ANN's coverage of Anime NYC 2024 is sponsored by Yen Press and Ize Press!
Image courtesy of Netflix Leading up to the Terminator Zero premiere at Anime NYC on Saturday night, a snippet of the show's theme song began playing with that iconic Terminator “du-dum du-du-dum” beat. After just a few “du-dum du-du-dums,” an audience member started clapping along to the beat, and soon everyone else joined in. After several rounds of clapping, the rhythm was lost, but it was an exhilarating moment nonetheless for writer Mattson Tomlin, director Masashi Kudo, and production designer Haruka Watanabe (all attending Anime NYC for the first time) as they took the stage—as they clapped. As did Terminator Zero composers Michelle Birsky and Kevin Olken Henthorn, who were later revealed to be sitting in the audience.
To get a sense of their backgrounds, moderator Khleo Thomas asked the panelists to name their top five favorite anime series. Tomlin went with the “basic” answers of Akira and Ghost in the Shell, his “gateway anime” of his childhood, The Animatrix, the works of Peter Chung in general, and Samurai Champloo. Kudo started by naming Disney favorites Sleeping Beauty (“Maleficent, absolutely the best villain ever introduced”) and Peter Pan (“Tinkerbell is a great design”), then picked Sailor Moon and Mobile Suit Gunma: Char’s CounterAttack as his favorite Japanese anime, and in a bit of humor that matched James Cameron’s own ego, picked his own Terminator Zero as the fifth best anime of all time. Watanabe splits her list into her childhood favorite Studio Ghibli films, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Whisper of the Heart, and three films that influenced her as an adult: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Mushi-Shi, and Planetes.
Netflix prepared both an English dub and a Japanese version with English subtitles for this premiere. A close-up audience shout-out eventually led to the subs being chosen over the dub, though many who wanted subs soon regretted that choice when the subs were blocked by hundreds of viewers (they eventually fixed the problem by resizing the screen). Reviews of the series are taboo and spoilers are strictly prohibited, but these first two episodes make a positive first impression.
The show captures the horror of the original 1984 Terminator (the recently released Red Band trailer gives a taste of the brutality)—after the premiere, Kudo revealed that he was approached to direct the series after telling a producer he'd long wanted to try his hand at horror anime. The once-futuristic, now-classic late-'90s setting offers an incredibly plausible alternate reality informed by today's growing concerns about artificial intelligence. The artists at Production IG are always reliable when it comes to cyberpunk action animation, and they're on display in the first episode's thrilling cold open and the second episode's reflections on the history of war.
The panel continued with a mix of behind-the-scenes videos and questions for the crew. Watanabe offered insights into the show’s mix of classic Terminator and more uniquely Japanese design elements; examples of the latter included the “cute yet creepy” ASIMO-inspired 1nno robots and the Kokoro AI holograms inspired by three Shinto goddesses. Kudo revealed that the end of Episode 1 was his favorite scene as a director—in part because he took advantage of the rhythm of the audience clapping along. Tomlin received a standing ovation when reflecting on the state of modern AI, which he said has the potential to be used for good, but that those applications should NOT “put manga artists out of work.” At the end of the panel, he emphasized his desire to continue the show for a second season.
Anime News Network also had the opportunity to speak directly with Tomlin and Kudo:
There have been six Terminator movies plus a TV series, most of which have more or less attempted to reboot the series. Why is it different?
Mattson Tomlin: That's a great question. I think when I look at the franchise, there's a reason we keep making them, and it's not because Hollywood is out of ideas, it's not because we're completely reliant on intellectual property. It's because there's something about those original films that has captured our minds and hearts, and it means something to people. You can say, “Let's leave it alone,” and some people will leave it alone and not watch any more of them. That's fine. For others, I think there's a desire to say, “I want to recapture that feeling, but I also want to give me something new.” For me, there's a really interesting opportunity presented by the Terminator being live-action only and so immediately doing something animated… This is different. This would do something different and it might operate by a different set of rules than a $100 million action movie.
How much did you draw inspiration from previous Terminator movies?
Masashi Kudo: The first thing they decided from the beginning was that they wanted to take the horror aspect of Terminator 1, the original, and bring back that fear-mongering component. T2 directed by James Cameron influenced me.
TOMLIN: I think with any franchise, with anything that people care about, and Terminator is 40 years old now, I ask myself, “Why are we still coming back to this?” I have to ask why I like this, and I have to ask why people like this. I think killer robots are great. Time travel creates interesting and exciting ideas. I think the idea of war in the future is very appealing to fans; I hope I can get to that in future seasons. But it’s also great characters and impossible things, so for me, to have real characters going through something emotional and primal and family stories, for me that’s what Terminator is.
