The Rise of Terminator Zero with Writer Mattson Tomlin & Director Masashi Kudo

ANN’s coverage of Anime NYC 2024 sponsored by Yen Press and Ize Press!

Leading into the Terminator Zero premiere panel at Anime NYC Saturday night, a bit of the show’s soundtrack started playing with that iconic Terminator “du-dum du-du-dum” beat. Just a couple of “du-dum du-du-dum” in, one audience member started clapping in rhythm, and soon everyone joined. After several rounds of clapping, the rhythm was lost, but it was nonetheless a moment of excitement for writer Mattson Tomlin, director Masashi Kudo, and production designer Haruka Watanabe (all attending Anime NYC for their first time) as they arrived on stage — as well as for Terminator Zero‘s composers Michelle Birsky and Kevin Olken Henthorn, who later revealed themselves sitting amongst the audience.

To get a sense of their background, moderator Khleo Thomas asked the panelists for their top five favorite anime. Tomlin went with the “basic” answers of Akira and Ghost in the Shell, his childhood “gateway anime” The Animatrix, the works of Peter Chung in general, and Samurai Champloo. Kudo began by naming Disney favorites Sleeping Beauty (“Maleficent, absolutely the best villain ever introduced”) and Peter Pan (“Tinkerbell is a brilliant design”), then selected Sailor Moon and Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack as his favorite Japanese anime, and in a bit of humorous ego-stroking fitting of James Cameron himself, picked his show Terminator Zero as the fifth best anime of all time. Watanabe divided her list between Studio Ghibli‘s childhood favorites, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Whisper of the Heart, and three shows that influenced her as an adult: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Mushi-Shi, and Planetes.

Netflix had both the English dub and the Japanese version with English subtitles prepared for this premiere. A close audience screaming match ultimately led to picking the sub over the dub, although many of the people who wanted the sub soon regretted that choice when the subtitles ended up blocked by hundreds of heads in the audience (they ultimately fixed the problem by changing the screen size). Reviews of the show are embargoed, and spoilers are strictly off-limits, but these first two episodes make a positive first impression.

The show captures the horror of the original 1984 Terminator (the recently released Red Band trailer offers a taste of the brutality) — after the premiere, Kudo revealed he got called up to direct the show due to having told a producer he wanted to try his hand at a horror anime long ago. The once-futuristic, now-retro late ’90s setting offers an eerily plausible alternate reality informed by today’s growing concerns about artificial intelligence. The artists at Production I.G are always reliable when it comes to animating cyberpunk action, and they get to show off in the first episode’s thrilling cold opening and the second episode’s reflections on the history of war.

The panel continued with a mix of behind-the-scenes videos and questions for the crew. Watanabe offered insights into the show’s combination of classic Terminator and more uniquely Japanese design elements; examples of the latter include the “cute but creepy” ASIMO-inspired 1nno robots and the Kokoro AI holograms inspired by three Shinto goddesses. Kudo revealed the end of Episode 1 was his favorite scene to direct — partly because he got to use that rhythm the audience was clapping to. Tomlin earned major cheers when reflecting on the state of modern AI, which he says has potential good uses, but those uses should NOT be “putting comic book artists out of work.” At the end of the panel, he emphasized his desire to continue the show for a second season.

Anime News Network also got a chance to speak with Tomlin and Kudo one-on-one:

There have been six Terminator movies plus a TV series, most of them more or less attempting to reboot the franchise. Why another?

Mattson Tomlin: That’s a great question. I think that when I look at the franchise, there’s a reason we keep on making them, and it’s not because Hollywood’s out of ideas, it’s not because we’re completely just IP-driven. It is because something in those original movies ignited and captivated our minds and hearts, and it means something to people. You could say, “Just leave that alone,” and some people will leave it alone and not watch any more movies. That’s fine. For everybody else, I think there is a desire to say, “I want to recapture that feeling, but also give me something new.” For me, there was a really exciting opportunity presented in the fact that Terminator has only been live-action and so instantly doing something animated… This is different. This will do something different, and it can operate from a different set of rules than a $100 million action movie.

How much were you drawing inspiration from past Terminator movies?

Masashi Kudo: The first thing they decided at the beginning was that they wanted to bring in the horror aspect of Terminator 1, the original, and bring back that sensational component of fear. The James Cameron-directed T2 influenced me.

TOMLIN: I think that with any franchise, with anything that people care about, and Terminator‘s 40 years old now, I ask myself, “Why are we still coming back to this?” I have to ask why I like this, and I have to ask why people like this. I think killer robots are cool. The time travel creates fun and interesting ideas. I think the idea of the future war is very tantalizing to fans; I hope I can get to it in future seasons. But then also it’s great characters and impossible odds, so that, for me, to have real characters going through something emotional, primal, and stories about families, that for me is what Terminator is.

Did you get to talk with James Cameron?

KUDO: No.

