A few months before Group Tac's Night on the Galactic Railroad hit the theaters in June 1985, a film entitled Gongitsune or Gon, the Little Fox was released.

Group Tac had by that time made a name for themselves with Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi, which had begun airing in 1975 and become a runaway hit. Gon was released to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the show.

I just had a chance to watch Gon for the first time. You can do the same here. (Note: no subs) I never thought I'd see this. Such are the wonders of the internets.

It's a very nice little film. In style and spirit it's close to Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi, but with much better production quality. It's stylish and charming in an offbeat kind of way.

Gon reminds me a bit of the Unico pilot directed by Toshio Hirata - the sad tale of a forlorn little creature wandering the world alone looking for acceptance and finding only rejection. The Japanese are good at making heavy movies for kids like this. Ringing Bell is an extreme example of this kind of movie - ultra dark and bleak children's movie with superb artistry. Gon isn't nearly as dark as those Sanrio films, but it's got something of the same heavy, tragic theme. Like these, it's a creative, well-crafted children's film with a unique style. Its neutral and original style makes it hold up better than many films and OVAs from this era, whose use of popular styles makes them look dated now.

Kosei Maeda directed the film, Shinichi Ohtake was the animation director, and Tatsuro Kadoya was the art director. Each of them had worked extensively on Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi.

I was surprised to find that Group Tac isn't explicitly credited anywhere with producing the film, even though Atsumi Tashiro is the audio producer and all of the main staff are people who worked on Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi for Group Tac. So it's not technically a Group Tac production. Ai Kikaku Center is credited with planning, and a few other studios are credited with production assistance. Ai Kikaku Center is the studio that planned Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi. It's kind of confusing, because Gon feels like an extension of Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi, and that show is synonymous with Group Tac.

Gon might look to be just another generic kiddy animal flick, but unlike most of those lackluster productions, this one isn't just pure emotional manipulation and melodrama; it's actually pretty satisfying as visual storytelling. It has an original style and atmosphere.

Gon is refreshing because it doesn't have the typical anime look or feel. It's got a style and vibe that was unique to Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi - poetic and mythical, yet whimsical and playful. Classical and elegant, yet modern and edgy. Characters creatively stylized and unlike anything else being done in anime.

The story of Gongitsune is about a little fox who is left to fend for himself after his mother is killed by hunters. A fire drives him from his home, and he eventually finds his way to a human village that he makes his new home. There, he plays tricks on the villagers until one day he does something that causes him to regret his actions and change his ways.

The story meanders randomly towards its conclusion rather than having a conventional story arc with predictable dramatic milestones. (In this and other ways, it's reminiscent of another good Tac film: Bonobono.)

We just follow the fox around as he goes about his daily business of fooling with the villagers. We observe village life - kids running around playing, women washing potatoes, men going fishing. Eventually, after we've come to know the characters, things come to a head in the natural course of things. It's a nicely effortless, unforced story.

An amusing sequence shows Gon walking behind a pregnant woman on his hind legs, holding his tail in front of him as if he were pregnant too. Gon is mesmerized when he discovers the blacksmith, with his loud clanging sounds, and he comes by regularly to watch in fascination. Most of the villagers don't take Gon's antics too seriously. They're more amused than anything. One of them is a jerk, though, so Gon sneaks into his warehouse to eat his potatoes. The interaction between the fox and the humans is entertaining but also moving. Gon is lonely and attracted to humans, but the tension between wild animal and human keeps them apart. He's a playful trickster but also lonely and sad.

The part where Gon loses his mother at the beginning of the film was actually added for the movie. It wasn't in the book. The reason becomes clear later on. Gon is traumatized by the loss of his mother. He relives her loss when he sees a tree struck by lightning erupt in flame before his eyes. One day, he plays a trick on a nice villager who protected Gon. Later on, he discover that it may have caused the death of the villager's mother.

This movie goes to the root of the Japanese myth of the trickster, shapeshifting fox. Gon is a regular fox, not a magical creature. Foxes are playful and curious creatures. Gon is irresistibly drawn to humans, and delights in exploring their world. Sometimes he's naughty, but more often than not he means no harm.

They could easily have handled this material in one episode of Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi, but they put a lot of tender loving care into the details of the production to make it feel like a movie and not just a glorified TV episode. The put extra-special care in animating natural elements like flowers, insects, fire and fish. The natural world acts as the substrate of the film's narrative.

Many of the film's most beautiful moments are simple moments observing life going on - dragonflies dipping their abdomens into the water of the river, kids running around playing. Or just watching the fox wandering around the environs, exploring the landscape created by humans - the old stairs leading to the temple, the tattered footbridge across the creek. Kosei Maeda is good at bringing alive the little details of everyday life in old Japan.

My favorite thing about the film is that it's good visual storytelling. Pretty much the whole first 20 minutes are pure visual storytelling without any dialogue. There's a particularly memorable sequence where the little fox falls into a river and is swept over a series of rapids down from the mountains into the valley where he discovers the village. The rapids are geometrical and stylized, showing the fox travelling down a labyrinthine series of channels between rocks.

After this adventure, the little fox floats down the river on a log. The scene where he floats into the village has a lovely atmosphere - the air is filled with dragonflies, the sky is purple with sunset, the water glitters, the village in the distance is like a painting.

The backgrounds have a kind of picture book quality - stylized and formal, like in Night on the Galactic Railroad, as opposed to purely naturalistic. I like the peculiar mix of real and cartoonish in Gon. The eels are drawn and move ultra-realistically, but then the villager capturing the eel has a huge cartoon head.

The designs are simple and cartoony. I like that Gon's design is cute but also kind of bizarre - those huge vertical eyes, his unchanging expression. He looks the same whether he's sad or happy. He looks cartoonish, spits out pumpkin seeds like a human, and even occasionally walks on his hind legs and dances for fun, but otherwise maintains a completely straight face, like an animal would. I can imagine another production would have had him doing all these crazy faces. His straight face keeps the character grounded in his animal-ness.

The heads of the humans are big circles, the eyes a little dot, and the hands a few squiggles. They're cute in their own peculiar way, but diametrically opposed to 'anime' type cuteness. It's a kind of cuteness that was Tac's exclusive purview. Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi is an astounding achievement as a repository of character design ideas. Every one of its 1000-some episodes had a different set of designs. Group Tac was better than any studio in Japan at coming up with amusing and creative new character designs that weren't just based on industry template.

The animation does a good job of bringing alive the antics of the fox as he runs around exploring things. I like how he skids from side to side out of excess momentum as he's running away, and he does an adorable little dance imitating the humans. The animation looks basic, but it can be quite detailed at the right moment. For example, the eel is animated twisting around with considerable care to make it look realistic, and the thunder and fire is quite realistic and detailed in comparison with the very stylized and unrealistic fox and humans.

