COMMENT

I've created two songs with the word "Internet" for this title before. This is the third song. I honestly thought I wouldn't create any more songs with that word after the second one, so it took a lot of effort.

I created the music for the game NEEDY GIRL OVERDOSE, so when I see them used in different ways or when songs like "INTERNET 〇〇" get all the attention, it feels a bit weird. I can't deny this feeling, so that's why I thought I wouldn't create another song with the word. But I'm the one who created it, so it doesn't matter how it's seen or used. After I recognized that obligation, I was strangely able to create the song. Who knows what will happen in the future though... (such pressure)

At the time of writing this comment, the song hasn't been released yet. It depends on how it's received once it's out in the world. Basically, there's no way to know how the song will be received. I don't want to be swayed by other people so I'm going to leave it up to time. I'll surf the bright lights of the internet then... C ya!

COMMENT

As a result of pouring absolutely everything from the thirty years I’ve been alive into this project, every last element, from self-harm to drugs, religion, and sex—got flagged during the review process. Each time it happened, the anime staff worked hard to keep the vision intact, insisting: “We absolutely don’t want to let fear of regulation ruin what makes this work compelling,” and they kept pushing. Thanks to that, the NEEDY anime has been coming together in an almost undiluted, straight-from-the-bottle form. Seeing the staff’s passion and depth of understanding, and how strongly they believed that “the concept of NEEDY GIRL has a reason to exist in this world,” and that “there are certain expressions only this work can depict," I’m now fully certain of this project’s value.

When the voice actors performed the scripts I’d written so nakedly and frankly, there were moments when someone, fully immersed, would start crying. In that instant, I realized it: what this work is depicting, in the end, is “human beings.”

A lot of people have discussed NEEDY with “the internet” at the center of it all.

As for me, I’m proud to say I wrote out, in the original game, both the sweetness and the bitterness of the internet as I’ve seen it from childhood to the present. And because this is an anime born from that kind of work, of course we have to ask ourselves: “What was the internet, anyway?” Even the title of the new song I made with my friends this time is "INTERNET ANGEL".

After releasing the game, the huge reaction to it connected me, too, to an unspecified multitude across the world. And I was insulted at times, had admiration hurled at me at times, was loved at times, attacked at times. Who on earth are these faceless people? Trends, oshis, faith, sneering cynicism, call-outs and pile-ons, outrage fires, consumption, algorithms, SNS, love and hate, influencers, pop, culture, criticism, subculture, mainstream, illustration, animation.

My conclusion was: “human beings.”

The true nature of the internet is nothing special. It’s simply “a gathering of human beings.” It isn’t anonymity, and it isn’t AI. Everything there is a collection of individuals: First there are people, and then there is the internet.

At the end of a long history, humanity finally took a small rectangle into its hands and connected, at light speed, with people all over the world. Faced with the first great transformation in human history, many people are tormented by both its merits and its harms. Now, people fear that excessive power so much that smartphones and SNS are being regulated around the world.

That overwhelming electromagnetic field, too, is “human beings.”

Picking at a single word to nail a celebrity to a cross and burn them for it, or elevating a nameless girl—wrapped in two-dimensional aesthetics as she broadcasts her feelings—into an idol to be worshiped... all of it is done by individual human beings, one by one.

The internet’s true nature was human beings.

And so, at the turning point of my mid-life, I had to depict across thirteen episodes everything I’ve experienced of “the truth, the goodness, and the beauty human beings possess,” and in doing so, sublimate that strange youth I spent together with an unspecified multitude across the world into the comprehensive art form called animation.

That comes with immense pain. It also means we can’t avoid including extreme, blunt expressions, and I’m sure countless opinions will fly back and forth. I think that, too, is proof that you are human. When the Taroman film ended on the caption “Taro Okamoto: Human,” I was overwhelmed, thinking: yes. Exactly this.

Me, and you—we’re not anonymity. We’re not anime icons. We’re not creators, or lurkers, or streamers, or scalpers, or fans, or antis, or Toshiaki, or Nanashi-san.

We are human beings who feel pain.

nyalra