Flaming Lips, Hiromi Uehara, John Frusciante, Ringo Sheena and Chara. I tend to be influenced by female singers. I think it’s because it’s something that I cannot be. Also I like neutral, genderless voice and music.”
To which Akira chimed in with, “Red Hot Chili Peppers and Oasis but I like all bands. Personally, I was a fan of Mr. Big. I admired how they played their instruments so fast!”
RADWIMPS recently scored the music for the very successful anime movie 'Your Name'.
Yojiro then followed on, “In terms of other musical influences, I’ve always liked jazz and hip hop. I think those elements are always in my songwriting.”
To which Yusuke added, “When I first started playing bass, I listened to all music that had bass part that stood out, like Jaco Pastorius and Marcus Miller. Because of that, I was able to adopt styles that many of the Japanese bands/bass players didn’t use at that time.”
It’s here we got onto how the band ended up scoring Your Nameand Akira explained how the contact had been initially made, “Director, Makoto Shinkai, approached Yojiro through Mr. Kawamura, the producer.”
Yusuke then went onto explain further, “Makoto Shinkai was a fan of RADWIMPS so he recommended us as soon as the production of movie Your Name was confirmed. It’s such an honor.”
Naturally, I wanted to know if any of the band had been familiar with Shinkai’s prior animated work, to Yusuke responded, “Yes, I have. I saw the Voices of a Distant Star, Makoto’s debut film, when I was in high school. I’ve been a fan of his ever since and have seen all his films.”
In terms of being fans of anime in general, Yusuke again responded quite enthusiastically, “I’m a fan of lots of anime. Ghost in the Shell, Hayao Miyazaki films, Akira, Gundam, etc. I’ve always been a fan of anime since I was little. I was fascinated by robots, science fiction and stories that were surreal. I’m still a fan even at this age.”
As for how the band approached scoring Your Name, Yojiro explained, “It took almost a year and a half to make the whole entire score. We talked with the director and the producer more times than I can even remember. The songwriting process was moving forward at the same time with the animation so it influenced each other. The music changed the story, the lines, and if the new scene was created, we changed the music. It was a creative process. The 2 main characters were very attractive. So I concentrated on them. How and when their feelings moved. We weren’t able to see the actual animation until it was all finished so we focused on the script and director’s words. And just kept imagining.”
To which Akira clarified further, “So there was no particular inspiration but we followed the images that the director had for the film.”
Something Yusuke confirmed, “Yeah, there was a video storyboard as guidance. “What kind of music would help people to feel the emotion of this scene?” was what I had in mind when making the score.”
'Your Name' has been one of the most successful anime movies of recent years.
Compared to writing a stand-alone album, it seems that scoring Your Name was quite different for the band, as Yojiro explains, “It was totally different. In making my own album you have to express everything all by yourself, only the music. But for the movie, it’s more comprehensive. The music has its own role in each scene. For some scenes, music doesn’t have to stand out and just be in the background. Letting the animation do the telling. And for some parts, the music leads the whole story.”
For Akira, it seemed that timing was more of an issue, “It was really difficult to arrange music to fit the animation by the second.”
Yusuke then talked a bit more about the process, “Except for the vocal tracks, we divided parts and assigned a member to be responsible to complete that part. So the process was mainly individually and separately done at our homes or studio. We never do that for our original albums.”
One of the more interesting aspects to the U.S. release of the movie is that the songs were also localized into English. It seems that the band had a key role in this, as Yojiro explains, “Writing English lyrics to the original Japanese songs was interesting. The melody was the same so the capacity of the lyrics had already been fixed. Sometimes you have to add the story in so as to fill the melody.”
What with Your Name being such a huge success, I wanted to know if the band might score some more anime in the future. Yojiro responded, “It doesn’t have to be an animation. If there was a cool interesting story, and if I feel that it’s going to be something new and exciting, I’d love to be a part of it.”
In terms of video games, while the band hadn’t thought about scoring any yet, Akira is clearly a gamer, “I’m playing Yakuza. It’s a game about the yakuza, the Japanese mafia.”
As is Yusuke for that matter, “I like lots of games. Final Fantasy, Biohazard, Monster Hunter, etc. They let me into a surreal fantasy world.”
As for the future of the band, Yojiro had this to finish off with, “I’m thinking of writing more English songs. For the past few years, I was focused on writing in Japanese, searching for the possibilities of Japanese language. But now, I’m interested in English songs. How to express these feeling as a Japanese person, in English.”
