At Anime NYC 2024, we had the chance to sit down with other media outlets to interview with the creative forces behind the Leviathan anime adaptation.
Interview with Leviathan Author Scott Westerfeld and the anime’s producers at Qubic Pictures and Studio Orange during Anime NYC 2024
Leviathan is an upcoming anime series adapted from the popular novels by Scott Westerfeld. Set in 1914 during World War I, it follows a fugitive prince named Alek and a girl named Sharp who disguises herself as a boy aboard an airship called the HMS Leviathan.
At its core, the series explores the dichotomy of ideology between the Clankers and the Darwinists, as both sides clash and struggle against each other during the war.
Scott Westerfeld is the author of the novels that bear the anime’s namesake, Justin Leach worked on Leviathan as a producer at Qubic Pictures, and both Yoshihiro Watanabe and Daigo Ikeda are producers who work at Studio Orange.
Note: Watanabe served as a translator as well for Ikeda’s response during the interview. This interview has been truncated and lightly edited for clarity.
Leviathan Anime Interview
Q: I’m interested in what inspired you to adapt Leviathan into an anime, and for Justin (Leach), as a long-term producer working between Japanese and American animation – how has your previous production experiences in Japanese animation informed your approach to producing the series?
Justin Leach: Well, I first started working at Production IG. I worked there as an employee in 2001 to 2004.
That’s kind of my first exposure working within an anime studio and I started to see the potential for like ways to collaborate from that experience and so it’s always been kind of my life’s mission to find out like because I love Japanese animation so much, love the creators work so much, I’ve always been a fan and I just always wanted their work to be seen across the world and accepted by a wide audience.
So as I progressed through my career over the years, I was lucky enough to have some opportunities to produce anime content with creators that I knew. So they just tried to find the right opportunity for this collaboration and I’ve been very lucky.
This project in particular was a project that Netflix approached me about making. Before that, I had worked on Eden with Netflix and I feel like I’m always trying different configurations of how to collaborate on projects with Japan.
Eden was very different than how Leviathan worked, for example.
With Eden, the idea was to have a team of Japanese artists, like Irie Yasuhiro who directed Fullmetal Alchemist, and Kawamoto Toshihiro who was a character designer on Cowboy Bebop. We take that, and then work with other studios maybe outside Japan, to see if that configuration works.
That was one way that we tried it, and then for the next configuration, we had the opportunity to work with Studio Orange, and they’ve been such a great partner in this production. We wanted to be closer to the studio and have a closer partnership on the Japanese side of production. So when we approached (Studio) Orange, we wanted to include them as an equal partner in the creative process. So we would include them, as well as Scott (Westerfeld), he was there from the beginning.
And really just trying to figure out how to work side by side and share our ideas, and bring our ideas to the table. So that was our focus for this production. And I think it really was interesting. We also have Christophe Ferreira who’s (directing) from France, and he brings his sort of cultural experience to the project.
I feel like this particular configuration has been really fun to see come to fruition. It sort of makes me happy to see this synchronous production.
Scott Westerfeld: I think when people ask me if I wanted to see it come into some other medium, I always thought anime was a good idea. That was always one of my answers. I mean, there’s a girl flying around the world on a giant whale – it’s the most (Studio) Ghibli thing I can imagine. Like, these sort of phantasmagoric creatures and walking tanks, even though they’re from 1914.
Those are both staples of anime and it’s sort of like always fit into that, which is weird because of course, these illustrations in the original book are very much like Edwardian, Victorian engravings. So to see it move into a completely different medium is really amazing and interesting.
But I think the things in that world already fit into anime.
Yoshihiro Watanabe: So we thought it was a great opportunity to take on, and also the theme of the book is something that really resonates to now even though it’s set in a fictional World War I setting, all of the themes, the characters, the conflicts, what emotions the characters felt, we felt that it’s something that should be told now.
We thought it was a great opportunity to do it. Through anime we’re retelling Scott’s story into this world.
Q: My question is for Scott. How do you feel about seeing your work adapted into an anime by a big studio like Orange, and how closely have you been involved in the adaptation process?
