Junichi Sato

Junichi Sato
Name	Junichi Sato
role	Episode Director

Junichi Sato (佐藤順一 Satō Jun'ichi, born March 11, 1960 in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan) is the chief director of the Princess Tutu anime. He also directed two episodes and storyboarded eight, as well the OP sequence.

Storyboards[]

Episodes Directed[]

Commentary[]

My child is already of an age where one is capable of reading stories by oneself, but at a younger age, we would also lay side-by-side as most people do, and I would tell stories. Perhaps partly due to my occupation, rather than telling already existing folktales and such, it was in fact more normal for me to make up a story on the spot with whatever came to mind and tell that. Once a child takes a liking to a story, the child will want to hear the same story over and over, but as the storyteller, it feels boring unless you rearrange things, even just a little. Son, in the spirit of added service, I would ad-lib additional incidents and increase the number of characters, changing the story here and there as I told it. Soon the ad-libbing would beget ad-libbing, and the story would head off in unexpected directions. It got to the point where it seemed highly unlikely that I would ever arrive at the conclusion I’d originally planned for. [laughs] But even though the story may have changed so drastically, for some reason, one’s stule of storytelling never changes.
One year, we went to visit my family. My father began to tell a story to his grandchild (my child). The story was a folktale from the countryside where my father is from, and it was one I’m sure I’d been told as a child as well. But I no longer remembered how the story unfolded or how it ended. As I listened to the story, however the recollection of having been told stories in this style of delivery gradually came back to me. His style of storytelling had not changed one bit from what I’d heard as a child. And it seems that my style of storytelling had also unknowingly inherited a similar atmosphere as well… even though the stories you heard as a child may only remain with you as fragmented memories, the style in which the stories were told to you must stay with you deep in your memory.
In anime the, equivalent of this storytelling style would probably be the overall atmosphere. It is a very hard thing to accomplish, but I hope that in Princess Tutu, I’ve been able to imbue it with a “storytelling style” that is difficult to put into words but still makes its way deep into people’s hearts.

Welcome to the world of Princess Tutu.