Interview with Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru and Masaki Sato

[Psykomatik]

So, Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru (中鶴勝祥) and Masaki Sato (佐藤正樹) were both at a Belgium Convention, "Made in Asia". They answered to some questions concerning Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z anime which are really interesting.

DRAGON BALL:
About Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru
- He was born in Oita in 1962.
- He joined Toei Animation in 1981, at the age of 19.
- He wanted to become an animator thanks to Space Battleship Yamato (1974) and Mobile Suit Gundam (1979).
- He was first influenced by Hayao Miyazaki. At the time, there were more and more animation techniques and Miyazaki's work was very innovative.
- According to him, Dragon Ball's animation quality wasn't as good as it is today. He did his best to increase the quality.
- While there wasn't a lot of animation guides, he still wanted to learn and did his best.
- His first key animation were done for an american cartoon such as GI Joe, My Little Poney or Dungeons & Dragons.
- Daisuke Nishio recommended him to work on Dragon Ball.
- Minoru Maeda practically never corrected him. He was one of the two exceptions.
- He did the follow-up of a Sato's cut (where Piccolo is damaged by a fireball and then Goku disappears), which is rather unusual.
- He did the fight in #153.
- His favorites characters are Kame Sennin and Son Goku.
- He did his best to imitate Toriyama's work, but he still feel like he's nowhere as good as Toriyama.
- He did his best because drawing Dragon Ball is a fun thing to do.
- Since Dragon Ball Super is an original series which does not have a manga as a base, they have to create something new for character-designs. He's still OK with them as long as people like Toriyama's style.

About Masaki Sato
- He passed a test at Toei Animation, but finally decided to join Studio Junio.
- He met Toshiyuki Inoue and Minoru Maeda at Studio Junio.
- At Studio Junio, Minoru Maeda asked him to join DB's staff.
- He passed the test at the same time as Hisashi Eguchi.
- When he first saw Dragon Ball, he really felt like going to another dimension. He never felt that before.
- He changed some parts of #97's storyboard (Son Goku vs Ten Shin Han) because he found it too long to last 20 minutes.
- He took inspiration from a submachine gun with the idea where Son Goku receives multiple blow.
- He did the cut where Goku saves Ten Shin Han against Piccolo Daimao.
- He did the cut where Goku and Ten Shin Han are fighting in the sky and took inspiration from a Nakatsuru's cut.
- He took a lot of inspiration from the Olympic Games.
- Minoru Maeda got mad at him because of his use of the shaking effect (Maeda found them unnecessary).
- He took inspiration from Hokuto no Ken.
- He added a lot of scenes in the fight between Piccolo and Son Goku in #145.
- Minoru Maeda practically never corrected him. He was one of the two exceptions.
- Because he doesn't know to draw flames, Hisashi Eguchi did the fire scenes in #153.
- Because he didn't want to draw Chichi, Hisashi Eguchi did the wedding scene in #153.
- His favorite character is Ten Shin Han.
- According to him, Toriyama's style is very hard to imitate.
- He did his best because drawing Dragon Ball is a fun thing to do.



DRAGON BALL Z:
About Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru
- He became animation supervisor with DBZ.
- On #44, people at Toei started to call him the new Minoru Maeda.
- He had 6 weeks to correct #44.
- One cut on movie #4 which was thought to be from Sato was in fact him.
- He says that at the time, cuts weren't done in a logical order: one animator could do cut #1, then cut #3 and finally cut #7.
- To work on DBZ implies too much work, so it was impossible for someone to animate an entire episode by himself (like Yoshitaka Yashima is doing on Dragon Ball Super), but some episodes were animated by two animators only.
- A story-board could take 2 months to be complete. Animators had 1-2 months to do their thing.
- He knows that Dragon Ball is super popular on Spain and in Italia.
- He told us that people from Channel and Terry Gilliam's son came to visit Toei Animation.
- He bought the manga to imitate Toriyama's work. He started to be happy with his approach 2 years after his first work on Dragon Ball.
- Before he got promoted to "chara-designer", he was a "guest chara-designer".
- He hated the Red Ribbon's arc because characters were too "round".
- He really started to take fun drawing Dragon Ball with the Freeza arc.

About Masaki Sato
- He became animation supervisor with DBZ.
- He did the vast majority of the fight between Vegeta and Reacum and did all the effects.
- In the same episode, he did the cut with Son Goku.
- He took a lot of inspirations from differents sentai because he loved it.
- According to him, the most difficults episodes are Maeda's one because he was very strict with them.
- He didn't have that much time to work on Reacum's fight: only 3 weeks. Because of production and planing issues, story-board got delayed and was complete late. It was very hard for him.
- Since he's on twitter, he started to realize how popular Dragon Ball is in the world.
- He bought the Weekly Shonen Jump each and every week to analyze Toriyama's work.
- He hates drawing women because it's the hardest thing with Toriyama's style.
- Cell was really hard to animate, but if you ask him what is the most difficult thing to do between animating Cell and animating a girl, he would answer Bulma.
- About #95 and the first time Son Goku transforms into a Super Saiyan, they recorded Masako Nozawa's scream before the transformation was actually animated, so the audio and the image were not synchronized at all.
- His favorite chara-designs are from the Minoru Maeda's era.

[Akuma Johnson]

Great work, Psykomatik. Sato, Nakatsuru and Maeda are totally unrivaled when it comes to old-school character art.

[Michsi]

Thank so much for this.

Very interesting, also funny. Especially how Masaki Sato has difficulties in drawing girls. I always found Toriyama's style fairly easy to imitate when it comes to girls, so this was a surprise.

[Baggie_Saiyan]

Great work, Psykomatik. Sato, Nakatsuru and Maeda are totally unrivaled when it comes to old-school character art.

Nakatsuru's Z promo art is just too good (and expensive), I actually spent some time on the weekend looking through his work and other folks work on promo art from back in the day.

It just makes me sad modern DB doesn't have anything close to.

[KBABZ]

The amount of "oh gurls are hard!" in the interview (or at least the list above) is saddening.

[MadSpecialist]

Thanks for sharing Psykomatik, we don't read from these two enough. Eguchi, Maeda, Nakatsuru and Sato's abilities are inspirational to say the least. Personally, the animation was at its peak whenever they, along with animators like Yamamuro, were involved; their attention to detail was evidently impeccable.