The voice-acting is natural and laid back, and doesn't have the typical anime voice-acting sound, thanks no doubt to audio director and Group Tac president Atsumi Tashiro.

Yasunori Tsuchida's jaunty, offbeat score is a great match with the directing and helps give the film its unique tone.

Kosei Maeda

Kosei Maeda was born in 1950. He joined Mushi Production in 1969. He started working on Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi in 1979. He animated and directed no less than 90 episodes for the show over the next 15 years. You can see quite a few of these up on Youtube here. You can also see a lot of those of Shinichi Ohtake.

After Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi was cancelled in 1995, Kosei Maeda continued making films. He directed features, made some indie shorts on his own, and made a few short films in the same vein as Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi for a series produced for Niigata broadcaster BSN called Tonton Attato: Niigata Mukashibanashi (2005-2006).

Kosei Maeda also holds exhibits of his paintings on a yearly basis. You can see some of his paintings here.

He was the storyboarder (and animator?) of the Pliocene Coast scene in Group Tac's masterpiece, Night on the Galactic Railroad.

Kosei Maeda has his own personal home page, where he has kindly uploaded not only a list of his works but also four indie short films he made, and some making material. You can see six pages of the storyboard he drew for Gongitsune. You can see the character designs and a bit of storyboard he did for the Sakura Daimyoujin episode of Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi, and you can watch the actual episode here. This episode incidentally also features backgrounds by his longtime associate Tatsuro Kadoya.

The Flying Person was his first independent film, made in 1993. It's perhaps his most unusual and most beautiful short film. It's a brief visual poem about a woman, birds, and flight. He makes good use of watercolor washes to create a beautiful shifting array of lines and colors in the scene where the bird transforms into a woman.

The Ibis was part of a 2003 Mushi Pro omnibus about the Japanese eras. It feels the most reminiscent of the show and Gongitsune - the simple, small-proportioned characters with round heads, and the setting in the Edo period. It's a little story about a trio of sisters who capture a hapless ibis to feed to their sick mother, because legend has it that ibis meat cures sickness. But they're stopped along the way by some government officials and get into trouble. The drawings of the government officials and the samurai have a nice caricatural quality. Everything here including the backgrounds was drawn by him, so it all feels very hand drawn. The drawings are loose and the lines uneven. The soft texture of the screen is nice to look at, kind of reminiscent of Ghiblies. I love the bizarre grinning stray dog.

A Cat's Sunday was made for fun in 2004. It's a fun, silly little music video set to lyrics written by Kosei Maeda himself. It's about the delight of staying home relaxing with your cat on a Sunday. Until your cat gets tired of your bored taunting and exacts revenge, that is! It's got the same visual look as The Ibis - no backgrounds, only a spare coat of light watercolor wash, and simple characters drawn with a few loose lines.

The Snow Woman of Ginzandaira was one of the films he made for Tonton Attato: Niigata Mukashibanashi during 2005-2006. Only a clip is available, but you can also see some of his watercolor character and background roughs for the short. It appears to tell the story of a hunter in the snowy north who becomes involved with a demon disguised as a beautiful woman. The designs here are not quite as cartoony as those of The Ibis, and the mood and story are more serious and atmospheric. The color tone of the film is subdued - black, white, and lots of grey and tan.

Group Tac

I don't know how it came to be that Group Tac isn't credited in Gon, because the main staff were people who worked at Group Tac on Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi. Perhaps they were temporarily dispatched to work on the film, or else just did it as a side-project at Group Tac.

It's tragic what has happened to Group Tac. Following the death of president and spiritual leader Atsumi Tashiro in July, they filed for bankruptcy in August. It's a sad way for a great studio to come to an end.

Group Tac was one of the best and most original and artist-driven studios in Japan. They produced a number of masterpieces over the years, and had a style all their own informed of the artistic sensibility of their artists, notably among them co-founder Gisaburo Sugii, who directed two of the studio's best films: Jack and the Beanstalk (1974) and Night on the Galactic Railroad (1985).

Group Tac and Madhouse were the two big Japanese artist-driven studios in my mind. They didn't always produce artsy stuff - Tac produced lots of manga adaptations and things like Street Fighter II - but they left behind a handful of very unique anime films that no other studio would have dared to produce. Their occasional vanity project showed that you could produce genuinely creative work that gave artists freedom to do what they do best, and still make it as a studio.

Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi is definitely their biggest legacy as a studio. It was a huge hit, one of the longest running anime TV series ever. Most importantly, I like this show because it was artistic and idiosyncratic in the extreme, produced with seemingly nigh-complete freedom on the part of its artists, yet remained accessible and appealing to audiences. It shows that you don't have to fall back on popular manga or trendy story tropes and design styles to be a hit. In many ways, I find it to be the ideal relationship between producer and viewer. Artist could be satisfied of having creative control, and audience was willing to appreciate what the artist threw at them.

Production studios that worked on this movie

Like most productions, the animation was produced by a collection of different studios. Notably, Tsukasa Tannai of Studio Gallop heads the animator list. (He worked on numerous Miyazaki productions.)

Studio Gallop (home page) was formed in 1978 by Akio Wakana, who had started out working at Mushi Production before moving to Tokyo Animation Film and then leaving to form his own studio. Studio Gallop was exclusively devoted to photography up until 1983, when animators and directors from Telecom including Tsukasa Tannai, Toshio Yamauchi and Keiji Hayakawa left to join Gallop. They were a subcontractor for a few years before they began producing their own shows. They produced Fujiko F. Fujio's Kiteretsu Daihyakka and well-loved shoujo shows like Hime-chan no Ribon and Akazukin Chacha. More recently, they produced the TV special Light of the River directed by Shinei animator Tetsuo Hirakawa. Other staff involved with Gallop over the years include Hatsuki Tsuji, Hajime Watanabe, Nobuyuki Tokinaga, Kazuyuki Kobayashi and Kuniyuki Ishii. Gallop also helped out Group Tac on Touch and Hiatari Ryoko around the same time as Gongitsune

Anime Friend was a subcontractor founded in 1977 that ran until 1990. They were almost exclusively involved in Tatsunoko productions, being something of a subsidiary of Tatsunoko. Anime Friend was one of the pioneers of outsourcing to Korea.

Studio Lions was the inbetweening subsidiary of Studio Giants. Studio Giants was founded in 1975 and Studio Lions was founded the next year in 1976. Studio Giants is best remembered among anime fans for their work in the 1980s. They produced episodes with lots of crazy movement on shows like Sasuga no Sarutobi. Studio Giants had numerous talented animators during the 1980s included Masayuki, Tadashi Shida, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Shoichi Masuo, Satoshi Ishino and Toshiyuki Tsuru.