Scott Westerfeld: So, I always talk about how when I brought Keith Thompson on board to do the illustrations, because there’s so many in the books, he was illustrating at the same time as I was writing. And it changed a lot of things that I wrote because I would write a cool thing and then he would draw it and I’d be like, oh – that thing has to do more. Like I was only going to have it in one chapter, but it needs to hang around because it’s so awesome-looking.
So having something visualized changed the way I wrote the book, and changed the way I approached the characters and thought about the characters. So now to see it changed, you know, to see it have a new life also has changed the way that I feel about the characters, and changed the way that I see the characters.
The style of the book is black and white. It very much looks like an engraving. It looks very old, and everybody sort of stands in a sort of 1914 stuffy way. So to see these characters be really colorful and expressive, and make manga gestures when they talk has been really wonderful. I feel like their internal lives are being shown in terms of color, and light, and movements, and expression. That’s really great.
Your other question is like how involved was I?
I was in the writing room when we were doing writing meetings. I was there every week. Every Wednesday, I got up early and they would stay up late so that we could go through every script together. I’ve been through every script. I’ve seen every, what do you call it – the animatronic?
Justin Leach: the animatic?
Scott Westerfeld: The animatic, the super rough cut which is sometimes just you know a sketch of a person going like [gestures motion]… they showed me that version, they showed me the version with the wireframes, I’ve seen every episode like twelve times. [Talking to Justin] I’m sure you’ve seen it like a hundred or thousand times…
Justin Leach: [Laughs] Yeah…
Scott Westerfeld: But it’s really great to understand the entire process and to see the layers get added.
Q: You spoke before about how certain aspects of Leviathan were perfect for anime. I want to know if there were any unexpected challenges or things you knew might not work when trying to adapt a work like Leviathan?
Justin Leach: There’s always technical challenges. One thing I think that is hard to accomplish is building an expansive world that’s believable. I think Ghibli is very good at showing this, so I think that is very important.
And so I think that was also a big challenge: How can we make this world feel like it’s big and expansive? And also be able to have more intimate moments with the characters and to create that opportunity? I’d say, I think that’s a big challenge to do that.
I think one thing that Orange really impressed me with was their, I mean – they’re already doing amazing animation. The animation’s amazing, but they also built out a background painting team within the studio, which all the paintings would just blow me away each time I saw them. And I think those paintings really helped build out that world, and made it more beautiful.
Creatures are always a challenge too, like making big creatures and scale is always a challenge.
Scott Westerfeld: I think one of the weird things about Leviathan is that it’s grounded in history very much, and the way the politics works is very much the same. The history of how World War I started is day by day exactly hooked up to the way it is in the history books. But these completely banana pants objects are wandering around in that history.
So to try to keep it grounded in this very dark part of history while at the same time, you know, opening up to fantastical things without one of those things stopping on the other is something that was tricky to do in the book and I’m sure really complicated in the anime process. But they did an amazing job of it. Like the clothes are all great.
Daigo Ikeda: [Translated by Yoshihiro Watanabe]
So one thing for us in making Trigun Stampede, we had very dynamic action sequences, the characters are much more dynamic.
But because as Scott and Justin said, Leviathan is based on reality, the historical facts are a very important part of the theme. So in order to illustrate that, not just storywise, but in its technical approach – it’s really important to consider what we do to create that reality. And to create that reality, instead of them just jumping around like sperm whales the important thing was the weight.
So, the weight of things. How things actually look heavy and the gravity of things happening. That’s something we approached with director Christophe Ferreira, and how we technically approached this show.
Scott Westerfeld: Right, so the physics matched the history.
Q: How did you approach the inspiration from Keith Thompson’s illustrations from the novels in designing the characters in the world for the anime? Especially since Keith’s style is very detailed while the animating style would definitely be distinct from that. What was the process of tweaking the designs for a seamless animation?
Justin Leach: We met with Keith early on in the project. We basically asked him to give us all of his drawings and digital files and we studied them very carefully. I think everyone’s a big fan of his work, and we were trying to figure out how best to make the transition.
We worked with another concept artist named Alex Alice, who’s a French comic book artist who is also very skilled and knowledgeable about history and war machines, I guess you could say.
