From Light Novel To Anime Sensation: ‘Solo Leveling’ Producer And Action Director Discuss The Breakout Hit

First a light novel and a webtoon, Solo Leveling has been on every anime fans’ lips this year, as its first season produced by A-1 Pictures and Aniplex rolled out globally on Crunchyroll in January.

While working on the second season and in the midst of their world tour going from one anime expo to another, the creative team stopped in Paris a few weeks ago for Japan Expo 2024, providing a rare occasion to dive deeper into anime production. There, fans and professionals alike had the chance to chat for over an hour with Atsushi Kaneko, producer at A-1 Pictures, and Yoshihiro Kanno, action director and key animator.

For their team, it was the first time they had adapted a webtoon. Kaneko, who’s been with A-1 Pictures for over ten years, recalled how the project came to him: “The idea was brought to me by Mr. Sota Furuhashi [producer in charge of Solo Leveling at Aniplex] back in 2020. I knew nothing about it, so I checked it out and asked around my team who had heard of this story. Their feedback was enthusiastic, and I saw the opportunity to make a great action anime with this material.”

Yoshihiro Kanno, who had already worked on several A-1 Pictures anime including Sword Art Online: Alicization, was also excited by the project. “It took me some time to start reading it,” he said, “but eventually I found it really interesting. I love stories and characters with ranks and levels, and starting with Sung Jinwoo at the lowest rank of this universe was appealing to me. Plus, there were some killer action sequences to be made.”

The project kicked off pre-production in April 2021, with animation starting in October 2022. To complete the 12-episode first season, A-1 Pictures and its partners worked tirelessly. Kaneko explained the process in greater detail:

In my team at A-1 Pictures, there were twelve people including myself, but the total workforce of the production must have been between 500 and 600 people throughout the whole process. As producer, my role was to push these teams forward, to go beyond what we had done before with projects such as Sword Art Online. I remember Mr. Furuhashi telling me, ‘We have to destroy Sword Art in terms of animation!’ For each episode, it took the teams between eight and ten months to complete animation, working synchronously. But pushing them doesn’t mean pushing my ideas upon them, I prefer to let them elaborate, and then decide with them what remains and what gets cut. For example, the giant snake fight was interpreted in a new way in the anime, an idea brought by my colleague Yoshihiro Kanno.

Anime production is often strongly compartmentalized, but as action director, Kanno had the chance to step beyond those lines. He said:

Usually, when you have that role on a project, you mostly correct animation made by others. However, I wanted to put my fingers into it this time. I had been working mostly with pen and paper until then, but I switched to digital drawing during this production due to the huge amount of animation and the high quality standards needed for this adaptation. Jinwoo has a distinctive combat style, kind of a brutal-yet-amateuristic vibe, and I studied a lot of live-action fight sequences in order to portray this flow perfectly. I think my interest for animation first expressed itself when I saw the action scenes and visual storytelling of Princess Mononoke back in the day, but in Solo Leveling the fighting is mostly urban, which brings a different approach. In natural settings, backgrounds are made by background artists, while when you draw fights in an urban environment, you can use background as part of the scene. You can throw it, you can break it, you can smash it into characters, and it makes for much more fun. But also a lot of extra work.

One particular scene – spoilers ahead – stuck out during the behind-the-scenes the team provided in Japan Expo. In episode eleven, Jinwoo surpasses himself in order to defeat Blood-Red Commander Igris, his strongest foe to date. To convey this climactic moment, Kanno, who storyboarded and animated most of the sequence, worked closely with showrunner Shunsuke Nakashige and the production supervisors.

“It was decided early in the process that we would retain a white-on-black style for the final moments of the fight,” Kanno said, “and then I was able to play with the material, deform the lines and monitor the whole shot. As I explained before, usually we don’t get to do our own backgrounds and coloring, but the fact that I was drawing digitally, along with the particular style we were looking for, allowed me to combine those aspects myself.”

The level of animation provided by A-1 Pictures and its partners is definitely the kind that seduces global audiences. But for Kaneko, the original material also plays a big role in this success. “Solo Leveling is driven by universal themes and motives that appeal to modern audiences, while providing a new way of telling this story. This world that sometimes mirrors role playing games while sometimes paying tribute to great anime and mangakas is definitely part of what captivated audiences. And we’re working very hard to blow them away with season 2.”

Following the release of a first teaser for season two (embedded below), Kaneko shared some behind-the-scenes drawings on X (formerly Twitter). Kanno is also back to work on season two.

For those who may want to dive deeper into Solo Leveling’s transition from light novel to anime, Crunchyroll offers a 40-minute documentary on the making of the first season, which now streams exclusively on the platform.