In advance of the U.S. premiere of the new stop-motion animated short film Bottle George, Anime News Network sat down with writer Akihiro Nishino and chatted not only about the film and its creation but also its deeper message and how it connects to Nishino’s past.

While now well-known as a children’s book author and artist, Nishino first found fame in a different medium entirely. “I started as a manzai comedian and then started appearing on popular TV programs,” Nishino began. “However, I realized that even if I continued to do TV, I wouldn’t be able to get any bigger as long as the Japanese language limited me. Since that was the case, I would have to do something that would be easier to translate—or use non-verbal communication. […] So I thought drawing might be the way to go and started drawing.”

However, despite the obvious artistic talent displayed in his many successful books, it was a struggle in the beginning. “When I started writing picture books, I realized I wasn’t particularly good at it. It was all a bit complicated. So I thought that if I continued as is, I wouldn’t be able to break into the industry.” However, he discovered he had an advantage that many other professional authors lacked: time. “I realized that it takes a lot of time to create a book—and that authors have to make a living in the first place, so they can’t take that long to create one piece of work,” Nishino explained. “I realized that, at that time, I was still on TV regularly. […] In other words, even if I didn’t have any income as a picture book author, I wasn’t completely broke.” This allowed Nishino to spend as much time as needed to complete his books—and, in doing so, put a stunning amount of detail onto each page.

Nishino first became interested in making a movie based on his work around a decade ago. “When I was in the middle of writing my fourth picture book, Poupelle of Chimney Town, I realized that I wanted to make a movie,” Nishino told me. So, as he drew, he did so with a filmmaker’s eye in mind—designing the pictures almost as if they were storyboards. “I felt like, if I made the pictures movie-esque, people would come and say, ‘Hey, this would make a good film!'” It seems to have worked as Poupelle of Chimney Town got a STUDIO4ºC-animated film in 2020.

As for Bottle George, it all started with a chance meeting between Nishino and director Daisuke ‘Dice’ Tsutsumi at a film festival where Nishino was a guest speaker. “Director Tsutsumi and I talked and hit it off, went out for drinks, had a good time, and started talking about doing something fun together—and that’s exactly what happened in the end,” Nishino laughed. Of course, things didn’t start quite that simply, and it was around six months later when Nishino started writing on what would later become Bottle George.

“In the beginning, I started with the idea of making Bottle George a picture book. However, one day, Director Tsutsumi asked me if we could try doing the story with stop-motion animation instead—and although it seemed like it would be a lot of work, I thought it would be fun. So I said to Director Tsutsumi, ‘Let’s do it.'”

“The story changed shape during production,” Nishino explained. “At the beginning, it was more of a story about ‘second attempts’—essentially about when the first thing you tried to do didn’t go well, and you gave up, but then you picked yourself back up and took on a different challenge.”

This, of course, mirrors the flow of Nishino’s own life. “I started as a comedian, and then I got into TV. I thought it wasn’t right for me, so I withdrew from that. But then I started making picture books and movies, which were my second attempt.” However, while a portion of this theme remains in the film’s final version, it’s no longer the main focus. “It was partway through that we decided to focus the spotlight a bit more on the setting—on its creature that drank too much and got trapped in a bottle. To make it a story about addiction.”

This change in focus came from a personal place—his friend’s struggles with addiction. “We were pretty good friends, so we got to know each other quite a bit, or rather, we would meet up about once a month, go out to dinner, and do things like that—but we always tried to encourage each other to do our best. I tried that [with their addiction], but it didn’t get any better. They’d say they’re going to stop, but I felt like they would start again the moment I wasn’t paying attention.”

“This had been going on for a long time and I realized I had been misunderstanding what addiction is—that it’s not a simple problem that can be solved by saying, ‘Let’s do our best,'” Nishino continued, “It is a very troublesome illness. And I realize it cannot be cured by just one person alone.” It was then that Nishino came to see that the story of his friend and the story of Bottle George were the same.

This added another layer of complexity to the film. After all, this is a film by a children’s author aimed at children; happy endings are almost a given. “I thought that if I gave this story a really happy ending, it would give people the misunderstanding that addiction can be cured by telling people to try their best, and that’s not the case,” Nishino lamented. The best he could do was to aim for a hopeful ending. “I ended the film making sure family and friends were there for [the one suffering from addiction].”

In the end, Nishino hopes that those seeing the film will have the same revelations he did about the nature of addiction. “I think that there are many people who don’t know about addiction—or how to treat people who have become addicted. I didn’t even know about it at first, so I hope Bottle George will give people something to think about.”

Bottle George will premiere in the U.S. at the San Francisco International Film Festival on April 27, 2024.