So we brought him on to help us with the concept design, and working closely with Christophe, I think that they found kind of an anime angle. But while also sort of being faithful to some of the motifs and the design language that we did.
We’d always check in with him, and he was a big wealth of information and super detail-oriented. Little things that he would add on, like on the Stormwalker, for example – there’s like a little sleeping bag, kind of attached on the top. We made sure that there’s function for the design and the elements that were added inside of that.
I wish Christophe was here to speak more to this, but that’s kind of our history in terms of how we tried to bring the pieces together.
Scott Westerfeld: Keith, when he draws one side of something, he always knows what it looks like from the other direction.
Q: I was wondering how the Clankers and the Darwinist’s (fabricated beasts) in the novel are representative of different political philosophies or ideologies in Leviathan‘s World War I era? And have these differences been highlighted more in the anime adaptation due to stylistic animation choices?
Scott Westerfeld: The Darwinists are very much about science and about the way that science challenges us. It’s not just technology, it’s not just something that you use to go faster or to be, you know, to be more powerful. Science is something that increases your wisdom, it increases your understanding of the world, and that’s more the Darwinists, whereas for the Clankers, it’s more about how technology makes you more powerful. It’s about how technology can crush other people or crush other ideas.
I think that collision between metal and flesh is sort of at the core of the book.
Justin Leach: I think design language-wise, in terms of style, maybe echoing the same thing that Keith was doing in the books, which I think is represented with different political points of view.
So the Clankers have very hard edges, and they’re boxy, and you feel the weight of their technology. Whereas on the Darwinist side, something more organic; nautilus type of Fibonacci designs, shells, and organic forms represent that side and that point of view.
In the story itself there’s music to help describe this relationship between the two different sides. There’s a song in the story where Sharp sings a folk song that she grew up singing, and then Alek plays a song that he was classically trained in on his side that’s inspired by a Dvorak piece called “Going Home”, which is actually presented as a folk type of music, as well as traditional classical music.
They actually sounded like two different songs, but they came from the same composer. So it’s an interesting theme that we talked about in the story.
Scott Westerfeld: Yeah, it also goes back to the weight. Because the Leviathan itself is full of hydrogen. You have to throw everything away. It’s balanced with the air. It’s the same density as the air, whereas the Stormwalker – it’s a rock [laughs].
Justin Leach: When the foot goes into the water, it splashes. You feel this. It’s like digging into the ground. There’s a part in the trailer where it just skids into the ground and just sinks into the ground.
Daigo Ikeda: So we can’t clarify who the creative designers are, but we have two designers. One designed the Clanker side and one designed the Darwinist side. And actually not just the stylistic difference or artistic difference, but their methods are different in designing as well.
The Clanker side actually went straight to the models and they started designing 3D models so you have a more hard version concept that’s directly in the method, and the Darwinist side was first drawn as illustrations to design the creatures.
Scott Westerfeld: That’s great!
Q: What would fans of the Leviathan novels be most excited for when they actually watch the adaptation? What do you think they’re going to appreciate the most about it?
Scott Westerfeld: That’s a really interesting question!
One of my things, one of my ticks as a writer is: I write a lot of action scenes. I write a lot of kinds of personal flights, like hoverboards and people jumping off of things and people swinging from ropes. So, all of that stuff is very much a part of the anime.
The action scenes are amazing. Watching the illustrations, like watching the Stormwalker move, watching the Leviathan fly, is really great. It’s also nice to see the characters being really expressive of their interiority. I always imagined Alek as someone who stands at attention all the time, but to have him moving, and to be more of an animated character and to be animated is really great.
Justin Leach: I really like seeing the characters come to life. And Sharp, is just such a wonderful character in this show, and seeing her across from Alek and the way that they play across from each other. Although we can’t mention the voice actors yet, the performers that were cast are really good. And I think it’s a great fit. So it’s cool to see all those pieces coming together.
But I personally really like Sharp’s character a lot. It’s just really enjoyable to have someone you just fall in love with. It’s her personality, it’s kind of contagious.
