Sentenced to Be a Hero is, in my opinion, underrated enough to be considered a hidden gem of its season. While it ended up making it relatively high in multiple polls about anticipated and liked anime, it was never quite high enough to be *consistently* talked about amongst the other anime released in its season. It very much deserved to be. Opening with an action packed, in medias res, extended length episode, the series immediately presented its animation, art, and action resume. The premise of the story is interesting too; a lot of expectations of what a certain class of character might mean are flipped, and there’s plenty of worldbuilding to digest as those intentional contradictions are revealed to the audience.
At this year’s Anime Expo, we had the chance to sit down with some staff from the series, including those in some pretty critical and interesting roles. This included Sentenced to Be a Hero staff Yoshiki Nakakoji, who served as director and provided creature design, Yasutaka Kimura, chief animation director from Studio Kai, and Takeru Noda, a character designer from Studio Kai.
Portions of this interview have been lightly edited for clarity. This interview was conducted with the assistance of an interpreter.
Q: Episode 1 of the series is incredible, starting in media res and quickly showcasing the capabilities of the animation and giving the audience an immediate burst of the design and characters. What was behind structuring the first episode in that way and what was it like working on it?
Nakakoji-san: Director Takashima [Hiroyuki Takashima] really wanted to put emphasis on how we can immerse audiences from the very first episode, and because we had an entire hour to play around with, we had a little bit more leeway into how we wanted to structure the episode to get what we wanted.
Q: For the audience, that first episode ends with the revelation that things aren’t as one would expect in this series. Heroes are prisoners and goddesses are weapons. When you personally learned about this aspect of the series, what was your reaction?
Kimura-san: The story itself is a dark fantasy theme, but they wanted to add a different twist and a unique element to it.
Noda-san: Within the dark fantasy theme and the theme being that heroes are criminals, I anticipated that it would be a great concept to play around with and develop. For example, like Suicide Squad. It’s kind of like a bunch of criminals coming together and accomplishing something like a greater goal.
Q: Sentenced to Be a Hero has been described by some staff as being “experimental.” In what ways did you have the opportunity to experiment while working on this anime?
Nakakoji-san: From an animation perspective, we wanted to put emphasis on not using a lot of shadowing, which in anime is not usual and is actually really hard to implement. It takes a lot of people to make this happen and also the control of the colors especially are quite difficult to manage as well. Also, we’re using one theme song throughout each episode, just plotted into the episode. Usually it’s at the beginning and then end, but this time we plotted that one theme song within each episode, which is also experimental. We also paid a lot of attention to the use of color, and we would think of how we would want to color it based on each scene, so we had a lot to convey and handle in that department as well, which is experimental.
Q: Nakakoji-san, you were originally brought onto the project specifically for creature design before eventually becoming a director as well. What was that transition like for you? Does your work on creature design affect the way you approach work as a director?
Nakakoji-san: During pre-production, usually it’s just the director and producer that go over the screenplay together. But for this particular project, we did it with all staff on board, so I was involved from the very beginning regarding how the scenario would go and the pre-meetings. Eventually the director would ask for certain advice or certain support. And I became that pillar and the director asked me to come on board as the assistant director.
Q: Noda-san, what was your process for the character design? How much were you able to go directly off of the illustrations from the novels and where did you make deviations?
Noda-san: From an illustrator’s perspective, I paid close attention to the original works and the character silhouettes in particular. And we paid a lot of attention to the clothes, the armor, the characters, and the amount of lines all of that had because it had a lot of lines. We wanted to make sure that it would transfer smoothly to the animation team to make sure that they could easily recreate it properly, but also simplify it so they wouldn’t have to draw as many lines that were originally prevalent in the original works.
Q: What kinds of challenges, if any, did you encounter while adapting the series into anime?
Nakakoji-san: To design something that doesn’t already exist in this world — to visually express or think of a design from zero to one, I think, was very difficult.
Kimura-san: We had to study a lot about the fantasy genre in general and what exists already. Especially currency or language — or especially animals.
Nakakoji-san: I know so much about animals now, because I really had to look into it to create the world setting properly.
We’d like to thank Yoshiki Nakakoji, Yasutaka Kimura, and Takeru Noda for taking the time to speak with us and thank Crunchyroll for coordinating the interview. You can watch Sentenced to be a Hero on Crunchyroll. Season 2 is confirmed and you can watch the official trailer below.
©2024 Rocket Shokai/KADOKAWA/Project Sentenced to Be a Hero
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