The Soul of Square

Key former members of Square USA make a go as Sprite Entertainment

The word “sprite” is defined in the dictionary as both a soul or ghost and an elf or fairy. It is also a computer graphic (CG) animator’s term, used to describe a way of making a two-dimensional figure appear to be three-dimensional. The word captures the rebirth of former Square USA producers and animators in local animation startup Sprite Entertainment Inc. and the esprit de corps that it has generated.

Square USA, for the animation-challenged, was the Hawaii-based subsidiary of Square Co. Ltd. of Japan that was set up in Honolulu in 1997 to make Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The groundbreaking animated feature, the first to use computer-generated, photo-realistic characters – the main character, Aki Ross, actually graced the cover of Maxim in a bikini – was a Mainland box office flop. The film cost more than $135 million to make, but grossed just $30 million in North America.

A SPRITELY CAST OF CHARACTERS: Most of Sprite Entertainment Inc.'s employees formerly worked for Square USA.

The founding co-director of the University of Hawaii’s Cinematic and Digital Arts Program, Chris Lee, also helped to promote Final Fantasy. Lee says, “In a lot of ways, Square was ahead of the curve with the first CGI film. Now, more importantly, if you look at some of the films like the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or the upcoming Hulk directed by Ang Lee, they have fully digital characters.”

Former Final Fantasy Co-Director Motonori Sakakibara, who is Sprite Entertainment’s president, likens Final Fantasy to launching the world’s first rocket into space from Hawaii. He says, “When you first decide to do something so dramatic and big, significant, you can’t really count that R&D stage toward movie production [costs].”

Being the first didn’t stop the Japanese parent from shutting down the company and its multimillion dollar studios in the Harbor Court building last year. That’s when about a dozen employees decided that they were going to stay in Hawaii and ultimately make another animated feature film. Sakakibara helped to reel in a majority investor, Japan-based Amuse Inc., a multimedia production and advertising agency, which had also invested in Final Fantasy. Amuse put in $300,000, and a handful of employees added $70,000. Then Sprite found space on another floor of Harbor Court as a client of the Hawaii Health Care Business Incubator and invested about $80,000 in tenant improvement and equipment, which included rendering machines purchased from Square.

Producer Terri Sasaki says of Square’s passing, “A lot of us felt that it was a waste of a lot of the technology and know-how that we had created in the past three to four years. Of course [Square] invested a lot of money in it, but we invested our time and energy to create that, too, and a lot of artists wanted to stay here in Hawaii, so we thought, ‘Maybe we can do something. The synergy is there.’”

BUILDING CHARACTER: Some of Sprite's animated creations for "Get Healthy Now"

While the new digs for Sprite are in the same building, on a different floor from Square’s, the company is markedly different for local boy Roy Sato, who was the lead animator for the Aki Ross character and is Sprite’s senior animator. “I come to work, park in the same stall, get off on a different floor, but the mood is different, I think. Because Square was such a huge company that, at one point, probably employed 200 people. The animation team was over a dozen people alone and right now the whole company is a little over a dozen people. It feels more like family,” says Sato.

While everyone at Sprite has the same long-term goal of working on a fully animated feature film within five years, the short-term challenges, such as finding smaller projects that generate income, are more pressing. The company has had a number of smaller animation projects from both Hawaii and Japan. It generated more than $600,000 in gross sales in its first year, from May to December 2002. And Sasaki is projecting between $1.2 million and $1.5 million in gross sales this year. The owners say that although there are many good short-term project prospects, it’s difficult to say when the company will be profitable.

One of Sprite’s immediate projects is an animated series for the local market and possibly national distribution, with educational tie-ins that will emphasize a healthy lifestyle, called “Get Healthy Now.” At the time of this writing, Sprite was still fund-raising with a handful of local partners toward a $1.5 million project goal, with hopes of completing a pilot by summer and launching the series in the fall.

The evil mayor of an underground town is another Sprite original.

The brass ring remains the Sprites’ original animated feature film. At the time of this writing, Sprite had three pilot projects. The first was the original feature created by Sprite; Sakakibara is working on a script. Sasaki describes it as an adventure-quest kind of movie, set in a fantasy world with an Asian feel. It’s a family movie, so although it has monsters, nobody dies. The second was a script created in Hollywood, with a well-known producer that was looking for an animation company. The third was a feature film based on a Japanese comic book Tyrannosaurus rex that had already piqued the interest of a few investors.

Fund-raising for a feature-length film has presented its own set of challenges. According to Sasaki, local investors are not very entertainment savvy and are so risk-averse that even if Sprite were to line up a major studio and had a great script, “they’ll probably think it’s too risky. It’s hard to talk to local investors.”

Attorney Junichi Yanagihara, who was Square’s general counsel and senior vice president and is Sprite’s managing director and producer, says, “Our goal is to make them understand it’s not going to be that expensive. … But these people only know about Final Fantasy, so they immediately think, ‘Gee, it’s going to be a money loser. It’s going to be so expensive.’ We cannot do this, period. There are some other types of levels that we can do in computer graphics and we can actually do more efficiently because we have done that high-end product.”

Sato notes that everyone at Sprite has turned down other job offers to stay and make the company work. “Essentially, we have the elite of the elite working at Sprite. And that’s a pretty big thing when you think about it,” he says.

Sasaki adds, “The studio, although it is small, can compete with any other studio in Hollywood. Basically that’s the type of quality that we can deliver and we want people in Hawaii to be proud of that ability that they have here in Hawaii.”

Lee, a successful Hollywood producer, says, “I definitely do believe that [Sprite is] an example of a new kind of media company that Hawaii definitely should encourage and keep an eye on.”

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