Magic Bus was founded in 1977 by Tetsu Dezaki, who had worked at Gisaburo Sugii's studio Art Fresh, the studio that produced Goku's Big Adventure for Mushi Pro in 1967. (Tetsu Dezaki also happens to be Osamu Dezaki's older brother.) Magic Bus started out as a subcontractor but went on to produce their own shows. I personally remember them best for the small handful of OVAs and movies they produced in the 1980s: Carol, Kasei Yakyoku, Open the Door and There were 11. We have Magic Bus to thank for Mad Bull 34. Ahem. They've been a prolific studio other than this as a subcontractor on other studios' shows. One of their most recent projects was the new Cobra series.

Gongitsune main credits

1985, 76 minutes

Original story by Nankichi Niimi (1913-1943)

Director: Kosei Maeda

Animation Director: Shinichi Ohtake

Art Director: Tatsuro Kadoya

Audio Director: Atsumi Tashiro

Music: Yasunori Tsuchida

Script: Naohisa Ito

Animators:

Tsukasa Tannai
Tsukasa Abe
Takaya Ono
Tetsuya Yamamoto
Toru Sato
Shinya Takahashi
Mitsuru Suzuki
Toyoko Hashimoto
Sanae Ohkubo
Yutaka Oka
Nobuyuki Koyanagi
Atsushi Ishiguro
Ikue Matsuzaki
Hiroko Sawada
Yumiko Shimamura
Mieko Takagi
Takeshi Okiyama
Yumiko Kaneumi

Animation assistance:
Tatsunoko Doga Kenkyujo
Magic Bus
Studio Lions
Radical Party

Production assistance:
Studio Gallop
Anime Friend

BONUS: A few of Kosei Maeda's characters from Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi.

I just discovered Takuya Inaba's Minna no Uta video from this summer for actress Juri Ueno's song Egao no Hana (The Smile Flower).

It's a delightful piece of animation, befitting an artist working at Robot, the studio that gave us Kato Kunio's Oscar-winning House of Small Cubes. They're one of the coolest new studios on the scene in Japan, doggedly going their own way in the vast shadow of the industry, making colorful, lovingly animated, creative little confections. Their films have a sense of wonder and whimsical fancy that sets them apart from every other studio in Japan.

I love this film's unique style. And it's sumptuously animated, unlike many Minna no Uta animated videos, which often aren't satisfying as animation. The characters are great - the designs are cute and appealing, and they're animated with great care. The domino sequence at the beginning is amusing and well done. The backgrounds are beautiful - early on the street looks like a child's drawing, and later on the forest is painted in bright, colorful strokes.

Then there are the little touches here and there that are unexpected and fun like the faucet in the sky that fills the ocean with water, and those little round guys walking on the fence having their own mini parade. There are strangle little characters doing things everywhere you look. And I just love the television cat with the chicken family inside.

I like the story of the film, too. The sun, the moon and a cloud come alive to help take a lost fairy back to her flower house. Behind the colorful fantasy, it's about cheering up a little girl who's feeling down in the dumps and making that 'smile' flower bloom.

Takuya Inaba was born in 1976 and graduated from the Kyoto Seika University Faculty of Design. He has been active as an animator since at least 2001, when he made an independent film called Haru-chan. He was hired by Robot in 2002, presumably on the merit of his film. Since then he's been quite active making short pieces of animation here and there on commission, as well as drawing picture books and other things.

He had already made a Minna no Uta music video in 2006 with Koi Tsubomi, which again has two layers - the song appears to sing of a girl who had to leave her boyfriend for the big city, while this is translated in the visuals into a little girl being seen off at a train station by her polar bear friend. The visuals are soft and mellow and pleasant, but it's not as creative and original as his most recent video.

The next year, in 2007, he directed a music video entitled Song of Sunrise for the band Sukima Switch. It shows a little girl and a hulking robot walking around in a desert landscape. I like the designs here much better, and the story is also quite interesting. It hints at a back story involving the robot either escaping from a robot city or being the only survivor, but doesn't make everything obvious. I like how it leaves it to your imagination to connect the dots.

Just before Egao no Hana, Takuya Inaba completed a 7-minute independent short film entitled Kuro. You can see a few shots from it on his home page. It's in black and white and appears to feature more fun creature animation like what was seen in Egao no Hana. Hopefully it's in the same vein as this film, but even more densely packed with nonsense antics from odd creatures, because this one left me wanting more of that sort of thing - something even crazier and more freewheeling, really letting loose with his unique style.

Takuya Inaba's blog and home page.

The manga Sukeban Deka about the yo-yo-wielding delinquent detective was adapted into a two-episode OVA in 1991 after having been adapted into live-action movies in the late 80s. The live-action stuff appears to have been done by Toei, but the OVAs seem to have been the product of a consortium that outsourced much of the work to different studios, among them chiefly Osaka's Anime R.

Anime R is a subcontracting studio founded in Osaka in the late 1970s by Moriyasu Taniguchi and Hiromi Muranaka. It was one of the first Japanese animation studios to be located outside of Tokyo. They are best remembered for their contribution to raising the quality of Ryosuke Takahashi's first two 'real robot' shows for Sunrise Dougram and Votoms. They had a unique style in the 1980s, with exciting and detailed animation like no other studio. They were one of the most relied-upon studios for mecha animation. That flavor receded in the 1990s, after many of the 1980s staff left, but they're still a prolific and relied-upon studio.

The credits don't mention Anime R. But it's obvious that they're involved if you read between the lines. There are a bunch of Anime R animators involved.

Anime R president Moriyasu Taniguchi is credited as an animator in Sukeban Deka alongside Anime R animators Hiroyuki Okiura, Toru Yoshida, Takahiro Komori, Takashi Fumiko, Masahide Yanagisawa, Hiroshi Osaka, Hiromi Muranaka, Masahiko Itojima, Takahiro Kimura and Kazuchika Kise. Masahiro Kase, another Anime R member at the time, is the sub-character designer and the main animation director (sakkan).

This OVA thus seems like a good place to get a sense of what kind of work Anime R was doing at this mid-period in their history, after their most famous period but before all of the cool animators had quite left. I've heard of Anime R forever and known who was involved there, but I couldn't put my thumb on their defining look.

Nobuteru Yuuki is the character designer of Sukeban Deka, but he's not the sakkan, so it doesn't have that patented Nobuteru Yuuki density of animation and highly worked drawings. Masahiro Kase was the sakkan of episode 1, assisted by Yuka Kudo and Hiroyuki Okuno. All three are credited as sakkans in episode 2.

The drawings in Sukeban Deka are actually all over the place, maybe not as much as Hakkenden, but still pretty uneven. That's actually one of the things I most liked about these two OVAs. The story is otherwise quite stupid and obviously not meant to be taken seriously. It's a kind of shoujo action mystery, and it's mildly entertaining, but nothing about the characters or story ever grips you. It's about a cute girl in a sailor fuku kicking ass, and hey, that's enough for me. It's a shoujo anime, but it feels more like a shounen anime. The action scenes are actually fairly nice, with an appealing looseness and rawness appropriate to the style of this period, so it's a pretty decent action show.

