Profile:

Yoshiaki Iwasaki

Born in Kobe on October 6, 1964. Graduated from the Engineering Department of Chiba University.

While at University he was involved in the anime club, which produced original anime.

Deciding on a career in anime, he went on to be the storyboard artist for the TV series of "To Heart", "Slayers" and "Chikyu Boetai Kigyo Dai-Guard", the latter two in which he also played a directorial role, was the animation director for "Revolutionary Girl Utena" and "Turn-A Gundam" and experienced directing on "El Hazard 2".

However he is most well known overseas for directing "Love Hina".

The interview started off with a startling confession, Yoshiaki Iwasaki hadn't actually read any of the original manga by Ken Akamatsu when Xebec approached him to direct the anime version of "Love Hina". Laughing he recalled, " After their initial approach I bought and read all the tankoubon manga. After reading such an interesting work I immediately replied to them "Yes I want to do it!".

It was the liveliness and individualism of the characters, which convinced him to step into the role of director and he strove to portray them as realistically as possible. He also tried to stay relatively true to the manga versions of the characters - "After all they are still living in the manga...you can't really change them to be your own ideal characters."

Mr. Iwasaki was very grateful for the way in which the creator of the manga, Ken Akamatsu, gave him so much freedom. Often there are clashes between the creator of the original work and of the anime, such as the character design being altered or the story changing and sometimes issues can arise to some extent when considering that the anime may replace the manga. However in relation to "Love Hina" - "When I met Mr. Akamatsu he told me that he wanted the anime and manga to be separate entities. So we didn't have any of the usual trouble - actually I pretty much did as I liked."

Even though the anime and the original manga turned out to be different, Mr. Iwasaki believes that the anime still has the "Love Hina" essence. One of the main reasons that he believes they should be different is so that they can compliment each other - the viewer of an anime will probably read the original work - which is a good thing. And for those who were already fans of the manga? "Of course if the manga is read first the viewer will have their own idea about it, we didn't want to deny the fans of the manga, but we wanted to create an anime that was a separate anime work."

When it came to developing the story for the anime he and the writer Mr Hazaki worked together on scenes, and felt that even though it is a serial story - you should be able to enjoy it even if you only watched one episode. They made several test films, which resulted in a variety of episodes, although Mr Hazaki presented him with a lot of story options from which he could choose. "The general storyline had been developed beforehand and the various stories and elements came together quite well".