Adapting the web manga series written by One, Mob Psycho 100 is a psychic shonen anime featuring an entertaining cast of characters, One’s unique art style, and endlessly creative applications of psychic abilities. The story follows Shigeo Kageyama, nicknamed Mob, a young boy who suppresses both his latent psychic powers and his emotions, struggling to connect with those around him and generally having an awkward, though authentic, presentation. Mob works with self-proclaimed medium Arataka Reigen, a con artist who has no psychic powers of his own. These are two of many characters, all of which end up being pretty entertaining, especially those with psychic powers who manage to bring Mob’s internal emotional meter up to 100%, after which he unleashes his true power.
At this year’s Anime Expo, we had the pleasure of speaking with some of the people who make this anime possible. This included Yuzuru Tachikawa, director of Mob Psycho 100, Setsuo Ito, the Japanese Voice of Mob, and Takahiro Sakurai, the Japanese Voice of Reigen.
Portions of this interview have been lightly edited for clarity. This interview was conducted with the assistance of an interpreter.
Q: Main characters from creator ONE are often depicted in a sort of plain style. When directing / voicing in the anime, how did you balance maintaining that plain element while also creating opportunities for Mob to shine?
Tachikawa-san: When I read the original manga, I couldn’t even really visualize movement — because of course there is no movement in the manga. However, since Mob and Reigen are the two protagonists, I wanted to make it symmetrical. However, at the same time, Reigen, he’s a con artist. It’s a little bit more dynamic. And then at the beginning, Mob is just your run of the mill middle school student. And so he was going to be a little bit more static. So in that sense, Reigen ended up being a little bit more dynamic and Mob a little bit more static.
Ito-san: For us voice actors, we’re given a script and we’re given some images to work off of, and we have to go off those. And of course if there’s action or if there’s motion then maybe there’s a little bit more going on in the voice. If not, there’s a little bit less. For Mob, I think his level of nervousness or his level of tension was something that I had to take into account as well to reflect that on the voicing that I did. And I think that we did a pretty good job of that. Mob, however — he actually doesn’t speak that much. And so there were actually more cases of where I experimented with or added things or I said things that I was told weren’t necessary at all.
Sakurai-san: This is continuing along with what the director was saying, but I wanted to make sure that I created contrast with the simplicity of mob. And then, my character is a con artist. So I wanted to maybe be a little bit more excessive and have some excesses in the way that I did the voicing, but without getting to the point that it was annoying. I still wanted the character be an attractive and fascinating character. So that was what I focused on.
Q: Tachikawa-san, what was the process you took for capturing the exact right atmosphere from the original source material? How did you iterate and end up where the anime did?
Tachikawa-san: At the very beginning when I when I read the manga, I noticed that the the graphic style was very special. It was very unique. And we were faced with whether we were going to try to make the anime like that or whether we were going to try to imitate what was being done in other popular anime around that time. So we did some experimentation, some searching about what we were going to do and where we were going to fall on that, between those two extremes. And actually, at the very beginning, we started with drawing Mob as a pretty boy, kind of a really cool looking guy. And I still cannot forget how uncomfortable it was and how weird it was to have a Mob that was like that. So we ended up just saying, “Okay, look, we’re going to make him exactly the way he is. His character — not pretty it up or anything and make it as close to [the original] as possible.” And we do the same thing with the visual style. We did some consultation with a character designer, and we ended up trying to get as close as we possibly could to the original graphic style of the manga. And we also know that made it so that it was interesting. It was more enjoyable for us to find a design where we could do that as well.
Q: Ito-san, Mob suppresses his emotions, with his explosions of emotion being tied to a specific emotion. In moments where you are tasked with displaying 100% of an emotion, what is your approach?
Ito-san: Honestly, I would try it — it was a process of me trying it and just trying what I thought was going to work and seeing what people told me. I would try something out. I would experiment a little bit and then I would maybe go and get some direction from the director who would say “Why don’t you do this? Why do you do that?” So there’s some feedback there. And in that process I was just looking at, okay, what are they going to accept? What are they going to tell me? No, don’t do this. Yes, do that. Don’t do that. It was a process of discovering that and learning. There was a lot of learning.
Tachikawa-san: Well, I mean, for example, when you had to represent 100% anger and put that into your voicing, did you remember something that you were mad about at home or something like that?
Ito-san: No, I actually didn’t link it to my home life or to my personal life very much. I really didn’t draw a lot on my own experience. But what I did draw a lot on was anime that I had seen and other performances and theater, for example, that I had seen. So I was inspired a lot by those things, just not by my own personal experience.
We’d like to thank Yuzuru Tachikawa, Setsuo Ito, and Takahiro Sakurai for taking the time to speak with us about Mob Psycho 100 and Crunchyroll for coordinating the interview. You can check out the Mob Psycho 100 anime on Crunchyroll.
© ONE,Shogakukan/MobPsycho100 Project 2016
Participate In Discussions