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About two years ago, two first-time cinematographers began a trip around Japan in search of real-world inspirations behind some of the most beloved video games and anime of all time. Their third and most recent documentary explores the origins and cultural touchstones of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and the direct overlap and softer parallels between the game and its home country really are something to see.
Frank Milham and partner James Dawson, of YouTube channel Midnight Kotatsu, have spent three or four years in Japan between university work and various odd jobs like sales or, the foreigner classic, teaching English. They tell me they're perfectionistic. Neither had really worked in film before – though they did see some broadcast work during the Tokyo Olympics, and their humanities backgrounds in philosophy and history have helped shape their video style – which is largely why it's taken several years for them to get three documentaries out the door. A fourth, exploring Nier: Automata, is already in the works.
Their Zelda travel log comes several months after similar documentaries for the anime films Your Name and Spirited Away, which were often filmed in tandem to save time. If you count individual shrines, the duo visited upwards of 30 or 40 locations for the Zelda video alone, and at least 15 or so areas even if you only count major destinations, many of them in the Japanese countryside, Kyushu, or Saga Prefecture.
Where those animated films feature many modern, almost one-to-one locations that you could readily point to and visit – hence the abundance of side-by-side comparisons from J-vloggers – the more fictionalized world of Hyrule made parsing the underlying origins more challenging.
Zelda in Japan
Some overlap is obvious. Several Breath of the Wild developers cited in the documentary have discussed their inspirations on the record, like with the Hyrule map layout against Kyoto's and the placement of certain landmarks. Others are less obvious, at least until you see them pointed out, like the game's goddess shrines and Japan's actual Jizo statues.
The whole video is a gorgeous and fascinating dive into how fragments of Japan made their way into Breath of the Wild, and how traces of Zelda can be found around Japan. It's a mix of interpretation and investigation that echoes the original design philosophy of Zelda mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto, who was initially inspired to make an adventure game by discovering and exploring a cave near his family home.
I originally learned of this video via a Reddit post which quickly caught fire among the Zelda community. Shortly after, I spoke to Dawson and Milham about the research and travel that went into it.
"For our Spirited Away video, there's locations that [Hayao Miyazaki], the director, had talked about, and we would just go there and kind of find more," Milham explains. "But with this, with Kyoto, for example, I knew that was an inspiration, to some extent. A lot of people know about the geography having inspired it. But from there, I would try and do deeper research and then find more specific details. Or take a quote that is concrete and try to use what I've felt the quote's about, using the atmosphere of Japan. So that's quite a concrete idea, but look at Japan and go, this feels like Zelda. Tying those two together, saying it's not just coming from my head, it is intentional."
"I also think, stylistically, we don't always just want to be completely 100% concrete in terms of, this is this, this is that," Dawson adds. "We sort of want to blur the lines between the game and Japan, where we can create a more immersive and cinematic experience for the viewer. And that's sort of stylistically how we want it to come across."
What's fun is, quite often, and which felt very Zelda side-questy, we just have Japanese people who are so welcoming and surprised to see you in the countryside
Frank Milham
This kind of production process can be intense with no fast travel available. "Neither of us could drive up until recently, so it's been a lot of hiking into the middle of nowhere," Milham says. "There's so many stories where we've been waiting for a bus that just didn't arrive, and then we have to walk for miles. But a lot of it's been our knowledge of Japan that we already have, and we've just seemed to make natural connections."
One of the most striking shots in the video, a towering Deku Tree lookalike nestled in an old forest, was scarcely 10 minutes from Milham's old "middle of nowhere" home flanked by rice fields. He and Dawson have also tracked down abandoned towns, obscured caves, and tiny villages, sometimes for shots that only take up a few moments of the 26-minute video.
"I remember hiking all this equipment through rice fields for three, four hours," Milham says.
"The shoots involve a lot of two-day trips to get two or three shots," Dawson affirms.
"But I can drive now, so thank god we're saved," adds Milham.
Their process sounds fittingly similar to the experience of making discoveries in Breath of the Wild: finding and following a curious bit of smoke just to see what fire you might find at the end.
"It was a bit like, like you said, playing Breath of the Wild," Milham says. "It wasn't as planned as you'd expect. And the thing with us being perfectionists is that I just kept filming more and more and more, and I was having so much fun doing it. All the time, I'd go to a shrine and think, oh, this was really cool. And then I just look for more. So there wasn't an initial plan that then changed. It was always just improvising and exploring as I went.
"We had a big trip where James came down to Kyushu, and we knew the rough things we'd film, but we found so many little spots and cool shrines along the way, just looking around and exploring. And what's fun is, quite often, and which felt very Zelda side-questy, we just have Japanese people who are so welcoming and surprised to see you in the countryside as a foreigner.
"I remember we were cycling up a mountain to shoot something, and an elderly man came out and was like, 'Oh, wait here.' And then he came back and brought us a bag of oranges that he'd grown. So then when we got to the top of the mountain, we actually didn't have any food with us, so we just ate like five oranges each. Stuff like that, things just sort of happened as we filmed."
It's a fun way to unpack and interrogate the themes and motifs of a game. Dawson and Milham say they've already got ideas well beyond their planned Nier: Automata video, and their experience thus far has helped expedite and clean up the production process, so we'll hopefully see them sooner rather than later.
