All things considered, after managing to steady the team and prevent Dream Animation from completely falling apart, Sora Kamakawa was finally able to release a bit of the breath he had been holding in his chest.
He picked up his phone and reread the message that had just arrived from Ren-the newly appointed production coordinator for Voices of a Distant Star. The moment he finished reading, Sora's gaze sharpened with focus.
In anime production, technical skill and motivation alone are never enough. A studio's network within the industry carries almost as much weight as its actual capabilities. The overwhelming majority of studios simply cannot produce an entire work from start to finish using only in-house staff. It's not laziness-it's basic arithmetic. Keeping everyone under one roof costs far too much.
Even when heavily streamlined, a production still needs at least a dozen-often many more-key animators to handle the sheer number of cuts. On top of that come dozens of in-between animators, a sizable background team, a large group for coloring and finishing, and then sound, voice acting, post-production, photography, scheduling, and management. Every stage adds another cluster of people. When everything is counted, it's not uncommon for a single anime project to involve more than two hundred people, directly or indirectly.
Maintaining a team of that size internally means a monstrous payroll, month after month. In Sora's previous world, only studios that were extreme outliers-those with rigid structures and highly consolidated permanent staff-could maintain stable quality without relying heavily on freelancers and outsourcing. Most studios simply couldn't replicate that model.
And within that reality, the content of Ren's message carried enormous weight.
He said he had a reliable contact: a team that could handle the 3D effects required for Voices of a Distant Star during the winter season. And this had come less than half a day after Sora officially appointed him to the position.
That alone showed exactly why Ren was there.
A production coordinator doesn't need to draw well. He doesn't need to know how to animate. What he absolutely must have is the ability to talk to the right people, in the right way, at the right time-and the network to make things happen when the internal team can't keep up. He's the one who stitches departments together, fills gaps, calls in reinforcements when manpower runs short, pressures everyone to meet deadlines when they're already breaking, and somehow keeps the schedule alive while the entire production threatens to burst into flames.
Sora exchanged a few more messages with him, asked for details about the outsourced studio, checked timelines, capacity, and track record, then gave a clear instruction: Ren was to make formal contact and begin negotiations.
Only then did Sora put the phone down, turn his gaze back to the desk, and open the storyboard notebook-the book of cuts that sat there like a weapon prepared for the coming war.
He picked up his pencil.
At the same time, he plunged into the memory of the original Voices of a Distant Star anime, as if pulling an entire film out of his head, frame by frame.
In his previous world, when people said the work had an "old-fashioned look," they were almost always talking about the character designs. Mikako's face looked overly round in some frames; in others, depending on the angle, it flattened into something awkward, sometimes even deforming enough to break immersion. It was a point many criticized-and not without reason.
But the backgrounds… the scenery… the sense of space and light…
That was a different story entirely.
Even now, with the experience he'd accumulated and the reference of countless modern anime, Sora still believed those backgrounds surpassed more than ninety percent of recent releases. It was the same impact he remembered from 5 Centimeters per Second: whether the focus was romance, farewell, or silence didn't matter-when the sky opened up, when stars filled the frame, when light pierced through clouds, it felt too vast to be contained by the word "anime."
It was a kind of beauty that didn't require understanding art theory. You just had to look to feel it.
The pencil touched the paper, and with the first line, Sora entered a state of concentration that erased the rest of the world.
He had grown up being pushed by his father, Hiroshi Kamakawa, toward animation and directing. Maybe he didn't fully master everything yet-maybe there were technical gaps, holes in his practice, insecurities he couldn't hide-but drawing storyboards didn't frighten him.
He didn't need to draw like a detail-obsessed master. That wasn't the goal.
A storyboard doesn't demand "beautiful art." It demands clarity.
A face can be a simple circle. Eyes can be dots. A nose, a single line. The body, a basic stick figure.
