"Rurouni Kenshin Final Chapter The Beginning" Director Keishi Otomo What is necessary in manufacturing is an awareness of details [Director's Interview Vol.120]

The importance of the “diary” that connects “The Final” and “The Beginning”

Q: In terms of realism, director Otomo's works have an excellent use of monologues. In `` March Comes in Like a Lion '' (2017), the main character used a lot of monologues to create a sense of familiarity, and in the ``Rurouni Kenshin'' series, he purposely omitted them to strengthen the sense of reality while also maintaining the tempo of the work.

Otomo: It's true that I don't use it with the intention of "explaining it to customers." ``The Beginning'' includes Tomoe's monologue, which is used to express ``the true feelings of Tomoe, a feudal-era woman who hid her true feelings.''

Tomoe has a childhood friend and fiancée named Kiyosato (Masataka Kubota), but it is unknown if they had any true romantic feelings for her. At that time, marriage was something that was decided by parents, and it was also a matter of family and family. Perhaps it was only after losing Kiyosato that he realized the "mass" of love he had, and felt a sense of sadness. As a daughter of a samurai family, she must have been trained not to show her emotions, and I think that losing Kiyosato caused a swell of emotions. The only place she can reveal her feelings is in her diary.

“Rurouni Kenshin Final Chapter The Beginning” © Nobuhiro Watsuki / Shueisha ©2020 Movie “Rurouni Kenshin: Final Chapter Part I - The Final/The Beginning” Production Committee

Because of this trend, both in ``The Beginning'' and `` The Final ,'' we used the direction of ``realizing Tomoe's true feelings through her diary.'' In ``The Beginning'', Kenshin reads the diary and realizes Tomoe's true feelings, and in ``The Final'', the diary is entrusted to En (Mackenyu Arata). And then Kaoru Kamiya (Emi Takei) becomes involved. Her ``sword that saves people (katsujinken)'' and Tomoe's ``I will continue to cut people from now on...but beyond that, I will always protect more people than the number of people I cut...I must never let them die here and now.'' ” are synchronized. As I was writing the script, the structure of Kenshin, Enri, and Kaoru's actions converging with Tomoe's words in her diary felt really good.

Although each person's reaction is different, both Kenshin and his relationship are saved in a sense. In order to create a monologue for that purpose, I was conscious of how much detail to express, including how to present it.

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