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There are several Mamoru Oshii book lists on the Internet, but they do not provide detailed descriptions of the contents. My collection of Mamoru Oshii books is not yet complete, but I would like to write a short summary for each of those books.
I apologize in advance for any grammatical errors or incorrect information.
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(Roman Album 2501: INNOCENCE Story Board)
release: 04/29/2004
publisher: Tokuma Shoten
[contents]
storyboard
interview with Mamoru Oshii
[review]
This is the full storyboard of INNOCENCE. It also includes an interview with Oshii.
In the book, Oshii says that he changed his storyboarding style in INNOCENCE. In the past, he used to write the details of camera movements and timing on the storyboards, but he got tired of that.
"Coming in, going out, follow-up shots, pans, and so on. I got bored with them. (laugh) I'd been doing the same thing for 26 years. I wanted to write new things on storyboards, like intentions of shots, hidden thoughts of characters. So in INNOCENCE, I experimented with those things. At least, it wouldn't be boring. It might be interesting to other staff members too. I also changed my writing style. I was hoping that the staff would react differently.
Another reason I did that was because I once realized that no one had listened to me. Even after almost an hour of talking, animators would end up saying that they didn't remember much about it. So I decided to only talk with animation directors. Before that, I heard that animation directors used to give another briefing for animators. I didn't realize that until later. The animators of Patlabor the Movie said they didn't understand what I was saying, so the animation director explained the same thing every time."
In other words, this storyboard is more of an explanation of the storyboard by Oshii. Technical orders are not written in the book. (Direction was done at the layout stage.) Instead, his intentions and subtext are written in the book. For example, in cut 02 of scene 21a, Togusa is talking to Aramaki, and the text says,
"Togusa has a grim look on his face. This kind of mission is painful for him. He is opposed to this mission from the bottom of his heart. He is not suited for the secret police job."
That kind of explanation is not often seen in anime storyboards. Anime storyboards are necessary for production staff to calculate the progress, but Oshii says that directors put many different intentions into them. Okiura's storyboards and Oshii's storyboards are completely different in style because of the different intentions. Okiura's storyboards were influenced by Junichi Sato's "Junkers Come Here".
Oshii's new style is very important because, unlike other storyboards, it gives a lot of hidden information. For example, Oshii writes, "Haraway was maybe ghost-hacked by Motoko." When Batou stopped the voice data of the gynoid, Haraway's original ghost returned to her body. Oshii writes "maybe" because he didn't want to specify which is Motoko and which is not. One of the birds flying in the sky might be Motoko. The storyboard is filled with such subtexts.
In the scene where Batou is ghost-hacked by Kim, it is written that the car's holography triggered Kim's ghost-hacking. The odd pauses in the shots vaguely convey Oshii's intentions, but most people miss that detail.
When Kim dies, a holography of Zeami's words appears. That is a tigger of Kim's gynoid virus, which is also not explained in the film. Oshii believes that the film does not need such an explanation.
