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Interview

Ty Hanson p3

Animator Ty Hanson talks about story and character development...

READERSVOICE.COM: The story of MillEx is really solid with a good back story that resurfaces in modern urban Japan. How did you learn to tell longer stories? Did you draw blueprints of the stories of other anime to see how they wrote their stories, or how did you learn to plot longer stories?

TY HANSON: I didn’t really ‘learn’ to tell stories as much as I was inspired by both the simplicity AND complexity of other titles. I did however study these other titles quite meticulously out of respect and to see what makes a great title…great.

RV: Vaan Kiseragi, the leader of the anti-terrorist organisation Grave, looks like a fun character. And Xarus, the leader of Nexus the shadow syndicate, sounds like someone who could easily exist behind the scenes these days. Vincent is a hero people would empathise with, too. Do these characters also develop and change, too, over the course of the story?

TH: Character development is a BIG thing for me, and a very important element when writing a larger story.
To me, a fictional character needs to grow as they would if they were real. Like you or I, people grow from their experiences, failures and successes. Their bodies change with the passage of time and I feel it should be no different for a character in a story.
Short stories can be different: you only have a very limited amount of time to tell your story, so the window for character development is much shorter.
However in a long running show, story, series or book, I feel that characters should always grow…. not just the main character.
Vaan’s growth is somewhat limited, however there is a bit of a plot twist in his case that explains why this is.
Everyone else we are exposed to regularly over the story’s duration show some pretty strong signs of growth and development, though.

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-copyright Simon Sandall