ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Ultraman: Rising director Shannon Tindle about the upcoming Netflix movie. Tindle discussed the film’s incredible journey to being made, fan service, and the film’s art style. It premieres on the streamer on June 14, 2024.
“When baseball superstar Ken Sato returns home to Japan to pick up the mantle of Earth-defending superhero Ultraman, he quickly finds more than he bargained for as he’s forced to raise the offspring of his greatest foe,” reads the movie’s official synopsis.
This started as an original idea, correct? And then it morphed into being Ultraman once Netflix got on board?
Shannon Tindle: Yeah, it was something I’d been carrying since, believe it or not. 2001 was an idea inspired by Ultraman, and I never considered it would be an Ultraman project because I knew there was probably not a chance I could get the rights. The rights were there were all kinds of difficulties with it. I developed it at Sony and started working on it there for a while. We got to a point where they wanted to go in one direction. I wanted to go another with the film. Kristine Belson at Sony was gracious and allowed me to take the film out. I was at Netflix probably just a couple of weeks after it went into turnaround at Sony. When I came into the room, there was a huge group of people. I thought it was just gonna be a couple of folks, but it was Melissa Cobb, Gregg Taylor, and a few other folks. The suggestion was, “Hey, what if we could get you the rights to Ultraman?” Then I took the script that existed and started to [make changes]. It’s still the same, very much the same story and same characters, but start to work the Ultraman mythology into the film.
That’s such an incredible story to be inspired from it and then later on actually get to build upon that franchise. What is your history with Ultraman?
I first came across the show when I was probably four or five years old. My dad and I would watch it on Sunday afternoons. I remember seeing the character for the first time. I was already a big comic book fan at this point, but Ultraman was so different, not just in his appearance, but in his powers than any of the other characters that I’d grown up with to that point. I was immediately engaged. You see the science team and the bright orange uniforms and Ultraman and his red and silver. It’s not a suit. He’s an alien, so it’s his body. I was obsessed with it when I was a kid, but I had no connection. I didn’t know how big the character was in the rest of the world. As things go when you’re a kid, you’re interested and then you move on to other things. When I moved to Los Angeles in the nineties, I was re-exposed to it. At that time, Ultraman Tiga was the show that I had seen. Then I really started to become obsessed with the character again. That’s when the idea started to form.
The tokusatsu genre is very popular with children in Japan and worldwide. When you’re making an animated film, obviously, this is going out worldwide as well, but for a more Western audience, how’s it adapting that genre to the animated film and staying true to the roots?
For me, any story that I tell, I have to connect with in a personal way. I think the more personal the stories are, the broader of an audience they’ll connect with. So again, because I approached it from the perspective of just telling a good story inspired by Ultraman, I wanted to tell a story about family, about the difficulties between parents and children. No matter where you’re from, that story rings true. Parents and children always have struggles. They learn from one another, they support one another. So that was the story inside of an Ultraman film. So, the goal was always to make a film that would play to as many people as possible because I knew that in this country, Ultraman wasn’t that big, and he was considered kind of a niche. So what if I could take that character and bring in families and bring in people who may never watch an Ultraman film?
That’s what’s been incredible about the reaction so far in the test audiences, is that folks who think they would never wanna watch an Ultraman film, parents, mothers, daughters, dads who didn’t know anything about it, kids who didn’t know anything about it, they really connect with the characters. I think it’s because they can relate to the family aspect of it. So again, I think there are certainly things in there for Ultraman fans. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge Ultraman fan. I have way too much Ultraman stuff in my house and way too many books. I watch the shows, Ultraman Ultraseven, Ace, Tiga, all of those shows. I’ve watched them so many times. But you can never win on fan service. People are not gonna be happy no matter what you do. But I hope that I can get to them emotionally and connect with them emotionally and they’re happy to see this story about parental conflict and reconciliation and love as told from the perspective of one of their favorite heroes.
You brought up fan service, I did have a question about that because one of the kaiju we see, Gigantron, is very similar to the kaiju Melba in Ultraman. Was there any ever thoughts of using an existing kaiju in that role?
Well, it was an original kaiju because it wasn’t an Ultraman film at first. So yeah, I designed that character years ago. Maybe Melba was somewhere in the back of my head, but I honestly wasn’t thinking about it when I created and designed Gigantron. But you’ll notice too, once it became an Ultraman film, I wanted to make sure that some of those characters got in play as well. So we have Bemular, we have Neronga, just to name a couple of my personal favorites that one can see in the show and see the history of the series. But Gigantron was an original, frankly out of necessity because I couldn’t use any of those creatures, and then there was no reason to change her.
In the same way that it was no reason to change Ken Sato. What’s really great about the Ultraman series is that it’s evolved, and the rules change, and there are different characters every time. You have the core things of the science team being a big part of it, the kaiju and the seijin or the aliens, those are all parts of it. But the characters and their personalities change over time. So I think it’s why Ultraman is ripe to be interpreted and to reimagine because they literally reimagine it every couple of years.
I saw this really cool photo. It was of an event in Japan, and they had made a Gigantron suit. A person was in the suit. It was a tokusatsu suit for your creation. How cool was it seeing it promoted to those fans and it coming full circle in that way?
It blew my mind. I didn’t know they were building it. We flew out for Tsubucon and to be on stage with Yuki Yamada, one of the stars of Godzilla Minus One, and the star of our Japanese language version of Ultraman: Rising. So we were overwhelmed by meeting him, we met members of the cast from the original series, which was incredible. Then we come around a corner and you just see the suit there, and I couldn’t believe it. Especially as somebody who’s watched tokusatsu films for a long time in series, of course Godzilla, uh, of course, The War of the Gargantuas, like all these films. To see a suit of a character that I created and I designed was pretty mindblowing. Then to actually have it be walking around next to you on stage was like, I’ve said it many times, it’s like I’m living my little boy dream when I was a kid.
