Based on a Korean webtoon, the anime adaptation of Solo Leveling follows Sung Jinwoo, an E-Ranked hunter who was chosen to become the Shadow Monarch, a necromancer capable of reviving the spirits of the dead to become his soldiers, when he was at the brink of death himself. At Anime Expo this year, A-1 Pictures producer Atsushi Kaneko and voice actors of the titular character, Taito Ban (Japanese) and Aleks Le (English), took some time to discuss season one of the show, and how it felt to level up with Sung Jinwoo.
While Taito Ban and producer Kaneko both have rather normal stories of how they joined the project, Aleks Le’s was a little more peculiar. “I got involved in this project in summer 2020, when an Aniplex producer brought it to me,” the producer shared simply. Ban said, “I auditioned for the role when it first became available. Initially, I had to play E-Rank Jinwoo, but then during the audition process, I also had to level up and play Jinwoo of all ranks before I could pass.” Following his Japanese character counterpart, Aleks Le revealed that he found out he landed the role completely unintentionally. “Last year, I was actually at Anime Expo with Aniplex for a different show. They’re usually quite secretive about roles when you’re auditioning for the English dubbing roles so we don’t know who we’re reading for. But, I ran into Producer Kaneko last year, and we got to talking. He asked me what roles I’d done recently, and I told him, and he was surprised at how much I did. Then, he was like, ‘And you’re also Sung Jinwoo!’ and I told him no. He told me he saw me on the cast list, and I asked if he had been looking at a fan casting. He replied, ‘Well, it could be, but I’m also the producer of the show, so I’m pretty certain?’ and I still didn’t believe him. I don’t think I ever fully believed I was playing Sung Jinwoo until I was in the studio recording for him four months later.”
Even after joining the project, it wasn’t easy to play Sung Jinwoo for either of the two voice actors. “The arise scene from episode 12 was the hardest to record for me,” began Ban. “The word is such an important and representative one for this whole franchise that I spent three hours staring at the script and practicing the word at home before the recording session.” Agreeing with him, Le joked that the two of them must have spent at least one hundred combined hours rehearsing the word. Even then, however, his most difficult scene was one closer to the end of the season, in episode 11. “Ban set such a high standard that every scene was quite difficult to record,” Le began earnestly. “But in episode 11, when Jinwoo has his big showdown against Igris, there was a lot of screaming [that made it the hardest to record]. I flew from LA to Dallas to record that day, screamed in the booth, then went to a fan convention straight afterwards. The next day, I couldn’t talk and was even coughing up blood,” Le revealed. Continuing on the topic, Ban shared a little about what the recording process is like in Japan. “We get to record only two times. The first time is a test run, and the second time is the final. There was a long line of dialogue leading up to the word arise, and a lot of meaning, so it was really important to get the emotions and nuance behind it straight away.” The trio also shared that, in Japan, the voice actors record to animated stick figures, and only know what scene is what based off of timestamps and episode numbers that are in the corners of the videos. For the English dub actors, they are given a script that’s created based off of the final product and written to match the movement of the animated lip flaps.
Aside from difficulties when it came time to record for the voice actors, there was also the production aspect of the show that took a lot of time and effort. “I’ve been producing for 16 years, but this was my first time producing something with an underlying IP,” began Kaneko. “I was reading the webtoon on my phone and had my own tempo while reading it, but I realized that the director also had his own pace, and other readers would have their own, too. I wondered a lot if my tempo was the correct one, but in the end, I just had to trust my gut and go for it. In the case of Solo Leveling, I built the framework – scheduling, budgeting, and benchmarking the quality per episode. Then, I handed off to the creatives and spoke with each section leader regarding the animations, the backgrounds, and the setup. From there, I just had to trust each person to do their part. Though we are sitting here with this cool and shiny title, this project is really the culmination of the hard work of all of the animators and team.”
Hard moments aside, there were also many rewarding moments for the trio while working on the show. Le gushed, “[My favorite moment in the season] was during episode six, when Jinwoo went through like four puberties at once and wakes up like ‘What’s up?’ There’s this one part in the show where Jinwoo cuts off someone’s head, and there wasn’t even a line animation drawn! They literally just lasso-tooled it off because of how clean a cut it was.” Ban also shared, “In that same moment [Le was talking about], there’s also a part the director and I discussed. We wanted to figure out how to capture this chaotic moment, and I suggested we record the same word over and over, and layer them together. Also, with the decapitation scene, the other actor was in the booth with me at the same time, so it was quite interesting.”
As for what’s ahead in season two, both Ban and Le are looking forward to continuing to level up with Sung Jinwoo. “Season one was a huge challenge, but also super exciting,” Le began. “I adore the animation work from A-1 and [working with] Aniplex and Crunchyroll. I was a little worried because I heard Ban goes crazy in the booth, but I also thought it was great because I got to go crazy in the booth, too.” Agreeing with his English dub counterpart, Ban also expressed his excitement at getting even crazier for the next season. “Up until now, it was all about solo leveling, but in season two, we will get to see even more levels and angles [to our character]. There’s more capacity to Sung Jinwoo’s evolution in season two.”
