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‹ Thursday, July 7, 2005 ›
I have belatedly discovered an "interview" with Eiko Tanaka from the NYAFF screening of Mind Game, available here. (It's more like a general write-up interspersed with a few interview snippets.) Hopefully someone will conduct a nice interview with Masaaki Yuasa tomorrow evening in Montreal, at the Canadian premiere.
We've seen a lot of up-and-coming animator Tetsuya Takeuchi lately, with some impressively dense and nuanced acting animation in Koji Masunari's latest endeavor, Kamichu, which characteristically takes a fresh approach to an otherwise pedestrian concept, infusing it with new vitality, and a bit of animation at the beginning of the latest ending of Pierrot's Bleach, all coming quite soon after his impressive feat in Honey and Clover. We're beginning to get a good idea of where Takeuchi is headed as an animator, and it looks like a good direction. Now deprived of Masashi Ishihama, Masunari has found a nice new lead animator.
There's also been a few Tadashi Hiramatsu items recently. He animated the curiously erotic pre-title section of Eureka Seven 11, as well as directing the latest ep of Aim 2.
A name that brings back memories from my early days in anime, Umanosuke Iida, returns with a TV concept of his own creation at Telecom, Tide-Line Blue, a decade after what is probably his best piece, the unfortunately unfinished Space Miners, which is the first item I remember buying/translating/subbing entirely on my own. I remember struggling to find information on the elusive creator of the show, as well as struggling to figure out how to romanize his name - Forthman Lunchfield? Fothmann Ranchfield? It only goes to reason that I couldn't find anything, because it turns out Iida just made it up. He was the creator. It seemed unusual.
Supposedly next month's issue of Ntype will have a feature on Naruto 133, complete with reproductions of Norio Matsumoto's key animation and an interview with Atsushi Wakabayashi. Unusual for this magazine. There will also be what promises to be an interesting discussion between, of all people, Osamu Kobayashi and Mamoru Hosoda. There have been rumours floating around about Hosoda joining Madhouse, so this gets me to wondering. Hosoda's film comes out on DVD two weeks from now.
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By the way, I haven't checked out Shinbo's new series Pani Poni Dash yet. I wonder when he'll do a 'serious' series again.
I was too disgusted by the thought of Shinbo doing another moe series to check it out... I also checked out Goro Taniguchi's new series because I liked Planetes, but apart from high production values it was 'eh'.
There's also new opening sequences coming up for Eureka Seven and Aquarion... Hiroyuki Okuno's SG 13 seems like he gave up trying to make the animation interesting but absolutely badly done, and focussed on correcting the faces... it was pretty good (for SG's standards, that is) I don't remember seeing Mori in there either.
Zettai Shounen is still as ero as ever, but it isn't entirely *bad*... I'm surprised how the ero angles and all just fly over some non-Japanese fan's heads.
Thanks for continuing to slog through SG. It's sad to see Okuno (and particularly Mori) dragged down like that.
You're certainly right about ZS. I hate to sound like a scrooge, it's just that making the decision to do that has fatally compromised my own willingness to trust that director.
And just what I was hoping is coming to Aquarion...
SG 14 had much better animation and Okuno doing KA but I don't remember where because I was 3/4-asleep.
I was watching Turn-A Gundam the other day and while most of the series had unfortunately clunky animation the last few eps had Kenichi Yoshida in them... Umanosuke Iida's apparently doing the concept for Gonzo's movie Gin iro no Kami no Agito (not about post-apocalyptic kamen riders, I'm afraid), there's a trailer of it somewhere. Sounds a little familiar though.
I haven't watched more than the first ep of Turn A. I'd assumed that if the first ep was clunky, the rest would follow in turn. And thanks for pointing out that movie. I don't exactly follow Gonzo's stuff.
http://www.catsuka.com/interf/tmp/ntype_naruto133_01.jpg
http://www.catsuka.com/interf/tmp/ntype_naruto133_02.jpg
Here are the interviews of Hosoda & Kobayashi :
http://www.catsuka.com/interf/tmp/ntype_hosoda.jpg
http://www.catsuka.com/interf/tmp/ntype_kobayashi.jpg
I don't follow Gonzo's stuff either, but I think it's their first ever movie so it was talked about more, and I mentioned it since Umanosuke Iida was being mentioned...
Now it's probably a coincidence, but Atsushi Wakabayashi storyboarded that ep of Otogizoushi with Ohira in it. Pity he didn't direct any of the eps
Talking about Gonzo, they've just made an opening for a japanese TV drama called Densha Otoko. The opening is a tribute to Daicon 4 (same music, graphic references ...), designed by Okama. Not as powerful as the original, but it's nice to see such a tribute. You can download it on Catsuka.
About Hiramatsu, Anime Style has just launched a column about him. Hope to see as many contents as for Yuasa :]
At least, a new trailer of Sugii's Stormy Night is available.
In other news ep 16 of E7 will be a Sayo Yamamoto ep... but no Dai Sato I'm afraid (though he's the overall scriptwriter). A different writer from all the eps so far will be doing it, Chiaki Konaka. He/she did some interesting stuff, I guess we'll see how it goes...
Still no Utsunomiya in Aquarion. No new OP yet. However, ep 16 was pretty interesting in that there was some more fluid animation and it was one of the better eps (not far from best).
The director was Keiichi Sasajima, who turned out to be an animator for the Kill Bill anime sequence and in Mind Game as well. He also co-storyboarded ep 3 of Taniguchi's thingamajiggy, which is sort of fun if one doesn't take it seriously...
Eureka Seven's new OP was headed by Yasushi Muraki. Nothing much, until the last bit. That last bit was very nice. It looked like a lot of effort went in... pity the song really, really didn't fit.
And I also quite enjoyed ep 2 of TLB. Not that I don't have my criticisms, but it's the only show in months I've felt interested enough in watching through to the end.
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