I wanted to ask about your Ultraman, Ken Sato. There’s a fun dynamic here. He is living this double life. He’s a baseball player, and then he also has this duty to the world to protect it and be this superhero. What did you like most about really exploring this kind of personal struggle and really showing the stress that comes with all of his desires and being his own person?
When you become a parent, you’re automatically juggling your career at home. You’re juggling your responsibilities as a parent. Any other responsibilities that you happen to have, any hobbies that you have, any interests that you have, those things. You have to learn how to balance it. I think Ultraman is all about bringing balance to the world, but that’s a grand idea, and to make something a bit more relatable and intimate. Talk about a character who feels like he’s a bit of a loner. He doesn’t talk with his father very much, and he was bullied when he moved from Japan to the United States. How did he cope with that? Well, there’s the line I wrote in the film where he says, “If they’re gonna talk anyway, you might as well give them something to talk about.”
So he’s got this chip on his shoulder, and I wanted to show a character that needed room for growth. I think a lot of times characters, especially in family films, there’s not as large of a growth with them. I think they were like, “Well, we gotta like that guy. He’s gotta be lovable.” For me, it’s like, no, the character just needs to be interesting. So I wanted to introduce him as we do in the film. First, there’s him as a boy, then you see how he’s changed as an adult and what he presents to the public, and then what he presents in an interview, and then who he is when he comes home, and that’s the true Ken, when he comes home, he’s a guy who is dealing with the criticism of taking on this new role that he didn’t want — being Ultraman.
He misses his mom, who is gone and presumed dead, and just to show why he behaves the way he does, I think what’s important is you can have a character like that and have them be abrasive but understand why they are who they are. When Emi comes into the picture, in many ways, she’s the real protagonist because she’s the one who creates the most conflict for him and disrupts his life. That positive friction causes him to become a more selfless person, as often happens when you’re a parent because it’s not just about you anymore. He’s forced into that situation, but he comes to understand this is what he is meant to do.
So throughout the film, Ultraman is basically just a metaphor for being a parent and all the responsibilities that come with that, protecting the world, protecting your kids, sacrificing your own personal health and freedom to the service of others. It’s what my parents did for me. That’s what I try and do for my daughter. And again, I think that’s something that a lot of folks, especially parents, can relate to.
I love the design of the baby kaiju. How was it coming out with this very cute original creature? Talk me through kind of the design process for that.
So it’s another one where I’ve been prepping things, we’re gonna be at Annecy next month, and so I’ve been prepping that doc. So I dug back into my files to look at my first designs for Emi, and she’s really not much different. Proportions are the same, colors are the same. You wanted to present this, if you look at babies, their heads are oversized, which gives a cute little waddle to them. So there’s the design aspect of it. I think you’ll probably see a little bit of Chuck Jones in the design, just because I can’t help but have that influence there. But then, uh, her expressions are inspired by my daughter, by the children of the animators at ILM.
In particular, there’s a scene in the film, the before or after, when Emi is frightened, because she only knows Ultraman. She doesn’t know Ken. So when he transforms back and forth, he has to help her to understand that Ultraman and Ken are the same person. That first shift where she’s crying and then sees Ultraman, that big smile, I have three photos of my daughter where she had three extreme emotions in just seconds. I sent that to the team, and I was like, “Look at this. Draw from your personal experience. You know how mercurial children are, so let’s make sure that we invest that in her.” Because she’s a nonverbal character, we have to use her face, we use her bioluminescence, we use her movements to express the specificity of a kid.
One of the most rewarding things has been when coming out of screenings, even though it was based on my daughter, people are like, “That’s my son. That’s my daughter. That’s my niece. That’s my nephew.” And that just means the world to me because, again, being so specific causes something to be more relatable for a much wider audience, and when that happens, it’s just magic.
The film looks great throughout. I love some of the effects like when the baby Kaiju has her mouth beamfiring, it looks incredible. How was it determining the look for Ultraman: Rising?
So we wanted to, and there are some of Ultraman’s powers that we drew, like Ultra Slash and things like that. I don’t wanna give too much away, but things that actually existed in the series. So we wanted to do our version of that and stay as true to that as possible while still evolving it a bit. The example you gave of Emi’s blast, that was actually designed by a good friend of mine who’s a traditional effects animator, Dave Lee, and he did some early sketches for it, and then Hayden Jones and his team at ILM then translated it.
In terms of the overall look, that was, you know, we had hired Sunmin Inn early to do some freelance stuff even before she came in as an art director. She and our productions designer, Marcos Mateu-Mestre, worked really closely together. We always knew we wanted an illustrative style, and we were looking of course, at manga and anime, but also if you look at like the rendered covers on Manga, where it’s a little bit more like beautifully rendered copic markers. Sunmin broke that down and then worked really closely with Hayden and the team there at ILM between London, Singapore, and Vancouver to come up with this look. You look back at the first test that we did, and it really looked incredible, but the look evolved from there. Once we had shots where it’s like, that’s what the movie looks like, then you just follow it consistently through there.
I keep saying that, and I’ve said this to Phil Lord as well, is you guys and the success of Spider-Verse gave the rest of us permission to do the things we wanted to do for a long time. So, they really kind of pioneered and because everybody in animation and CG wanted to use more graphic looks, but there hadn’t been a film that that proved to be popular that had come out, or people were really scared of it, which I never understand why you’d be afraid of style. But it gave us support being able to say, “Well, look how successful Into the Spider-Verse was and how many people saw it.” Then Across the Spider-Verse came out while we were working on the film to further kind of cement that, yeah, people love this. They like something that feels new and different.
