June 6th, 2024 
Jackson Murphy 
Animated action dramedy feature Ultraman: Rising is going to be one of the biggest at-home hits of the summer. You can watch it starting next Friday June 14th on Netflix. Emmy-winning director Shannon Tindle (of Lost Ollie and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends) and Emmy & Annie-nominated co-director John Aoshima (of DuckTales and Gravity Falls) suit up to tell me about their influences for this epic film. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: Netflix was kind enough to provide members of the press with a letter that you wrote about your personal connection to the Ultraman character. And as I watched the first few minutes of “Ultraman: Rising”, I felt that personal connection and that theme of family right away. You do a really good job.
Shannon Tindle: Thank you. Thanks so much. Appreciate that.
JM: How does it feel getting the opportunity to make this animated movie, to have it out there and for families to have this as repeat viewing this summer?
ST: It feels great. I’ve been trying to get it made for, no exaggeration, 23 years. (laughs) That may sound insane but they say to be in this business, you have to be stubborn, and I’m definitely stubborn. Anybody who’s worked with me will tell you that. But to finally see it and to be able to work with this team and see how the team elevated it every step from our art department, our production team music, the folks at ILM, our sound team at Skywalker with Randy Thom… to have all those people involved, it was worth that journey. And one of my favorite experiences is sitting in an audience and just watching them watch it because then it becomes new for me again. And I love seeing people’s reactions.
JM: John, There’s such a great theme of heroes and kids looking up to heroes. They can be superheroes. They can be athletes. They can be parents. And you get to explore all three of those with this movie. What interested you the most about that dive into this aspect?
John Aoshima: The theme of heroism… and I think Ultraman as a hero kind of helps encompass all of that because Ultraman is an aspiring hero, and it’s a hero that’s like trying to find balance. The world isn’t so black and white. There’s a lot of gray and obstacles. So it’s about being aware of what you’re confronted with and pursuing a peaceful solution. He’s also a hero that is not immortal. There’s a lot of high stakes when he confronts these conflicts. A hero that aspires and learns kind of inspires you as a person to meet that challenge, to rise up to that occasion. So I think you can apply that to any discipline, any medium to find who you are and challenge yourself.
John Aoshima and Shannon Tindle (left) and Jackson Murphy (right)
JM: This is an inspiring movie. Ken is a baseball star trying to do what his father has been doing for a long time, which is being Ultraman. Shannon, this film has a baseball foundation. A lot of sports fans and a lot of sports movie fans love when you get the authentic details right — and the feel and the flavor of it. I think you do an excellent job with that. This, kind of, is a sports movie.
ST: I grew up in Kentucky. We’re big college basketball fans. I love baseball. I’ve gone to the games and I’ve been going to Dodgers games for years. We got to go see the Yomiuri Giants play in Japan. Our editor, Brett Marnell is our obsessive baseball fan. Anytime anything was a little bit off, we were like, “Let’s check the rules. Let’s make sure that we can get away with that.” There’s that shot where Ken crosses the plate. That’s actually legal. You can actually do that. But just making sure that we got those things right. John was the same way too. If the outfielders weren’t in the right position…
JA: Yeah, I grew up playing Little League, so I can tell when characters are in the wrong position, or they’re wearing the wrong jersey sometimes. And so I’ll spot those out and do the best I can. But we had a great crew. And even our head of animation, Tony Facilli, an amazing animator… loves baseball. And I think he would have pursued baseball professionally if it wasn’t for his love for animation. When he had the opportunity to animate and lead the team with his knowledge of baseball, he really went in there.
JM: You’ve got the baseball portion of the movie, and you’ve also got this fatherly portion. And John, as Ken is raising the baby girl Kaiju… there’s a lot of heartwarming moments. There’s a lot of funny moments. There are going to be a lot of relatable elements for parents and families. What kinds of personal experiences and personal connections did you want to put into the comedy and the emotion of Ken raising the baby kaiju?
JA: Ken didn’t want to be a parent. He was just dropped into that situation. Well, I’m not a father myself. But I do have experience changing diapers for my younger sisters and helping out my mom because I was raised in a single parent household and with four kids. I had two young sisters. We’re about nine, ten years apart. And my brother and I took turns babysitting them, changing their diapers in the morning and to support my working mom. So I have my own experience of not knowing what to do. I shared some of those stories and we listened to the crew’s stories and even Shannon’s personal stories. It all got brought in to help inspire those situations in the film.
JM: Shannon, this is what I kept thinking pretty much the whole time while watching this movie: “This feels like a live action movie.” Is that what you were going for — that live-action movie feel in animation?
ST: I study film and I went to film school. Even though it’s the character animation department at Cal Arts, it’s a film school. And even though the film is stylized in look, I wanted the camera to feel grounded. So working with our [head of previs], John Bermudes, and then working with Hayden [Jones] and the folks at ILM… That’s their comfort zone — doing these beautiful live action films and recreating those shots. So I put limitations on the same kind of limitations that you would have in live-action. So let’s pick our lens kit and let’s have it be real lenses. And they’re going to be Toho scope lenses as inspired by the classic Toho scope films. Let’s look at the blocking of Alfred Hitchcock. Let’s look at the blocking in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. We studied “Pacific Rim”. Guillermo del Toro actually helped us out on the film. He started watching versions of the film as early as screening three. He’s a big Ultraman fan. He was very practical in his use of camera on “Pacific Rim”. But I think we certainly did things that you cannot do in live-action in the way we stylize characters… in the way that we added the line, the rendering, the shadow… cheating, the lighting, using colors that you don’t see in nature. So, merging those two things together, I think, hopefully pulls you in and makes you connect to it and makes you care about the characters in a way that you might not if you went a little bit wilder with the camera.
JM: Oh, yeah. You pull us in for sure to this experience, and it’s an intimate experience in parts of the film and it’s a wild experience with the scope of it. The action sequences and also moments where you have a giant Ultraman and much smaller human characters and other characters around. John, there’s a lot you do with that that’s really cool.
JA: It gave us a lot of opportunity to convey scale differences and work with that 2:35:1 aspect ratio to come up with those shots. And we looked at a lot of those tokusatsu and kaiju films to help us compose those sequences. But in the end it was a lot about character and having the beautiful script that Mark Haimes and Shannon wrote and having two adults talking and discussing the challenges of parenthood or getting advice or just having the drama moments and giving us story people the opportunity to compose shots was an awesome experience.
ST: And those are the scenes we had to fight hardest for.
JM: This is, I think, one of the longer animated movies to come out recently. It’s about 1:50, plus credits. But one of my favorite animated movies of all time, “Cars”, is close to two hours. The latest “Spider-Verse” was 2:20. And the pacing, to me, as I watched this feels good and it feels right. So I’m glad you fought for all of that.
ST: Pacing is a big one, right? And there are more and more. “The Incredibles” films are two hours long. You’re seeing it a lot more than you used to. If you pace it carefully and you make sure that you have the essential scenes in there, then it seems necessary.
JM: This is a movie about memories. What’s the biggest memory you will take away from working on “Ultraman: Rising”?
ST: One of the many is actually being able to meet our crew for the first time after the pandemic. We did the first few screenings not having met each other. John and I knew each other for a long time… but to see [a lot of people] in person was a really emotional experience.
JA: For me, it’s the entire experience. Just being in the trenches with the crew, whether it’s over Zoom or whether it’s in person. I’m really proud of the final movie, but I cherish all the calls that we had, all the growth and the stepping stones. We’re all so close as friends and family now. And so I’ll cherish this production experience.
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