Do you understand?
Do you understand? to talk to James Cameron?
KUDO: No.
TOMLIN: Not yet. I hope so. I hope that if and when he sees the show, he will realize what a huge fan I am of his and how much I love him and his work. It was a week or two before he said the first thing he ever said about the show. In an article in The Hollywood Reporter, he said, “It seems like they’re picking up some interesting themes; I’m interested in watching people take the baton in a world that I’ve created and see what they do with it and am very open to seeing what they do.”
Production IG has a history of cyberpunk shows like Ghost in the Shell and Psycho-Pass. Did any of those inspire you?
KUDO: There's a lot of overlap with the creative team of Psycho-Pass, so in Terminator Zero, there might be moments where you see similarities, but that's leveraging the knowledge and skill set that's also part of the creativity of Psycho-Pass. So Terminator Zero will have a little bit of Psycho-Pass' color through the same team on the creative side.
TOMLIN: I think I had to dig deep into anime just to learn what was expected of the genre and the medium because it's different from feature filmmaking. For me, the gateway into anime when I was a kid was The Animatrix. When The Animatrix came out, it blew my mind and became the gateway drug to so many other things. I always have to reconnect with things that I have a connection to. Usually, things I saw as a kid spark my imagination, so I rewatched The Animatrix. It was incredible, and there was something about it that made me say, “Okay, it's an anthology; we don't do that,” but it had a kind of violent, kinetic cerebral energy that I wanted to try to tap into. It was just getting back to that feeling as a kid.
Favorite Animatrix segment?
TOMLIN: I'm a huge fan of the animation style in “Kid Story.” There's something about the rawness of it. It's very depressing. He has to jump off a building, and the way that's done is so terrifying and poetic. That's very, very special to me.
What are your thoughts on the current threat of an AI apocalypse?
TOMLIN: I'm scared of that. I think there's the killer robot version, but then I think there's the more realistic, more grounded version where all our bank accounts are drained, our credit cards don't work, the lights go out, the water stops working, and we see how we all turn into animals all at once. I think that's a potentially terrifying reality.
Artificial intelligence is evolving so fast. When I first started writing the program, it was 2021 and AI had been around as long as we’ve all been alive, but it still felt like science fiction. Today, here in 2024, it’s not happening. Now, when I’m scrolling through my Instagram feed, I’m actually at this point where I’m like, “Are these the people in the pictures I’m looking at, are these real people?” “That scares me because just a year ago we were mocking AI, saying it can’t figure out how many fingers we have, and that was it.
KUDO: It's up to us to figure out how to use AI.
Both years Terminator Zero is set in, 1997 and 2022, were in the future when the first two Terminator films came out but are now in the past. How does that technically make this a period piece?
TOMLIN: It's funny because I had this moment where I thought, “Should we go to the 2030s? The 2040s? The 2050s?” And it ends up being set in 1997, which is a period piece, and when the first two movies came out, it was also the future, so there's a past that's like our past, but instead of going to some other place in the future, it seemed like a good way to start and go, “We know what 2022 is, but this is their 2022 because Judgment Day happened.” As an audience, you have to reconcile killer robots that look like humans. having to reconcile time travel, you have to reconcile all these fantastical fantasies, and so, “You know what 2022 is supposed to be like, but it's not like this,” it's just one less thing for the audience to have to get through.
KUDO: The 90s were an interesting time in history because the younger generation wasn’t born yet but there were a lot of people who lived through the 90s, who grew up in the 90s, who were young people in the 90s and therefore not quite ready to be called “nostalgic”, it was a time that you can’t turn into fantasy because there are still so many of us who remember the 90s. So keeping it more real but also being able to talk to the younger generation about a time that we lived through that they haven’t lived through was even more difficult. Even gathering sources about what happened in the 90s wasn’t as easy as we thought because it wasn’t exactly history, so in that sense it was an interesting creative process.
The Netflix show is making its international debut, and it has some big stars in its British cast. Kudo-san, when you directed the show, did you focus on the Japanese version, the English version, or both?
KUDO: I create the content in Japanese with Japanese voice actors, then the finished content as a package is sent to Mattson, who adds the English voice and directs the English performance.
The Kokoro scenes feature an interesting mix of hand-drawn and CG animation. How did you approach directing those scenes?
KUDO: Most of the scenes with Kokoro are CG, but those are the moments where illustration becomes easier and more expressive; those are the moments when hand-drawn illustrations are used.
The last anime you directed before this one was Sanrio Boys. What would his favorite Sanrio character be if Malcolm were a Sanrio Boy?
KUDO: Interesting question! This is a tough one… [vài giây im lặng suy nghĩ] Kuromi-chan.