TOMLIN: Not yet. I hope to. I hope that, if and when he watches the show, he detects what a tremendous fan I am of him and how much love I have for him and his work. It was a week or two ago when he said the first thing about the show that he’s ever said. It was in an article in The Hollywood Reporter, he said: “It seems like they’re picking up on some fun themes; I’m very into watching people take the baton in a world that I’ve created and see what they do with it, and so open to see what they do.”

Production I.G has a history of cyberpunk shows like Ghost in the Shell and Psycho-Pass. Did any of those inspire you?

KUDO: There’s a lot of overlap with the creative staff of Psycho-Pass, so in Terminator Zero, there may be moments where you see similarities, but that’s leveraging the knowledge and the skill set that was also part of Psycho-Pass‘ creation. So Terminator Zero will have some color of Psycho-Pass through the same team on the creative side.

TOMLIN: I think I had to go down a rabbit hole of anime just to figure out what’s expected from this genre and medium because it’s different from doing a feature film. For me, my gateway into anime when I was a kid was The Animatrix. When The Animatrix came out, that just kind of blew my mind and became the gateway drug for so many other things. I always have to reconnect to things I have a primal connection to. Usually, it’s stuff I saw when I was a kid that lit up my imagination, so I rewatched The Animatrix. It was phenomenal, and there was something about that too that made me go, “Okay, that’s was an anthology; we’re not doing that,” but that had a kind of kinetic, violent cerebral energy to it that I wanted to try to capitalize on. Just getting back to those feelings of being a kid.

Favorite Animatrix segment?

TOMLIN: I am a big, big fan of the animation style in “Kid Story.” There’s something about the sketchy roughness to it. It’s very depressing. He has to jump off a building, and the way that that’s rendered is so horrifying and poetic. That one is very, very special to me.

Any thoughts on the current risk of an AI apocalypse?

TOMLIN: I’m terrified of it. I think that there’s the killer robot version of it, but then I think there’s the more grounded, realistic version where all of our bank accounts get drained, our credit cards don’t work, the lights go off, the water stops working, and we are shown how instantly we all turn into animals. I think that’s a terrifying potential reality.

Artificial intelligence is developing so quickly. When I first started writing the show, it was in 2021, and AI’s been a thing as long as any of us here have been alive, but it still felt like science fiction. Today, here in 2024, it doesn’t. By now, when I am scrolling through my Instagram feed, I am really in this place of going, “Is the image that I’m looking at, are the people in the image that I’m looking at, are these real human beings?” It scares me because it was only a year ago that we were making fun of AI, saying it can’t figure out how many fingers we have, and that’s over.

KUDO: It’s up to us to figure out how to use AI.

Both of the years Terminator Zero is set in, 1997 and 2022, were in the future when the first two Terminator movies came out but are now in the past. What’s it like making this technically a period piece?

TOMLIN: It’s funny because I had this moment where I was like, “Should we go into the 2030s? The 2040s? The 2050s?” And ultimately setting it in 1997, where that is a period piece, and when the first two movies came out, that was the future as well, so going, there’s a past that should feel like our past, but rather than go to some other future, it felt like a good way to ground it and go, “We know what 2022 is, but this is their 2022 because of Judgment Day having happened.” As an audience, you have to reconcile killer robots that look like people, you have to reconcile time travel, you have to reconcile all these fantastical conceits, and so to go, “You know what 2022 was supposed to look like, and this isn’t it,” it’s just one less thing the audience has to jump through.

KUDO: The ’90s is an interesting time in history because the younger staff wasn’t born yet, but there was a bunch of staff who lived through the ’90s, were growing up in the ’90s, young adults in the ’90s and so it’s not quite ready to be called “nostalgic,” it’s the period you can’t quite make into fantasy because there’s still too many of us who remember the ’90s. So it’s been more of a challenge to keep it realistic yet also be able to talk to the younger generation about a time we lived through that they hadn’t lived through. Even collecting sources of what it was like in the ’90s isn’t quite as easy as we thought it was because it’s not quite history, so in that sense, it’s been an interesting creation process.

Netflix shows premiere internationally, and this one has some big stars in the English cast. Kudo-san, when you’re directing the show, are you focused on the Japanese version, the English version, or both?

KUDO: I create content in Japanese with the Japanese voice actors, and then the completed content as a package is sent to Mattson, who adds the English voices and directs the English performance.

The Kokoro scenes have an interesting hand-drawn and CG animation mix. How did you approach directing those scenes?

KUDO: Most of the scenes with Kokoro are CG, but it’s the moments where it’s just easier and more expressive to do with illustration; those are the times when hand illustration is used.

The last anime you directed before this was Sanrio Boys. What would his favorite Sanrio character be if Malcolm was a Sanrio Boy?

KUDO: Interesting question! It’s a hard one… [several seconds of thoughtful silence] Kuromi-chan.