What matters is that the perspective is right. That the space makes sense. That the character's position relative to the environment is clear. If someone is walking, it should be obvious. If there's something in their hands, it should be recognizable. If there's a building behind them, a street, or an object about to cross the frame, the drawing has to communicate that.
The point isn't to prove artistic talent.
The point is that the animation supervisor, key animators, and layout team can look at it and immediately understand: This is what he wants. The camera is like this. The emotion is here. The cut lasts this long.
A short film of just over twenty minutes can have hundreds of cuts. And each cut may require one, two, sometimes even more storyboard pages, depending on the action and rhythm.
A key animator might spend hours finishing a single drawing, but a director doesn't have that luxury at the storyboard stage. If Sora took half an hour per page, he'd become the bottleneck of his own production-the problem that delayed everyone else.
At first, his body still resisted. His arm tired at an unfamiliar pace. His hand had to return to a habit that wasn't just memory-it was repetition. But after several hours locked in the office, the motion began to settle. The pencil moved more naturally. His focus stabilized. His endurance increased.
And compared to other directors, Sora had an advantage that bordered on unfair.
He didn't need to invent the cuts.
The hardest part of drawing storyboards isn't the line on the paper-it's deciding everything that comes before that line: whether the camera is far or close, whether it's a close-up or a wide shot, whether the lens feels open or tight, how many people are in frame, what kind of silence the image carries, how long the screen should linger, where the emotion should hit, what the background must suggest, what the character's gaze should hide or reveal.
That's where many directors break themselves, tearing their hair out over a cut that doesn't "work," stuck as if in physical pain.
Sora didn't feel that pain.
Because the finished work already existed in his memory.
He had the answer key.
All he had to do was transfer it to paper as clearly as possible.
The work was exhausting, yes. Repetitive, yes. Filled with page after page, cut after cut. After a while, the monotony began to bite.
But aside from that, there was no block. No creative agony of someone trying to pull something out of nothing. It was draining… and yet it flowed.
Over the next two days, Sora practically lived in the office, drawing storyboards as if tomorrow didn't exist.
And the rest of the company didn't stop either.
Dream Animation still had a few in-house animators, but Sora had already made his expectations clear: Voices of a Distant Star could not become a slapdash project. It couldn't be another cheap production surviving on static shots and improvisation.
To reach the standard he wanted, the team would have to grow-even if through outsourcing.
At minimum, fifteen to twenty key animators would need to be involved.
And the number of animators required always depends on two things: the desired level of quality and the type of anime.
Action and combat series are the most brutal. Even thirty key animators might not be enough. In Sora's previous world, there were productions that spent entire seasons desperately searching for talent and still couldn't fill demand. And even then, some picky viewers complained about a "lack of detail," as if time and the human body were elastic.
Slice-of-life anime, calmer by nature, can survive with smaller teams. In some cases, fewer than ten key animators are enough-depending on style and planning.
And when a production is truly poor, there's even that extreme case that became a reference point: an entire series carried by a single key animator, packed with static shots and obvious distortions… yet somehow it still worked because the story or humor carried the audience.
Of course, that was the exception.
Most of the time, "a single animator" on a project isn't a joke-it's proof of someone absurdly above average, capable of bearing a load almost no one else could.
Still, the core issue remained the same: the more people draw, the more stylistic differences appear. More variation. More risk of losing visual unity.
That's why, when time and money allow, some studios do something rare: they give an enormous amount of time to a single elite artist and let them draw a large portion-sometimes the entirety-of an episode, to ensure consistency and impact.
…
Meanwhile, in Dream Animation's office, Sora's pencil never stopped.
Page after page, cut after cut, the storyboard finally began to take real shape-like a project that had existed only as pressure and concept was becoming something tangible.
Something that could, truly, be animated.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Each 50 Power Stones collected unlocks a new chapter! Your support not only helps the story continue but also allows us to create extra content for dedicated readers.
Additionally, exclusive content and bonus chapters are available on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/ImmortalEmperor
Join now and help shape the future of the story while enjoying special rewards!