"If it is a dying craft we can't do anything about it. Civilisation moves on. Where are all the fresco painters now? Where are the landscape artists? What are they doing now? The world is changing. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the same job for 40 years. That's rare in any era."

“Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world.”

“Actually I think CGI has the potential to equal or even surpass what the human hand can do.”

“It's difficult. immediately become the subjects of rorikon gokko . In a sense, if we want to depict someone who is affirmative to us, we have no choice but to make them as lovely as possible. But now, there are too many people who shamelessly depict as if they just want as pets, and things are escalating more and more.”

“We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation.”

“I believe that children's souls are the inheritors of historical memory from previous generations. It's just that as they grow older and experience the everyday world that memory sinks lower and lower. I feel I need to make a film that reaches down to that level. If I could do that I would die happy.”

“You see, whether you can draw like this or not, being able to think up this kind of design, it depends on whether or not you can say to yourself, 'Oh, yeah, girls like this exist in real life.' If you don’t spend time watching real people, you can’t do this, because you’ve never seen it. Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!”