He was condemned to be a hero In my opinion, he was underrated enough to be considered a hidden gem of his season. Although it ended up ranking relatively high in many polls of most anticipated and beloved anime, it wasn’t high enough to be talked about *constantly* among other anime released in its season. It was very much worth it. Opening with an action-packed, multimedia-resolution, feature-length episode, the series immediately presented its résumé of animation, art, and action. The premise of the story is also interesting; A lot of expectations about what a certain class of characters might mean are upended, and there’s a lot of world-building to digest when those intentional contradictions are revealed to the audience.
At this year’s Anime Expo, we had the opportunity to sit down with some of those working on the series, including those who play some important and interesting roles. This includes He was condemned to be a hero The cast includes Yoshiki Nakakoji, who served as director and provided creature design, Yasutaka Kimura, Studio Kai’s chief animation director, and Takeru Noda, Studio Kai’s character designer.
Portions of this interview have been lightly edited for clarity. This interview was conducted with the assistance of a translator.
Q: The first episode of the series is amazing, starting out in media fidelity and quickly introducing the possibilities of animation and giving the audience an immediate glimpse into the design and characters. Why was the first episode structured this way and what was it like working on it?
Nakakoji-san: Director Takashima (Hiroyuki Takashima) really wanted to focus on how to immerse audiences from the first episode, and because we had a full hour to play with, we had a little more leeway for how we wanted to structure the episode to get what we wanted.
Q: For the audience, the first episode ends with the revelation that things are not 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 unique element to it.
Noda-san: Within the dark fantasy theme and the theme of the heroes being criminals, I thought it would be a great concept to play with and develop. For example, like Suicide squad. It’s like a group of criminals coming together and achieving something like a bigger goal.
Q: Some employees have described Doomed to Be a Hero as “experimental.” What methods did you have the opportunity to experiment while working on this anime?
Nakakoji-san: From an animation perspective, we wanted to focus on not using too much shading, which is unusual in animation and actually difficult to do. It takes a lot of people to achieve this, and the colors are also particularly difficult to control. Also, we use one song throughout each episode, which is inserted into the episode. Usually it’s at the beginning and then the end, but this time we’ve planned one song inside each episode, which is also a demo. We also paid a lot of attention to the use of colours, and we were thinking about how we wanted to color them based on each scene, so we had a lot to move around and deal with in that department as well, which is experimental.
Q: Nakakoji-san, you were originally brought onto the project specifically to design the creatures before you also became a director. How was this transition for you? Does your work in creature design influence the way you approach work as a director?
Nakakoji-san: During pre-production, it is usually only the director and producer who review the script together. But for this particular project, we did it with the entire staff, so I was involved from the beginning in terms of how the script went and the pre-meetings. Eventually the manager will ask for specific advice or support. This became the pillar and the director asked me to join as an assistant director.
Q: Noda-san, what was the process you went through to design the character? To what extent were you able to deviate directly from the illustrations from the novels and where did you veer?
Noda-san: From an illustrator’s point of view, I paid close attention to the original works and the character silhouettes in particular. And we paid a lot of attention to the clothes and the armor and the characters and the amount of lines that all of those things had because they had a lot of lines. We wanted to make sure it would be transferred seamlessly to the animation team to make sure they could easily recreate it correctly, but also simplify it so they wouldn’t have to draw as many lines that were originally prevalent in the original works.
Q: What types of challenges, if any, did you face while adapting the series into an anime?
Nakakoji-san: To design something that doesn’t already exist in this world – to express visually or think about a design from zero to one, I think that was very difficult.
Kimura-san: We had to study a lot about the genre of fantasy in general and what actually exists. Especially currency or language – or animals in particular.
Nakakoji-san: I know a lot about animals now, because I had to research it to be able to create the world environment correctly.
We would like to thank Yoshiki Nakakoji, Yasutaka Kimura, and Takeru Noda for taking the time to speak with us and to Crunchyroll for coordinating the interview. You can watch He was condemned to be a hero on Crunchyroll. Season 2 has been confirmed and you can watch the official trailer below.
©2024 Rocket Shokai/KADOKAWA/Project He is doomed to be a hero