The main characters aren't drawn in a particularly interesting way, but the crowd drawings I really like. The faces have a surprisingly appealing, quasi-realistic style that kind of comes out of nowhere. They look nothing like the protagonists. They seem to have had more freedom with the sub-characters. The bystanders vaguely remind me of the bystanders by Koichi Arai in 3x3 Eyes from the same year. I like that they don't look like the sort of cliche'd anime/shoujo designs you'd expect in an adaptation of a shoujo manga. I don't know who would have been responsible for these. I thought maybe Masahiro Kase, since he's credited as the sub character designer in episode 2, but he's not credited with that in ep 1.

I know Masahiro Kase had started out at Nippon Animation in 1978 and worked on Pelline (1978), Anne (1979), Tom Sawyer (1980) and Lucy (1982) before leaving to join Anime R. While there, Kase was one of the main animators of Votoms alongside Anime R animator Mouri Kazuaki. Kase left Anime R around 1990 to form his own subcontracting 'studio' called Studio Curtain, from which he went on to continue to be involved in Nippon Animation's World Masterpiece Theater shows. He was character designer of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair as well as Mahoujin Guruguru.

Tadashi Hiramatsu had joined animation subcontractor Nakamura Production sometime around 1986 and done his first key animation in 1987 in Mister Ajikko, where he met Masahiro Kase, who was the character designer and chief sakkan of the show. Hiramatsu joined Studio Curtain when it was founded in 1990 and from there worked on the WMT for a bit. I suppose that's the reason Hiramatsu is involved, because he never worked at Anime R. Normally, Kase was at Curtain by the time this was done, so presumably he got the work because of his Anime R connections. Strangely, Studio Curtain gets a small 'assistance' mention in the credits, but there's no mention whatsoever of Anime R.

Anyway, the only sequence that I felt right away I could pin down to an animator was the opening scene of episode 1, where the girl is chased through the market and into the alleyway by the group of thugs. I'm guessing this part was done by Hiroyuki Okiura. What makes me think so is first of all just the skill of the drawings, layouts and movements. It's not super-detailed like his more recent work, but every detail is just right - the folds of the clothes, the way the girl's shoulders arch up realistically when she's struggling. Little things like this just show the hand of someone who has an uncommon skill at accurately visualizing the body in motion and being able to execute it in a way that feels nice as animation.

Also, I get the feeling I sense a bit of a distant echo of both Akira and Peter Pan in the way the baddies are drawn - their mouth, their expression, the way they gesticulate - which Okiura had just participated in recently. There's even an overhead shot here that has a similar layout as a shot in the mob scene he did in Akira. The smirk of the baddies and the way of drawing the eyes reminds me of Peter Pan, while Akira comes through in the more detailed folds of the clothing, the Takashi Nakamura-esque faces and hands, and the more realistic poses. It actually doesn't feel much like the great action sequence he did in The Hakkenden OVA 1 around the same time, but it's the only sequence in the episode that stands out to me as having good enough animation that seems a fit for him.

I can't pin down any other sequences to any particular animator - except for one. It's the main reason I sought out this episode. Discovering the Anime R connection was actually a surprise and a bonus. The sequence in question sticks out something incredible. I've seen a lot of crazy animation from Japan in my day, but this one was up there with the craziest. And it's ironic because up until a while ago I'd never heard of the animator who did it.

It's the action sequence on the school grounds, which you can see here. It was animated by an animator named Masayuki Kobayashi, who did a lot of similarly styled action in Ranma 1/2 around the same time.

Just look at these drawings. You don't notice that they're this insanely deformed when the animation is in motion - all you notice is the incredibly awesome effect the drawings achieve. Like many good animators, Masayuki Kobayashi is a great action animator who knows how to effectively insert deformed images at the right moment to heighten the impact of the animation. People have criticized Norio Matsumoto's animation on Naruto by picking out a single drawing that seems deformed out of an amazing shot of animation, and criticizing him for not being able to draw. Not only is it not true - he can draw really well - it betrays astounding ignorance of how animation is made. The skilled use of deformation within a movement like this is something not many animators can pull off. All the more so when it comes to really extreme deformation of the kind Masayuki Kobayashi busts out here.

As soon as Masayuki Kobayashi's action scene starts, it's like a different show. Everything is suddenly extremely fast and fluid - and rubbery. I love the way the characters limbs seem to bend under the very momentum of their superhuman leaps and lunges. The characters leap and stretch something incredible. It's really exciting to watch, as an action sequence should be. It's full of verve, momentum, punch, and insanity. It's the kind of action that made me fall in love with anime in the first place. You don't find this kind of action animation anywhere else in the world.

And the particular style of Masayuki Kobayashi's animation seems like something that couldn't have emerged at any other period. It seems the product of the various tendencies floating around in the air at the time. You've got a bit of Akira-esque realism, leavened with Satoru Utsunomiya's elastic style, multiplied by the wackiness of mid-80s TV action animation from wild children like Masayuki and Hideki Tamura. I like that it's not just a mere copy of Yoshinori Kanada or Satoru Utsunomiya - he's cooked together all these various tendencies into his own crazy stew. We're seeing a resurgence of the influence of Yoshinori Kanada these days among young animators like Jun Arai, but what I don't like is that it feels like they're just imitating him outright instead of coming up with their own style like Masayuki Kobayashi did.

I don't know where he came from or where he went. This is all I've been able to find that he's done:

Ranma 1/2 Nettohen 2, 4, 6, 10, 14, 18, 21, 25, 28, 31, 39 (1990)
The Hakkenden 2, 3, 5 (1990-92)
Sukeban Deka 1 (1991)
Rojin Z (1991)
Run, Melos! (1992)
Gunm (1993)
Nana Toshi Monogatari (1994)
X2 (1999)
Jin-Roh (2000)

Another scene I liked was the brawl in the arcade near the end of episode 1. The drawing style is really distinctive and totally unlike everything else in the episode, but I can't identify who did it.

It had some fast, fluid and excitingly animated action, without being wildly deformed like the Masayuki Kobayashi scene. It's a classic example of the sort of animation I most like in the productions of this early 90s period like Hakkenden. In fact, the movement seems suspiciously similar to the demon army scene animated by Hiroyuki Okiura in episode 1 of Hakkenden. It's got the same style of pared down drawings combined with really quick action with lots of movement constantly going on. I started wondering, maybe Okiura did this part?? But I notice the same kind of movement near the end of episode 2, and Okiura isn't credited in that episode, so I suspect both may have been done by the same animator.

