Posted on September 12, 2024

The Daicon Chronicles, Part 2

The opening animation for Daicon IV is as close to pure magic as anime can get. You only have to see it once, and it’s with you for all time.

The 5-minute Daicon III opening was cobbled together by a ragtag group of amateur animators. Two years later, they were still ragtag but they were no longer amateurs. From the first moment of the Daicon IV opening, it was instantly obvious that significant things had happened in the interim.

Let’s dial the clock back and investigate.

The original goal of the Daicon III organizers was simple: make a 5-minute handmade anime from scratch that would welcome SF fans to the convention which took place in Osaka, August 1981. The physical process of making it was not simple, but they got it done thanks to the leadership of Director Hiroyuki Yamaga, the creative power of Animator Hideaki Anno, and an army of art school volunteers. Their film quickly took on a life of its own and became a hot seller thanks to a new thing called “home videotape.”

In his autobiography The Notenki Memoirs (read it here), Producer Yasuhiro Takeda describes what followed.

When we sold copies of the Daicon III opening animation to cover our mounting debts, we ended up not only coming out of the red but also making a tidy profit to boot. We were now in a position to turn that profit into working capital for the films.

There were benefits of a different kind, as well: when members of Studio Nue saw the Daicon III short, they invited Yamaga and Anno to work on an anime TV series they were developing called Macross. And just like that, amateurs became pros.

In the year following Daicon III, Toshio Okada and the rest of his Osaka posse capitalized on their momentum in two ways: by founding their own sci-fi specialty store in Osaka called General Products and their own independent studio called Daicon Film.

Now that the General Products store was open for business, we used our customer base as a pool to scout new talent. If someone showed interest in what we were doing, or even if they just seemed to have a lot of time on their hands, they were immediately propositioned and added to the staff. General Products functioned both as a hangout for Daicon III veterans and as a place to find potential recruits.

In this way, the group created and completed an ambitious slate of live action and animated films throughout 1982 (mainly parodies and homages) while also planning Daicon IV, the next big Osaka SF convention, for August 1983. Meanwhile, other conventions were raising the stakes. Two of them, Uracon and Azicon, picked up the gauntlet thrown down by Daicon III to created their own opening anime (now abbreviated as OPAs; click on the names to see the results). On top of that, there was still the internal struggle against the SF “gatekeeper generation.”

Today manga, anime and tokusatsu films can generally be included in the category of sci-fi, but back then anything that wasn’t a novel wasn’t seen as “true” sci-fi, and was generally looked down upon. Even now, 20 years later, there are still people who cling to this outdated definition of sci-fi. What we wanted to do was introduce those pariah formats into the mainstream, and judging by the current state of affairs in the sci-fi world, it looks like popular opinion has won out in our favor. But it was a lot of work getting there. We took plenty of heat for our ideas, for reasons that would be unthinkable from today’s perspective.

It was a given, then, that what worked before would have to be topped.

Since the opening animation for Daicon III had generated such an enthusiastic response, we simply had to do another one for Daicon IV. The attendees would expect nothing less, and the staff was raring to go. Even Yamaga left his work on Macross to help us make it.

If the Daicon III anime had been “handcrafted,” then Daicon IV’s was an industrial production. We rented our own dedicated production studio in Morinomiya, right near Osaka Castle. The studio occupied an entire floor of an old building called the Hosei Kaikan, which means “Sewing House” in Japanese (it was managed by a clothing manufacturer’s union). Nishigaki, the head of the executive committee for the Convention, secured it through one of his connections, and we packed the main staff in like sardines.

That’s not just a metaphor. The whole building would be locked down promptly at 9:00pm, and no one could get in or out until the next morning. Naturally, we weren’t working on the kind of schedule where we could just pick up and leave every night at 9:00, so the majority of the staff would end up getting locked inside. Imagine it — the middle of the summer, locked inside an old building, with the air conditioning shut off to save power! I’m not kidding when I say it was sweatshop⁠ conditions for the anime staff. They had to paint cels long into the hot nights, drowning in rivers of sweat. It was pretty much your nightmare production site.

As before, production on the anime wasn’t fully completed until the morning of the convention itself. We had originally planned to play it simultaneously in both halls, but with only one completed reel, we were forced to show it on a single screen and stagger the screening times.

With two halls — one seating 2500, the other 1500 — we had plenty of stage events planned. That meant we needed stage settings, and lots of them. We organized a carpentry team to build the backdrops, then stuck them inside a rented warehouse with all the materials and told them to get cracking. This warehouse didn’t have air conditioning either, but they worked at it day after day. The locals simply assumed that a bunch of college kids had gotten together and started up a sign-making business. People would come by and offer them compliments: “You kids are young, but you sure do work hard!” It was nice.

In addition to those two “sweatshops”, there were several other locations around town where various groups were continuing with other preparations for the Convention — so many in fact that I couldn’t keep track of them myself. Not that it was my job to do so or anything…

From the Hideaki Anno exhibition book, 2023:

General Products and Daicon Film

After Daicon III closed, its core staff opened the sci-fi specialty store General Products (GP) in Osaka based on a proposal from Toshio Okada. GP engaged in product planning and sales of character merchandise and limited-edition models known as “garage kits.” Many amateur illustrators and visual artists, including Anno and Takami Akai, were involved in product development. Meanwhile, GP maintained a relationship with the Japan Science-Fiction Convention, marked by an ongoing give-and-take of expertise and labor supply.

Around the same time preparations for Daicon IV were underway, and as part of its promotional activities, the independent film production group Daicon Film was launched, with Anno as a participant. Collaborating with GP, the group disbanded after producing eight works of anime, marionette drama, and hero action during four years, including Aikoku Sentai Dai-Nippon and Daicon Film’s Return of Ultraman.

GP subsequently moved to Tokyo and partnered with the animation production company Gainax in areas such as magazine editing and product planning. Business was robust for a time thanks to increasing sales of computer software, but GP experienced creative stagnation in planning products licensed from other companies, and its activities ended when it was integrated into Gainax. Since then, Gainax has concentrated on the production of in-house projects.