Yu Suzuki has mentioned in past interviews that, in order to realize his vision for Shenmue, he needed help from people who didn’t even exist in the game industry yet:
“We didn’t have directors, or anyone used to motion capture, so I gathered people from all kinds of fields: movie staff, scriptwriters, even a novelist.”
One of those outside voices was animation director Kazuya Murata, who joined the Shenmue II team around 1999 and found himself navigating a development floor unlike anything in traditional animation.
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| Anime director Kazuya Murata |
In this 2019 interview, Murata shares what that transition was like and how he adapted to a creative process very different from the one he was used to. His recollections about working with Yu Suzuki and the team shed light on a moment when anime and game production intersected, bringing both new opportunities and practical hurdles.
This interview was released as part of an ongoing series that featured on the official company website of the major Japanese animation studio Toei Animation.
Note: this is a partial translation of the interview. Only the sections related to Shenmue have been translated; unrelated portions have been omitted.
Background of the Interview Series
About Kazuya Murata
For this entry, we spoke with Kazuya Murata, who served as chief director on the TV anime KADO: The Right Answer, produced by Noguchi (the interviewer for this article and a member of Toei Animation). Murata’s path into the anime industry is an unusual one: he started out as a designer for a housing equipment manufacturer before becoming a trainee at Studio Ghibli. He later worked on CG direction as well, including directing movie scenes for Sega’s Shenmue II. His ability to adapt to CG is often credited to the strong, logical approach to visual composition he developed back in high school.
Interview: Working on Shenmue II
Called in to a Bogged-down Shenmue II Development
Q: Around this time, while you were working at OLM and looking to further build your career as a director, you became involved with the Dreamcast title Shenmue II (2000). How did that come about?
Murata: After finishing the OVA Gunsmith Cats (1995) at OLM, I joined director Naohito Takahashi’s team and worked on Berserk (1997), To Heart (1999), and Steel Angel Kurumi (1999). After that, there was a bit of a gap before the next project.
Around that time, through Shuichi Kakazu, president of an editing studio called J-Film, we were told that Sega was working on their second Shenmue game and was looking for someone who could handle visual direction. They asked whether OLM could send someone over. I personally wasn’t someone who played games at all, but the project sounded like what we’d now call an early open-world game, and I found that interesting. So I ended up being seconded to Sega.
Q: What was the cutscene development process like on Shenmue II?
Murata: I joined what was called the “authoring team,” which was essentially the directing team. Based on scripts handed down from the scenario team, we would go to the motion capture studio, direct the actors’ performances, record the motion data, and then assemble the movie scenes. Once a scene was finished, we’d show it to director Yu Suzuki, receive feedback, and make revisions.
When I joined, there were a lot of retakes coming back from Suzuki-san, and the development on site was pretty much stuck at that point.
Q: When you say there were a lot of retakes, was that because of technical limitations in CG at the time, or because the acting was hard to get right?
Murata: Suzuki-san is very much an inspiration-driven person. He often gave abstract directions like, “Make it a bit more powerful.” The authoring team would then interpret that, reassemble the cuts, or redo the motion capture, but no matter how long it went on, we wouldn’t get an OK from him. Eventually, everyone stopped knowing what to do.
That’s when it was decided that someone was needed to establish a clear directing approach, and that’s why an animation director was brought in.
Q: I’ve heard that Shenmue had an enormous development budget, and I feel like I understand one of the reasons why now.
Murata: Apparently, before me they had brought in people like live-action directors, but it didn’t work out. Live-action and games have very different workflows, so they ended up leaving. Knowing that background, I figured what was being asked of me was to find a balance between the director’s vision, the script, and what the game world itself required, while also producing something that felt clear and comfortable for the player to watch.
So the first thing I did was create storyboards as a rough foundation. I showed them to the actors as well, clearly indicating from which direction the camera was capturing each moment, and we moved forward from there.
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| An example of Shenmue II storyboard planning: "Encounter with Shenhua". Murata describes introducing storyboards like this to bring clarity to camera direction and motion capture. More Shenmue II storyboards can be viewed here. |
Q: Did things start to run more smoothly once you introduced storyboards?
Murata: Yes. There were still times when something didn’t pass, but compared to how things had been stalled before, we could clearly feel that approvals were coming through and the project was moving forward again. More than anything, motion capture became much more efficient, and the amount of time each operator needed to assemble scenes around the captured motion dropped dramatically.
Q: At the time, I imagine this was your first experience directing 3DCG. Did it feel very different from what you were used to?
Murata: When I was helping out on the theatrical Pokémon films, I did have some interaction with the CG team, but this was the first time I was involved with CG to this extent. When drawing storyboards for hand-drawn animation, you have to be careful when moving the camera so the background perspective doesn’t need to change. But Suzuki-san had been intentionally moving the camera very aggressively ever since Shenmue Chapter One (1999), to emphasize that it was 3DCG.