This is another good example of the unique style of movement that so many animators were doing at this time. Realistic, but not Jin-Roh realistic - more fun and exciting and action-packed. Everyone seemed to be trying their hand at this style. One of the things I remember seeing pretty often in the early 1990s was this thing where the arms kind of hung down limply and wobbled around, as if they were asleep. I loved that. This whole style faded away pretty quickly moving into the mid-90s.

The reason I checked this out was to see Masayuki Kobayashi's work, because I'd heard he was involved. But when I checked the credits on the AD Vision release, I didn't find his name. I found only one "Masanori Kobayashi". I figured it had to be him and the translator just goofed a little. Then I noticed other names that seemed suspiciously familiar. Hironori Okuno? That couldn't be Hiroyuki Okuno, could it? Satoshi Hiramatsu? I only know one Hiramatsu, and that's Tadashi Hiramatsu. I was really curious to know what was going on, so I got my hands on the Japanese credits and did a comparison.

My jaw dropped at what I found. Now, Japanese names are a pain to translate. Often, if you don't have information directly from the person in question, you can't know for sure how a name is read. After all these years, there are still names I'm not sure of. And there are names that I thought I knew how to read for many years that turned out to be read differently. So in that sense, I don't really blame the translator. But on the other hand, there are some names whose readings are clear. The translator who did these credits didn't just goof, he f*ed up big time. In the case of 'Hironori Okuno', "Nori" isn't even a possible reading of that character. Worse than that, Tadashi Hiramatsu appears in both episodes, and is translated differently in each episode - Satoshi Hiramatsu in the first episode and Eiji Hiramatsu in the second episode.

Here are the credits, with corrections, to serve as an example of how important it is to properly translate credits, and how misleading and useless a bad translation can be. Who would have known that Koji Ayazaka was in fact Hiroshi Osaka? But hey, at least they translated the credits and didn't omit the key animators. That's already better than most releases I've seen.

Sukeban Deka Episode 1 animators

Sukeban Deka Episode 2 animators

There's been a spate of more deaths in the industry. I don't know whether it's because we are more informed in this day and age about these things or because it's been a particularly bad year for luminaries in the anime industry, but I'm getting tired of hearing about people who died.

Two producers who had a major impact on the industry have died.

Yoshinobu Nishizaki (1934-2010), the controversial producer of the Yamato series, died after falling off his yacht and drowning. This comes just before the release of the live-action remake of Yamato. I just wrote about his first attempt to revive the franchise with Yamato 2520.

Koichi Motohashi (1930-2010), the president of Nippon Animation and executive producer of Nippon Animation's World Masterpiece Theater series, died of MDS, a bone marrow disease. Nippon Animation and its pre-incarnation Zuiyo Eizo pioneered the yearlong animated literary adaptation concept in Japan, which was quite unheard of and revolutionary at the time.

The World Masterpiece Theater was instrumental in getting me back into anime fandom as an adult, so it has special meaning to me. One of the first things I ever wrote about anime was about the WMT. I doubt I would have gotten into anime as much without the WMT. Other obituaries merely recite a list of shows produced by Nippon Animation, so I thought I would go into a little more detail about why I felt Koichi Motohashi's studio was significant.

I don't know much about Koichi Motohashi himself. All I know is that without his studio, many of my favorite anime wouldn't have gotten produced. On top of that, his studio represented something unique in anime, something no other studio was doing.

Their productions were different from that of any other studio, with a more international and family-oriented bent deliberately tailored to make them safe for audiences the world over. Their productions were intended from the start for a global audience, which is why most of their shows like Maya the Honeybee (1975, German op) were aired in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. They also collaborated with Europe on numerous productions. Maya the Honeybee was a co-production with Germany and Little El Cid (1984, French op) was a co-production with Spain. Where most studios' productions feel very much like anime no matter what they're doing, most of Nippon Animation's productions felt very deliberately un-Japanese and international.

Their shows seemed deliberately aloof from the trends of the industry, at least in the 70s and 80s (their policy seems to have changed in the 1990s). They followed their own muse. Their shows were somehow kinder and gentler than anything else being produced at the time. They had a kind of European sensibility in the look and feel. The designs weren't as anime influenced. The directing was laid back and easygoing. Their shows weren't about heavy drama or robot action or saving the world. They were lighthearted and easy to watch, with a breezy charm.

Their early work shared a particular styling that is still appealing today, with these simple designs and basic layouts. Sindbad's Adventures (1975, German op) seems to be a good example of the early Nippon Animation style, with the spare, simple characters reminiscent of Yoichi Kotabe's drawing style. Sindbad was designed by Shuichi Seki, who would go on to be one of the studio's main character designers. It's partly his design sensibility that created that Nippon Animation look.

Jacky the Bearcub (1977) is another good show from their early period. (French opening with animation by Toshiyasu Okada from ep 1) It was designed by Yasuji Mori, also with these simple designs. It couldn't have been produced by any other studio, with its realistic yet adorable bearcubs animated in a realistic way and shown as actual wild animals, not anthropomorphized bears. A young Indian boy befriends the bear cub, but the story remains realistic in concept - the cub is a wild animal who eventually has to return to nature. Rascal did this material in an even more realistic way. It wasn't just a happy-go-lucky fantasy land; it taught youngsters about the tension between human society and the natural world of the animals. Nippon Animation's shows were wholesome but grounded and realistic about the world.

Among mid-period works, Spaceship Sagittarius (1986) was memorable, and a new direction for the studio. It was like nothing else out there, yet somehow still quintessentially Nippon Animation. The odd and homely alien designs were kind of refreshing for not looking like typical anime. The humor of the show was subtle and witty, the stories smart satire like a bizarro version of the real world. It was a quirky, fun kind of sci-fi that's never been seen before or after - not about pitched battles and space operatics, but sci-fi as whimsical fantasy and a satirical lens on our world.

Chibi Maruko-chan (1990) was another one of their more memorable productions. It signaled a change for one because it was based on a manga. Momoko Sakura's manga was about the everyday life of a grade-schooler growing up in Japan, but told with wry, ironic humor from the perspective of an adult reminiscing about the experience. It had a certain something that belied the childish style and made it appealing to the whole family. It was simultaneously realistic in the details of the specifically Japanese experience of growing up, which made it appealing to me, and stylized in the designs and look in a unique way, not a typical anime way.

Chibi Maruko-chan was produced with the assistance of Ajia-do, which is the studio that then employed the person who did many of Chibi Maruko-chan's creative opening and ending sequences - Masaaki Yuasa. Nippon Animation capitalized on the show's success by producing two Chibi Maruko-chan films around the same time. Another subcontracting studio long affiliated with Nippon Animation was Oh Production.