Q: Actually on the subject of Sharp’s character, she’s a very resonant character for trans and gender non-conforming fans of the series. I’m wondering how their gender identity will be explored in the anime? Especially since the conversation about gender identity has evolved so much since the novels first came out 15 years ago. In what ways may the portrayals differ from the original story?
Scott Westerfeld: I think when I wrote it, it was largely the kind of trope of a girl pretending to be a boy so that she could do something cool. And it was about not getting exposed and not getting found out. So, that was part of the dramatic tension. And now we’ve had an opportunity to think about it differently and to update it…
But I will say, that when I was doing it, I realized that… trope often has a moment where the girl who’s pretending to be a boy puts on a dress. And everyone goes – Oh, now you’re beautiful because you’re your real self again! And I never put that in the book. I was like, that will never happen because that’s not who she is.
Because in dressing as a boy, she is finding out who she is. What happens, and by getting what she wants, by going for what she wants, she is finding out who she is. So we lean more into that and when you get to the third book, episodes 9, 10, and 11 – Sharp really does talk about their identity in a specific way that doesn’t happen in the books.
It probably wasn’t accessible to many, or to the broader culture of YA writing in 2009. It has been, I guess, updated and enlarged and made more interesting. And we leaned into what was already there, what people have identified with all along. And part of that is because my fan base has taught me things.
That’s another thing that happens in addition to illustration, bouncing back on the work. And adaptations, teaching you about your work, also in the way that people read them. People read your books, making you understand them better.
Q: How has your collaboration with Qubic and Orange on the anime compared to working on the production of the Uglies movie set to release next month?
Scott Westerfeld: It’s very different. I was part of the writing process from the beginning with Leviathan. I did get to see the script of Uglies, but it wasn’t until a draft was done.
I did pitch some scenes for Uglies and some of them got shot. So I was part of the creative process, but Leviathan was written more by a group. Like (in) animation, you really have to get the script right before you start. So I think it was much more of a group effort, so I was part of the committee in a way that I couldn’t be for Uglies.
I got to do a cameo in Uglies, which I didn’t get to do in Leviathan [laughs] and I got to go on set. Being part of the production in that sense was entirely different. But in both cases, it’s been wonderful to have people who respect the work and respect my contributions. And it’s just they’re completely different media. That’s one of the things, part of the learning process is just seeing how different those two things are. Because they were going on pretty much at the same time. They started around the same time. They’re both coming out within six months of each other. So it’s pretty fascinating to have been involved with both.
Q: How was Qubic’s collaboration process with Orange?
Justin Leach: At Qubic, we’re passionate about bringing anime to a wider audience and we want to work with the best, most talented people. I’ve always been a fan of their work for a long time and I’ve been watching them steadily get better and better each and every production. So when we discussed who we wanted to work with, and discussed with Christophe, I think we felt that Orange was a good fit and they kindly decided to allow us to work with them.
Our approach is really, I wanted to treat this like an equal partnership where we’re working together side by side creatively in every aspect of production. I’m just a very collaborative person by nature and as a producer, I just try to get the most talented people together in the same room, and just try not to get in the way too much and let them do their thing.
So we try to create that type of an environment and have a lot of communication. And it’s a challenge. Sometimes there’s language, or cultural differences. There’s also different ways about how people typically work in the West versus Japan. So we try to work through the differences. We try to be very understanding of how Japan works, and we try to go in with that philosophy working together.
I think this is Christophe’s first time directing a show and he’s been doing very well considering we’re doing a big production like this and he lives, by coincidence, a block away from the studio. So it almost felt kind of destined. But he’s been a great director on the project.
I’m lucky to have these people that help make things go smoothly. He brings a lot of his French aesthetic and comic book experience in comics. Orange has obviously a lot of experience in anime production and we can build a team and work with different designers in Japan and help make the production.
Daigo Ikeda: I mean, it’s a challenge for a lot of people. It’s not just one side. Each person has their own challenges. Something new to contribute to this project. But because all of those challenges being overcome is something we’re trying to accomplish, we’re able to accomplish something really great.
