14 Interesting Behind-The-Scenes Facts About ‘Attack On Titan’

Attack on Titan is an epic series that deserves an equally epic ending. But animating something on that scale is no easy task - something that the creator Hajime Isayama readily acknowledges. He said:

The climax scene that happens in the last half of the final season was very hard to draw in the original manga, as well, so I couldn’t help but think, ‘This is going to be rough for MAPPA’. MAPPA is probably thinking, ‘Please stop.’ I’m sorry, MAPPA. I’m really sorry.

Arifumi Imai is the animator in charge of the Levi vs. Beast Titan fight, among many other scenes. He revealed on Twitter that it took him a full four months to animate that one scene. One month was spent storyboarding, while the actual animation took three months.

Considering how gorgeous it is, we're grateful he put in the time, but we also really have to admire his perseverance and work ethic - not to mention his talent.

Back when he was first conceptualizing Attack on Titan, Hajime Isayama used to have a part-time job at a net cafe. The people he met there served as inspiration for some of his characters. In the Attack on Titan Character Encyclopedia, he revealed that he modeled Mikasa's character design on one of the customers at the cafe - specifically her scarf, hairstyle, and eyes.

You might have noticed that the crying baby on the cliff sounded remarkably realistic. There's a reason for that. Yuki Kaji - Eren Jaeger's voice actor - sent in multiple recordings of his baby crying to be used in the scene. This baby, who was less than a year old at the time of recording, may be the youngest voice actor to debut in anime history.

Why use a real baby with such a close connection to the voice actors? According to the staff, it was because it highlighted the final season's themes of "inheritance" and “succession.”

Most creators put something of themselves into their work. In Hajime Isayama's case, the original premise of the story was inspired by his childhood in Oyama. Oyama was surrounded by mountains, which inspired the Wall. His feelings about his hometown were similar to Eren's feelings about Shiganshina. In an interview with NHK, he said:

I lived [in my hometown] until I was 18. At that time, I couldn't wait to leave. I wanted to go where no one would know me. I had low self-esteem in my studies, in sports… I felt like a failure. I thought I could change if I went somewhere else. I hoped I could become a different person.

But that wasn't the only way that Attack on Titan mirrored Isayama's life. In an interview with The New York Times about the end of the series, he talked about how Eren's inability to change the future was similar to his own inability to change the story's ending.

So the truth is the situation with Eren actually overlaps in a certain sense with my own story with this manga. When I first started this series, I was worried that it would probably be canceled. It was a work that no one knew about. But I had already started the story with the ending in mind. And the story ended up being read and watched by an incredible number of people, and it led to me being given a huge power that I didn’t quite feel comfortable with.

It would have been nice if I could have changed the ending. Writing manga is supposed to be freeing. But if I was completely free, then I should have been able to change the ending. I could have changed it and said I wanted to go in a different direction. But the fact is that I was tied down to what I had originally envisioned when I was young. And so, manga became a very restrictive art form for me, similar to how the massive powers that Eren acquired ended up restricting him.

Does anybody ship Hange Zoë and Kenny Ackerman? Probably not, but a few people might change their minds when they learn that their voice actors, Romi Park and Kazuhiro Yamaji, got married in real life in 2020. The two announced their marriage on Twitter just after Park's 48th birthday.

It's hard to say whether or not their time on set had anything to do with their relationship, but it's fun to imagine that it could have.