The 90s saw them shifting in style, keeping up with the times, adopting more popular styles and doing more obviously Japan-centric work based on manga and the like. The range was much broader than before. There was fantasy adventure like Pigmalio (1990, op) and Yamato Takeru (1994, op) and Mahoujin Guruguru (1994, op), cute shows about daily life in Japan like Mikan Enikki (1992, op) and Mama Likes Poyopoyosaurus (1995, op) and then unclassifiable oddball slapstick shows like Shonen Papuwa-kun (1992, op) and Tonde Boorin (1994, op) and Hanasaka Tenshi-kun (2000, op).

I watched a lot of their shows that came out in the early 1990s. They were actually quite original and different and appealing. Poyopoyosaurus is one I particularly remember liking - a family drama with a fun, hip contemporary vibe and style. Mahoujin Guruguru was also fun, a crazy slapstick fantasy adventure with cute SD characters. Tonde Boorin was just strange - a bizarre story about a superhero pig. Nippon Animation had clearly changed their policy in a very drastic way, striving to create series that would appeal to young viewers in Japan by following the stylistic trends of the day rather than being conceived for international audiences. I think a lot of these shows were quite fun and appealing, so in a way it was an improvement, while in other aspects they lost something that set them apart. It was still Nippon Animation in that the shows were good family entertainment. The style was just more trendy.

I didn't watch much of what they made post-2000, but I noticed there are some very bizarre items like Hanasaka Tenshi-kun that seem inconceivable for the company that produced 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother.

Then there are all of the World Masterpiece Theater shows. Nippon Animation is rightly remembered for the WMT. The concept of a serious yearlong animated literary adaptation was a real innovation and produced some of the best long-form storytelling ever made in TV animation.

The WMT was a staple of Fuji TV's Sunday evening programming for more than 20 years, bringing to the screen a new classic of world literature every year. Their shows took a new approach towards animation - neither shoujo nor shounen, not just for children but also for the parents, without superheros, robots, magical girls, or ninjas. The one thing that united the WMT was that they were about everyday life: the excitement, drama, sorrow, happiness and transcendent beauty to be found in the prosaic things we tend to take for granted.

Isao Takahata directed three series that launched the WMT and set the tone for the rest of the series - Heidi, Girl of the Alps (1974), 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother (1976) and Anne of Green Gables (1979). They are also easily the best in the series, and for having produced these series alone, Koichi Motohashi's studio would have a firm place in anime history. They're unsurpassed masterpieces in the TV animation format, achieving depth of characterization, power of storytelling and realism of detail and directing that will probably never be surpassed in TV animation (if only because nobody seems willing or capable of doing down-to-earth realistic stories like these). See end of post for an ancient writeup I did on what makes Marco great.

Takahata & co. were a tough act to follow. None of the subsequent shows had quite the depth, attention to detail and assiduous realism of Takahata's shows. Despite the later shows still having the trappings of being realistic drama, the WMT evolved in a subtly different direction fairly quickly after Anne. However, the early series that followed Marco, namely Rascal Raccoon (1977) and Perrine (1978), did an admirable job of creating a similar level of quality and realism under the direction of Seiji Endo, Saito Hiroshi and Shigeo Koshi, who would become the main directing figures at Nippon Animation in the ensuing years.

Rascal Raccoon in particular, despite sounding extremely lame going by the title, was one of the most affecting real-life stories in the series. It was even more realistic than Marco in the sense that it wasn't a grandiose continent-trotting adventure. It was just a small-scale story about a boy in rural America in the early 1900s and his day-to-day experiences. It also happened to benefit from a considerable amount of animation from one Hayao Miyazaki.

Tom Sawyer hit the air in 1980. It was an entertaining romp that is actually memorable if light and insubstantial compared to the previous outings. It benefited from great animation by Yoshifumi Kondo. It was an entertaining version of Mark Twain's classic, although the satirical fire and brilliant prose was lost in translation.

The mid-80s shows that followed were more melodramatic and less hard-edged, dropping the brutal neo-realism of Marco to create more accessible and child-friendly period dramas. I've only watched one series in its entirety from this middle period - Pollyanna, which seems typical of the WMT in this middle period with its saccharine tone and overwrought, unrealistic melodrama.

In the early 90s, the tone began shifting again, presumably due to dropping ratings. The first shift was the most drastic one in the series - Peter Pan. Based on literature, maybe, but a far cry from the realistic material that was the whole purpose of the series at the beginning. Yet it turned out to be one of the best WMT shows. It had strong animation thanks to Takashi Nakamura, who was fresh from his stint on Akira and itching to do something freer and more imaginative, and the animators he brought in (viz these old posts). It also happened to stand up fairly well on its own as an entertaining adaptation of this classic story that, despite veering from the story, did its spirit justice in tone and style.

Unfortunately the later shows didn't hold up as well. They desperately tried various measures like creating an action drama that wasn't based on a work of literature with Tico of the Seven Seas (1994), going against the premise of the series, and then switching the gender of Hector Malot's Sans Famille (1996) to a girl to play up to audiences. But ratings kept dropping and the series was finally cancelled afterwards.

Tico of the Seven Seas was, in itself, a fairly entertaining and well-produced series that the whole family could enjoy. Romeo's Blue Skies (1995) came perhaps the closest in spirit to the early WMTs of the 1970s, with its historically believable story about chimney sweeps in a late 19th century Italy at the turn of the century, but zany antics and childish melodrama trumped realism to the series' detriment.

Lassie (1996) was a valiant effort directed sensitively by Sunao Katabuchi. It benefited from the appealing, Yasuji Mori-esque character designs of Satoko Morikawa and nuanced animation work by the animators under her like Osamu Tanabe and Hisashi Mori. But it was sabotaged by the station, Fuji TV, who, dissatisfied presumably by unsatisfactory ratings, kept substituting baseball shows in the show's time slot and forcing the studio to change the story of the remaining episodes accordingly.

Remi Sans Famille (1997), which followed as if in a panic, was a disaster from the start, and was cancelled fairly quickly. With its cancellation, the glorious long-running WMT franchise came to an ungraceful conclusion. You can read an embarrassing little piece I wrote 15 years ago about Lassie and the end of the WMT here.

Ten years later, Nippon Animation returned to their roots, trying to revive the World Masterpiece Theater with adaptations of Les Miserables (2007), Porfy's Trip (2008) and Before Green Gables (2009), but these had little in common with the early WMT, and I don't know if the shows were successful with audiences. A Dog of Flanders earned 22.5% ratings in 1975, while ratings declined with each year until Remi Sans Famille in 1996 earned only 8.5%. It seems to indicate that demand for this material has all but evaporated amidst growing sophistication and variety of animated programming and variety of other, more flashy and exciting, competing forms of entertainment.

Even aside from the WMT, Nippon Animation was a prolific studio since it began with A Dog of Flanders in 1975. As of this year, it has produced roughly 100 TV series, including the 26 World Masterpiece Theater shows.

