'Oni: Thunder God's Tale' Creators on Bringing an 'Authentic Voice' to Show

When creating ONI: Thunder God's Tale, Tonko House co-founder Daisuke "Dice" Tsutsumi was keen to bring an "authentic voice" to the mini-series, which follows young girl Onari (Momona Tamada) as she tries to become a great warrior capable of defeating the ominous Oni.

The show, which landed on Netflix on October 21, takes Japanese folklore and mythology and adapts them to bring Onari's story to life, surrounding her with legendary creatures like Tengu, Kappa and Raijin (the titular Thunder God).

It was important for Tsutsumi to ensure the story was told as authentically as possible and to not approach it from a Hollywood perspective, and he spoke to Newsweek alongside studio co-founder Robert Kondo and executive producer Sara K. Sampson about why this was the case.

'Oni: Thunder God's Tale' Creators on Bringing an 'Authentic Voice' to Show

"I'm a Japanese native who has worked in this industry for a couple of decades, I was born and raised in Japan and growing up and working in the business as a sort of a foreign filmmaker, or the Japanese filmmaker [in America], I always had this dream of making [a] culturally specific Japanese-themed story someday," Tsutsumi told Newsweek.

"We don't see it as much as I thought we should, but especially through the Japanese authentic voice not from the Hollywood point-of-view, but more through the point-of-view of someone who actually has grown up in that culture, and when this opportunity came I was really excited that Netflix was interested in that sort of authentically told story [of] Japanese culture, which I'm very, very grateful for."

Tsutsumi and Kondo founded Tonko House in 2014, two years after making their first independent animated short film together as a way to expand their experience as filmmakers while working in Pixar's art department.

Making ONI: Thunder God's Tale was very different to their time at Pixar, Kondo shared, namely because of the scope and scale that the juggernaut animation studio is capable of, but even so there were also many similarities.

"To simply put it there are certain fundamental things that are very similar and then there are other things that are totally different," Kondo reflected. "Some of the things that are really similar, when we left the studio we sort of took the pages out of their book, stole a few pages, and I think some of those things [include] the focus on character.

"But also how our creators aligned with those characters, in other words really dig deep internally to find why, uniquely, is this a story that Dice can tell, that Sara can tell? And a lot of time is spent there, in sort of alignment between the crew, the cast, and the project, and ultimately in animation, especially TV animation, every single part of what you see onscreen is crafted. And because of that it gives you an incredible opportunity to create empathy through environments, through lighting, through pieces that we ended up making. So that's very similar."

On the Animation Process

The animation studio likes to "find a simplicity" with their characters during the creative process, Tsutsumi said, but a lot of hard work and thought went into making characters like Onari, her father Naridon (Craig Robinson) or her teacher Mr. Tengu (George Takei).

Tonko House started working on the series remotely during the COVID pandemic in August 2020, and though their animation may appear to be stop-motion in actual fact the production is "100 percent CG," Sampson shared.

"Whenever someone mistakes it for a stop motion we take that as the highest compliment," Sampson said.

"We are absolutely inspired by stop-motion and that was really how this film started, Dice wanted to tell this story in that medium and then once we started to dig in and really expand the story of ONI we realised that we needed something to really support this epic saga, so we decided to switch to CG."

Describing the animation process, she went on: "It's a pretty typical CG animation pipeline, we started with design led by Robert and our art director, Rachel Tiep-Daniels, and then we were just building out a big bible of designs to guide all of our artists. Then, of course, we move into CG modeling and then we have animation, and I will say our animation is a little different [because] we decided to do 12 frames per second, typically you use 24 frames per second, inspired by our stop-motion roots.

"At the same time it was great for production because we were able to move through animation a lot faster because our animators are doing roughly four to three seconds a day. And typically, at larger studios, it's four seconds a week so we had a lot of quota to get through in time. But as you can see, we tried to inject ONI with that stop-motion, tactile style wherever we could."

Kondo added: "I would say that originally when Dice and Sara were talking about this project we sort of played in the world of stop-motion, so our very early visual tests were actually in stop-motion. We worked with a studio in Japan called Dwarf, the most incredible stop-motion studio, and so we actually built puppets and built out this little sequence in stop-motion.

"The scope of the story grew from there, and it grew into a place where it started to become clear to us that CG was probably the best medium to capture that epic scope with the resources we had available to us.

"But, the stop-motion test we did always was the high bar for what we wanted to achieve visually and, so, that's where it came from, that sort of initial concept for stop motion, was because that's where the project started."

Working With Anime Icon Mari Okada

Mari Okada, the creative mind behind anime classics like Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day and Maquia: When The Promised Flower Blooms, helped to write ONI: Thunder God's Tale, something Tsutsumi admitted he didn't think would ever happen.

"We were huge fans of Mari Okada before we met her, and the type of stories that Tonko House has always pursued is to dig into the light and darkness within characters, within a person, their humanity. It's never black-and-white, good guys or bad guys, we always dig inside each character and we always were drawn to Mari's work because she always wrote characters that way," Tsutsumi said.

"And we felt it would be a really good match, and I never thought she would be available or I never thought she would even want to do it because at the time she was already starting to direct her second feature film, and who writes for another film while you're working on your own feature film?

"But, to our surprise, Mari found herself in the story of Onari and she felt she had to write it and when we pitched the idea she was immediately like, 'I want to do it. This is the story I want to tell, I want to be a part of it,' and the rest is history.

"She has been such a huge, huge part of the story of ONI, not just the scriptwriting but also we folded her into the process of everything because we just felt like she had just as much of her DNA in this story as anybody else on this production."

The Possibility of a Sequel

Reflecting on the series and how Onari's world comes face to face with the real world, Tsutsumi said they were keen to look beyond the surface of the tales in Japanese folklore.

"From the beginning, the concept of ONI, the way we sort of started this whole concept of the story, was that in Japanese folklore the Oni is always the villain character," he said. "And there was this interesting historical theory that I read years ago that Oni might have been the description of foreigners who lived in Japan a long time ago.

"They look different, they were bigger, their skin looked different then 'they must be bad, they are monsters,' that kind of mentality I felt was so current, humanity hasn't necessarily progressed our thinking, that we always are scared of things we don't know, people we're not familiar with, or cultures that we don't understand.

"So it was kind of important for us to start with the folklore and then connect it back to the current world we live in, so that was the concept of how that brings the story into something that the audience can relate to as an everyday thing."

Sampson said that she hoped viewers would feel "empowered" when they watch ONI, and feel "courage not to conform to column A or column B but really be inspired to look beyond that fear, like Dice says, nothing is black and white."

She added that she hoped viewers would feel compelled to "go on that journey to carve your own path because we're all trying to figure out how we fit in this world, so I hope it's a positive, lasting feeling."

While the series has only four episodes and a complete story, Tsutsumi admitted that Tonko House would be interested in returning to the world again: "Even though there are a lot of story concepts that didn't make it into this particular version we have a lot of ideas.

"Robert and I always talked about [it], when we are telling a story or designing we design or think about the stories that are not in the frame, that feel like it's an extension of the world that people want to see more and more [of].

"So, we always think about the world and characters that are not in the final story, so it is natural for us to see, and if there is any opportunity in the future we would expand the world of ONI, for sure."

ONI: Thunder God's Tale is out on Netflix now.