Creating Chibi Maruko-chan

In 1990, the manga was adapted into an anime by Nippon Animation, the studio known for the "Sekai Meisaku Gekijō"[World Masterpiece Theater] series.

It has become a nationally popular anime that is still being broadcast today, celebrating the 30th and 35th anniversaries of its broadcast and original works in 2020 and 2021 each.

Director Jun Takagi of Nippon Animation has directed the "Chibi Maruko-Chan" anime for 15 years, as well as "Momoko Sakura’s Theater Coji-Coji" (1997–99), another anime by Momoko Sakura.

He explains the charm of the "Chibi Maruko-Chan" series, whose fan base has continued to expand beyond Japan and around the world, as well as what it was like to produce the anime alongside its original creator Momoko Sakura, who passed away in 2018.

After that, I read the manga for the first time and was surprised at how different it was from other manga.

It’s an essay manga, as well as a shōjo manga, and it’s executed with a humorous touch. I had never encountered anything quite like it and I thought it was really interesting.

"Coji-Coji" and "Chibi Maruko-Chan"
The first time I talked with Momoko Sakura herself was when I was directing "Coji-Coji" (1997–99). I think those experiences of working on "Coji-Coji" really helped me to direct "Chibi Maruko-Chan" later on.

Of course, the two series differ from each other in style, but both have Sakura’s subtle “dark humor”—although it is more pronounced in "Coji-Coji" than in "Chibi Maruko-Chan"—that makes her work so appealing.

Going through the process of understanding the essence of that dark humor and injecting it into the anime helped me to deepen my understanding of Sakura’s worldview.

Momoko Sakura (original artist) and the "Chibi Maruko-Chan" anime
Momoko Sakura began writing scenarios for the anime herself sometime in the middle of the first season. I suppose she became more interested in animation while watching the show.

During the second season, which started in 1995, there was a period of time when she was writing original scenarios for the anime nearly every week.

On top of that, because all of the events in the anime take place during a one-year period between 1974 and 1975, we try as much as possible not to contradict any of the previous content covered in the anime, such as by having Maruko do something else on a day already covered in a past episode.

This is more difficult than it sounds, and to tell the truth, we have not been perfect at it. It’s like drawing a spiral little by little, while doing our best to keep the spiral as small as we possibly can.

The importance of real-to-life drama
While the worldview of "Chibi Maruko-Chan" is very real, the characters, on the other hand, are quite deformed. This makes it difficult to use them to portray a real-to-life drama.

This realness, however, is the aspect I most want to emphasize when creating the anime. It’s something I try to maintain in all the works I direct, not only in "Chibi Maruko-Chan".

In fact, the reason I wanted to work at this company, Nippon Animation, is because the "Sekai Meisaku Gekijō" series was a work that depicted people by illustrating their everyday lives.

Adapting the work of manga into an anime
When translating "Chibi Maruko-Chan" for the world of animation, we can’t spoil any of the interesting aspects of the original work, and at the same time, we need to add another unique and interesting dimension to it. If Maruko has a particular kind of cuteness in the original manga, I think that cuteness must also be expressed in the animation as much as possible.

This may come off as a cliché, but as the person responsible for creating the animation, what’s important is whether we are providing our customers with a “proper” adaptation. As for myself, I believe that taking responsibility for the “proper”-ness of the adaptation means “cherishing the original work.”

Creating anime in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic
During the current COVID-19 pandemic, we have been working from home whenever possible as a method of handling the situation. This is something we were able to do because it’s a digital creation. I don’t even want to think about how things would have turned out in the age of traditional cel animation… As for aspects of production that need to be handled on site, such as recording the audio and sound effects, we divide up the work and have staff come in on a staggered schedule.

Today we worked on re-recording the dialogue. Whereas before the entire crew would get together to record everything at once, now we record with three people at most, sometimes even just a single person at a time, repeating the process over and over, and have the sound team mix and finish the recordings. We’ve been doing our best to keep up with our regular broadcast schedule .