Besides what they produced, Nippon Animation was important in that it had a lot of talented staff who did great work. Many of the Toei luminaries moved to Nippon Animation after leaving Toei. It was there that Hayao Miyazaki had a chance to flower as a director with Future Boy Conan in 1978.

In addition to hosting Isao Takahata, Yoichi Kotabe and Hayao Miyazaki, the most notable ex-Toei figure to grace Nippon Animation's productions in the late 1970s and 1980s was Yasuji Mori, the mentor figure of many of those same ex-Toei figures. He provided delightful character designs for many series including perhaps most notably Jacky the Bearcub, known as Bouba in Europe. Jacky is one of the few animated productions that brought Yasuji Mori's uniquely rounded characters to life in a satisfying way, as witness the delicate animation in the opening. He also designed Banner the Squirrel (German op) and Dorataro the Hobo (op) and later on acted as layout supervisor on shows like Animal Three Musketeers (op) and Alice in Wonderland (op). He was the character supervisor on the Animated Classics of Japanese Literature show. He stayed at Nippon Animation until his death in 1992.

Between his early A Pro period and his late Ghibli period, Yoshifumi Kondo did much good work for Nippon Animation. As the animation director of Anne of Green Gables, he was the person responsible for doing what has never been done (or at least done so convincingly and realistically) in a TV animation, gradually modifying Anne's design to match her physical maturation over the course of the series. In Tom Sawyer he provided lots of great animation. In Little Women he was the character designer. Nippon Animation also trained a number of producers who would go on to work at other studios, most notably Eiko Tanaka.

I'm not painting a hagiography here, just trying to point out the high points. They had plenty of lows. The World Masterpiece Theater in the 1980s was more a showcase for kitschy melodrama than for serious realism, and by the end in the 1990s, it had degenerated into something of a parody of itself. Their anodyne style could be viewed more harshly as being spineless and conservative, and most of their productions are aimed at small children and are fairly unremarkable. In the 1970s, they produced their fair share of generic spokon and shoujo manga adaptations, and even produced some forgettable robot shows. Their productions in the 1990s became much more tailored towards popular tastes in content and style, so they became kind of like every other studio out there and lost a little of what had once made them so unique. They had to survive.

But all that said, they did produce a series like Takashi Nakamura's Fantastic Children in 2004, which was a sincere attempt to create a series of genuine quality divorced of market considerations. Nakamura had previously been involved with Nippon Animation on their 1989 WMT Peter Pan, which was one of the series' late successes.

TV shows were Nippon Animation's main field of activity, but they also produced a number of TV specials sporadically up until the late 80s. In the early 90s, they produced a series of movies, most of which seem unremarkable. The second Chibi Maruko-chan movie (1992) notably featured some creative animation sequences from Ajia-do animators like Masaaki Yuasa. After the WMT ended, they even tried to revive the franchise with some fanfare by releasing remakes of Marco and A Dog of Flanders, the highest-rated shows in the series, but presumably these films didn't do so hot at the box office, because the series didn't continue afterwards.

One of their recent projects that looks intriguing is a 2007 TV special entitled Miyori no Mori (trailer). It was directed by veteran art director Nizo Yamamoto. It appears to have a more classical look indicating an attempt to return to something of the tone of their earlier work with material with a more broad appeal, an epic fantasy on the subject of ecology and nature.

The really remarkable thing about Nippon Animation is that this post doesn't even do justice to the range of their work. This post only covers a fraction of the shows they did, and briefly, and those other shows are quite wide-ranging in style, far more than almost any other Japanese studio except for maybe TMS. Over the span of 35 years, Nippon Animation has produced a handful of masterpieces and a slew of highly entertaining and unique TV series. They represented an alternative vision of anime far removed from all the cliches that have come to define Japanese animation in the imagination of the world. Many of their shows were watched and beloved by millions of kids the world over during the 1970s and 1980s. Kids of my generation grew up on Nippon Animation anime. They've been a one-of-a-kind presence in the anime industry for well over three decades. For running such a studio, Koichi Motohashi, thank you, and rest in peace.

Click on to see an old thing I wrote about 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother.

3000 Leagues in Search of Mother:
From the Appenines to the Andes

Produced by Nippon Animation, aired on Fuji TV
52 episodes, aired Jan-04-1976 to Dec-26-1976
Based on Cuore (1878) (Translated in English as: Heart: an Italian schoolboy's journal, a book for boys) by Edmondo de Amicis (1846-1908, Italian)

STAFF
Executive producer: Koichi Motohashi
Producer: Nakajima Junzo, Matsudo Takaji
Director: Takahata Isao
Character design & animation director: Kotabe Yoichi
Assistant Animation Director: Okuyama Reiko
Written by: Fukazawa Kazuo
Art director: Takamura Mukuo
Music: Sakata Koichi
Layout & Scene Design: Miyazaki Hayao
Storyboards: Tomino Yoshiyuki (3, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 17, 20, 23, 26, 29, 33, 36, 39, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52), Okuta Seiji (9, 11, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30, 32, 34, 37, 38, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51), Kuroda Yoshio (13, 16, 19, 22, 25, 28, 35), Takahata Isao (1, 2, 4, 5, 7)
Assistant directors: Yokota Kazuyoshi, Baba Ken'ichi, Kageyama Yasuo
Audio director: Uragami Yasuo
Photography director: Kuroki Keishichi

VOICE ACTORS
Marco: Matsuo Yoshiko
Peppino (Fiolina's father): Nagai Ichiro
Conchetta (Fiolina's sister): Ohara Noriko
Fiolina: Nobusawa Mieko
Tonio (Marco's brother): Sogabe Kazuyuki
Pietro (Marco's father): Kawakubo Kiyoshi
Leonardo: Kamiyama Takuzo
Anna (Marco's mother): Nikaido Yukiko
Julietta (Fiolina's sister): Chijimatsu Sachiko
Pablo: Higashi Mie
Fana (Pablo's sister): Yokozawa Keiko
Mario: Tomiyama
Clara: Takefuji Reiko
Fernadez: Miyata Hikaru
Narrator: Tsuboi Akiko

OPENING THEME: Sogen no maruko (Marco on the Grasslands)
ENDING THEME: Kaasan ohayo (Good Morning, Mother)
Vocalist: Osugi Kumiko
Lyrics: Fukazawa Kazuo (op), Takahata Isao (ed)
Music: Sakata Koichi
Arrangement: Sakata Koichi (op), Oroku Reijiro (ed)

Adaptation
This TV series is an adaptation of only one tiny portion of Cuore; namely, the story for the month of May, 'From the Appenine to the Andes'. The anime resembles the original story only in outline, as most of the story elements and characters were created specifically for the anime by writer Fukazawa Kazuo (whose only other anime credits are the screenplay of Hols, Prince of the Sun and the cinematization of 1001 Nights)

TV-comp.
A movie compiled from episodes of the TV series was released in theaters on 19 July1980 in Japan.

