The spirit of anime runs strong through Bandai Spirits’ office culture, where just going to the conference room is a dramatic experience.
In-series, anime’s giant robots are created in environments as cool and futuristic as the mecha themselves. Maybe it’s a secret fortress on the dark side of an alien moon, or a forgotten laboratory deep beneath the earth.
The figures and models of those robots, however, tend to be born in much more mundane settings, primarily the urban offices of Japanese toymakers. But while the job of anime merchandisers is to create a tangible piece of real-world life from anime art, sometimes that art ends up influencing their reality as well.
This pair of silver doors seen below is located in the Tokyo headquarters of Bandai Spirits, one of the many divisions of anime retailer Bandai. Sure, the zigzagging divider is kind of cool, but aside from that, they’re as dull as any other set of office doors…until an employee scans his keycard in order to unlock them.
昨日盛り上がったのを見ていた寺野さんが星矢の火時計の現物を見せてくれるというので、三田に引っ越した#BANDAI SPIRITSさんの新本社へ。入館ゲートが楽しいので何度も通過したくなること請け合い。#聖闘士星矢 https://t.co/5GsMYHhCSw
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天神TENJIN英貴™20周年画集発売中 (@TENJIN_hidetaka) January 25, 2019
In this video, posted to Twitter by anime mechanical designer and illustrator Hidetaka Tenjin (@TENJIN_hidetaka), an authorized tap of the panel next to the doors causing the surface of the portal to erupt in a display of technological light as the word “ACCEPT” appears, recognizing the employee’s right to enter. Then, as the doors slide open, animated lines on the floor usher Tenjin and his guide into the conference area beyond.
Though Tenjin refers to the doors as being the building entrance, it looks more likely that they’re the gateway to that particular floors’ workspace, and not directly connected to the street (and really, if it was, passersby would probably be clogging the sidewalk to watch the show). Bandai Spirits says the doors were installed back in August, but it wasn’t until October that the lights and animation were added, under the logic that the company thinks of the conference room as its base of operations, and so it felt like it should have a cool secret-base effect as you step inside.
Other Twitter users are, predictably, incredibly jealous, leaving comments like:
“SO AWESOME!”
“Too cool.”
“I should be used to seeing this sort of thing from watching anime, but with a real-life version, I just keep watching the video over and over.”
“So if you don’t have access, does the light turn red and a warning siren sounds?”
“The colors and design look just like something out of [anime series] Psycho-Pass.”
“Every guy watching this wishes his office had an entrance like that.”
Unfortunately, the doors’ lighting and effects look to be a custom project, so there’s no off-the-shelf version you can buy for your home or workplace…but then again, since Bandai Spirits is all about making cool anime stuff for grown-ups, maybe they should get working on a for-sale version for the rest of us.
Sources: Twitter/@TENJIN_hidetaka, IT Media
Images: Twitter/@TENJIN_hidetaka
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