Yoshihiro Watanabe: As we’re creating anime, anime is an ensemble of many different creatives. So it’s not just people who draw, it’s people, animators, our animators – they’ll draw the anime with CG. But basically, it’s the same thing. Drawing out the motion. But there’s music composers, there’s the compositing team, the creative development directors, and storyboard artists. Each layer people are doing comes from different areas, and they’re adding so much of the best of what they have learned in their careers.
This itself feels like it’s in line with the theme of Leviathan. We’re all trying to make something better in this world from a different perspective. We all have our calling that we had as to why we’re involved in creating animation. And that reason’s all different. But we all believe in this one thing that, in Leviathan, it’s about how to stop the war.
But in us, we’re trying to, through animation, we’re trying to inflict a new world into this one. And with Leviathan I think will be the results of what we were trying to bring fascinating things, new and familiar things, and this idealistic story too, as well.
Justin Leach: It’s interesting how the Leviathan echoes the real world through making the show itself. Two different clusters coming together to achieve a common goal.
Scott Westerfeld: Also I love that you had a more CG-oriented designer for the Clankers and somebody drawing for the Darwinist, was that super intentional?
Daigo Ikeda: Yeah, it was intentional. Also because Keith’s designed mechas have so much detail, and for an individual to draw out the details it’s going to take a long time. If we do this in a CG approach, the details can be put in there and as a design approach, that was the reason that we chose to approach it with the CG design. In creatures, the softness is really important so by doing it by hand first, drawing to designs that creates the softness of these designs.
So from there, the designs are turned into CG models. The whole design, if all of that 100% doesn’t transfer all the way, there’s something in there that remains to the final screening.
[Brief interlude about Ghost in the Shell, Street Fighter, and collectible film advertisement cells]
Justin Leach: Yeah, Ghost in the Shell was a very important and influential movie for me…I mean, for me personally, that’s what I would like to try, the bar I am aiming for. Those type of movies that had such a big cultural impact on the world: Ghost in the Shell, and Akira.
I feel like I haven’t felt this way in a while, but looking at Orange’s work I’m starting to feel like we’re starting to hit the bar again and I’m like, Yes!
Scott Westerfeld: When I was living in New York in the late 80s, early 90s, there was a bar called Max Fish on Ludlow Street that just showed Akira for like a month. [All laughs] With the sound down and music going, it was just on the TV screen as kind of a background. And I was like, what the hell is this? Like, what is happening?
It was just, you know, the scenes where the tentacles are just exploding and exploding more and more and more. I’ve never seen anything, any visual idea taken to that extreme. So that was kind of my first experience with that.
Q: And now anime is very accessible over here and there are multiple theatrical releases that are wide releases each month. Sometimes many at the same time. And it’s quite amazing to see how anime has become so popular globally. And like in the case of Leviathan and many other anime productions right now, it’s such a cross-cultural collaboration. You have animators and artists from all over the world, and many different countries, contributing to various productions.
Justin Leach: I think when I was working in Japan, there were almost no foreigners anywhere. That was very rare. Now it’s very common to see some foreigners working. There’s a lot of foreigners now that want to go to Japan. They want to learn the Japanese way, and they want to live in Japan because they love it so much, and it means so much to them. So it makes me happy to see that.
It’s interesting, yeah, it’s really changed. What the younger generation wants to make now is very influenced by, pretty much just anime right now. So it’s been interesting to see that change from the Disney World, to the Pixar world, and then see anime be so popular right now.
I feel like we’re kind of in the big change, the big change recently. It’s had impacts. In America, it’s interesting, there’s a big contrast. It’s been challenging for American animation production, but the opposite is true for Japan. All the studios are booked for like three or four years in advance, and there’s not enough animators. It’s totally different.
But I feel very lucky to be working in anime.
And with that, we wrap up our interview with the Leviathan author and its anime production studios at Anime NYC 2024. But, tell me your thoughts.
Will you be watching the Leviathan anime adaptation when it premieres on Netflix July 10th, 2025? Are you familiar with the novels previously written by Scott Westerfeld?
Leave your thoughts in the comment section below. We’d love to hear from you! Also be sure to follow us for more Anime Interviews!
☆ In Asian Spaces ☆ Ephesians 6:12 ☆
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