I actually pushed back against that. Even if something is CG, camera movement that isn’t driven by a clear directorial need just becomes visual noise for the viewer. That kind of approach had already been rejected in Hollywood by that point, so I felt it would be a step backward. That said, I understood what the director was aiming for. If every shot were completely fixed, the advantages of using 3DCG would be diminished. So we worked toward camera movement that felt natural and effective in 3D, without being overbearing.
Q: Were there any directing challenges that were unique to Shenmue?
Murata: One of Shenmue’s defining features is that even though we called them "movie" cutscenes, they weren’t pre-rendered. They’re actually real-time rendered parts of the game itself. The game world has its own internal clock, and time continues to pass regardless of what the player is doing. That means the same event might take place during the day or at night depending on the player’s actions.
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| Meeting Joy cutscene (day) |
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| Meeting Joy cutscene (night) |
On top of that, one of the selling points was that NPCs moved around freely on their own 24 hours a day, so the people in the background of a scene would constantly change as well. Our job, then, was to design combinations of acting and camera work, deciding what to frame and how much to show, so that the scene would still look good no matter when it was triggered. Since we couldn’t know the lighting conditions in advance, we couldn’t prepare fixed lighting effects, and that added another layer of difficulty.
Q: It’s often said that differences in terminology and workplace culture between the anime industry and the game industry can lead to communication problems. How did you deal with that?
Murata: As far as 3DCG was concerned, that wasn’t much of an issue for me. Back when I worked at Matsushita Electric Works, I was already using 3D software for design work, so I understood how three-dimensional forms are constructed within a space. I didn’t feel much resistance there, and I generally knew how to communicate things to the CG staff.
On Shenmue II, our team received completed data from the character and background teams and then focused on directing it. Compared to anime directing, it felt more passive, like being one part of a larger production flow.
Q: I’ve heard that at the time, the CG industry had many technically skilled people but not many who could handle direction. Given that, it seems like your participation, with experience in both CG and directing, must have left a real impact.
Murata: One great thing about the Shenmue team was that more than a hundred people were all working on the same floor. There were teams for movie direction, character modeling, background art, scenario writing, game events, motion capture, and then about 30 programmers in the systems development department. They weren’t just programming the game itself, but also building and constantly updating the game engine tools used by each team, which really impressed me.
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| Part of the Shenmue project office floor (from the Making of Shenmue documentary) |
For example, if we said it was hard to adjust the camera, they’d create tools to make camera work easier. Another distinctive thing was that camera work itself was done using a game controller. From a gamer’s perspective, I suppose it makes sense - the controller you use every day ends up being the easiest way to move things.
Q: What's your take on motion capture?
Murata: I think it really depends on how you use it. One advantage of motion capture is that you’re recording a performer’s acting directly, which allows for subtle movements or irregular motions that animators might not think of on their own. Also, once you’ve recorded the performance, you can consider the acting itself essentially complete, which dramatically reduces the amount of time compared to fully hand-keyed animation.
On the other hand, motion capture depends heavily on the individuality of the actor. In live-action, that individuality is the value of the work. But with motion capture, one actor might perform multiple characters, or multiple actors might perform the same character, so you don’t get a one-to-one relationship between actor and role. In that sense, it’s actually closer to the relationship between a hand-drawn animator and a character.
Because of that, I think motion capture often needs a later adjustment process, similar to animation direction or animation director checks, where the captured motion is treated as a base and then refined.
There was one thing about Shenmue that really impressed me. Character movement in Shenmue was fundamentally built around motion capture, but at the time the capture precision wasn’t very high, so a lot of noise crept into the data. The motion team spent their days cleaning up that data and refining the movements.
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| Sega's motion capture studio (from the Making of Shenmue documentary) |
As a result, we started to see people who could create very realistic, live-action-style motion entirely by hand, even without any capture data. Sometimes it actually looked more lifelike than the motion capture we were used to seeing. When I asked, “What is this motion?” the answer was, “It’s all hand-keyed” (laughs).
Q: (laughs) That’s an incredible amount of learning just from input alone.
Murata: Exactly. For those people, hand-keyed motion didn’t come from an “anime-style” way of thinking. It was based on real, live-action movement. Someone with that kind of skill can create animation that looks like motion capture whenever they want (laughs). Of course, these were experienced, senior-level staff, but it really made me realize how people grow in that kind of production environment.
-- End of translated section --
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| Kazuya Murata |
Final Comment
"The industry didn't have directors, or people experienced at motion capture - it was a new concept. Games didn't have things like voiced lines or acting. So to implement it, I gathered people from various different industries: a movie person, a scriptwriter, a novelist and so on".However, this resulted in a communication problem, as the experts all used different industry-specific terminology and specialist language. "They couldn't understand what I was trying to say at all".
In order to make it easier to understand for everyone in the team, Yu wrote the story in the form of a novel with the classic four-part narrative structure of Introduction, Development, Twist and Conclusion. In addition, he expressed it musically, composing a four-movement symphony.
"I asked myself what would be a form that everyone would understood in common - and that was music and story."
This may be the first time we've heard from one of the directors who worked on the game's cutscenes, and it adds another piece of the jigsaw, fitting in nicely with past interview comments and art materials.
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