Written following the Italian war for independence by a sub-leutenant who had fought in the seige of Rome in 1870, Cuore is the fictional diary of a boy's third year in a Turin municipal school. It was written to foster juvenile appreciation of the newfound Italian national unity, which the author had fought for in the recent war. The book is often highly emotional, even sentimental, but gives a vivid picture of urban Italian life at that time. A master, introducing a new pupil, tells the class, "Remember well what I am going to say. That this fact might come to pass--that a Calabrian boy might find himself at home in Turin, and that a boy of Turin might be in his own home in Calabria, our country has struggled for fifty years, and thirty thousand Italians have died." The author established a reputation as a writer in various genres after his experience as a soldier, and after having been translated into English in 1895 as Heart and then four years later as Enrico's Schooldays, the novel became internationally popular, and has been translated into over twenty-five languages.

This anime, the second sekai meisaku gekijo series, starts off in Genova, Italy¹, and ends up far away across the Atlantic in Cordoba, Argentina². At the beginning of the series we meet a family of four living in Genova, the Rossis: mother Anna, father Pietro, eldest son Tonio and young Marco... and Amedeo, their little pet monkey. The father runs a free clinic for the poor, as times were tough in Italy at the turn of the century, and there was a national work shortage. The Rossis find themselves in debt because Pietro's work is certainly charitable, but unprofitable. Tough times require tough measures, and Marco's parents are forced to make the difficult but obvious choice between sending mother to Argentina to find work, and starving: she agrees to go for a year. However, Anna and Pietro keep Marco in the dark about their plans until the last minute, for fear of his reaction. On the last day before Anna is to set out, the whole family spends one last idyllic day on the beach together, before revealing the truth to Marco...

...And thus the series begins. After the mother's departure, the series moves on into a number of episodes about daily life in Genova. This development section introduces the father and brother and many other characters not in the book. We meet not just the Rossi family and friends, but perhaps just as importantly, the fin-de-siecle city of Genova. We're ushered through its every nook and cranny through the eyes of Marco, giving us a glimpse of daily life going on all around him. These episodes bring the city alive in a way no other anime does. For the first time in an anime, the city was not a backdrop but an active part of the story. The city of Genova has many faces: dark alleyways which only get five minutes of sunlight a day³, marble plazas where a priveleged minority lounge in the sunlight above the crowded, towering tenements of the inner city⁴, the splendid and colorful facade of the city looking out on the sea. This series brought documentary realism to anime, and this is a big part of what makes it so much more powerful than typical anime (as is the case with Takahata's other work). Anime dealing with such mundane subject matter, and dealing with its characters in a realistic way had never been attempted before (excepting the earlier Takahata project Heidi). But though Heidi was an anime about everyday life, Marco is more than that.

Attention to detail could be said to be the unifying concept of this series. Every image of the city is designed to seem as realistic as possible, and comes across as intense and vivid. The city isn't just a backdrop; rather, watching the series gives you an impression of walking around a real city you've never been in before. No part of the city exists to fill in space, unlike in other anime. Sounds in the background are also realistic. Now and then you can hear the children singing a game in the distance, or a wife calling to her husband in the distance. And instead of each episode being an adventure story, this series tells of the things which occur every day in real life. The buildings of the city seem like organic creatures affected by the rain and sunlight of the environs. Using sound and lighting, the city's people and edifices are brought alive by these many small nuances, and as a result the 'foreignness' of the city seems very authentic. The real-to-life backdrop itself makes the action seem naturalistic and spontaneous. The fact that one single person wrote the entire script, and one single person directed every episode goes a long way to accounting for this series' sense of unity... because each is an auteur. Keeping the creative power within the hands of one person seems rarer in anime these days, probably because the industry has changed. But I think this tight creative control is precisely what made it possible to create a series which is certainly as much of a masterpiece as any of the other more well-known Miyazaki or Takahata films - but on an tremendously bigger scale. However, the director was not the only person whose creative work went into on this series. Credit should go equally to the various staff members: Director Takahata Isao, screenwriter Fukazawa Kazuo, layout artist Miyazaki Hayao, music director Sakata Koichi, art director Mukuo Takamura, animation director Kotabe Yoichi, and all the storyboarders - all without whose brilliant work these disparate elements would certainly not have come together with such glorious results.

But what about the 3000 League journey? It doesn't come until relatively late in the series, after a long exposition; so I think it's clear that the real journey is in fact one of Marco's inner growth. What is it that compels Marco to leave Genova for faraway Buenos Aires^{5 6}, all the way across the Atlantic? In part it's his character: Marco is a stubborn little boy. But he's justifiably worried in light of the sudden lapse of communication from his mother. By the time of the departure, it's obvious to the viewer that these episodes have served to mentally prepare Marco for the real journey ahead. But it's also clear that he has a long way to go. The often heated disputes had with his father, his skipping school to work as a bottle washer - all are symptoms of acute juvenalia. When the father finds out what Marco wants to do, he only naturally refuses even the thought of putting his son alone onto a ship for someplace as far as South America. But as for Marco, the little boy, he is still immature and stubborn. A stigmatized longing for the impossible seems to have a long tradition as as one of the beauties of youth, and Marco fits in nicely in that tradition. Marco takes his anxieties to an extreme that's frightening, even downright pathological, but for all his violent outbursts, he seems like just a normal little boy going through that phase in life. I think this is where Takahata shines - in making young Marco a bona fide, authentic, flawed human being. In fact, this is the part of the series which delves most effectively into the realm of Marco's mind, I think. At certain points in these episodes Marco rebels with an intensity of emotion and mental anguish that would make Jim "Rebel" Dean/Stark quake in his boots. No other anime before this has such a powerful screenplay which put effort into realistically portraying the a child's unstable emotional state during that roller-coaster time called adolescence.

This viewer only recently had the opportunity to experience watching these episodes for the first time, and without hesitation I would say in earnest that no anime tv series has ever been more emotionally riveting to me than merely the first fifth of this tv series. (and that'snot to discount the rest of the series) One could say that 3000 Leagues is the emotional prototype for Grave of the Fireflies, Takahata's film from a decade later. In her article on Isao Takahata in Kinema Jumpo No. 1166, Emiko Okada makes it a point to draw a parallel between the indifferent and cruel adults in Grave of the Fireflies and those in 3000 Ri. While I think such a parallel is partly true, I don't feel that the characterisations of the adults in 3000 Ri were taken to the extreme to which they were taken in Grave of the Fireflies. I think Grave suffers more than anything from this problem. People who lived through this period say that people were charitable and supportive of each other during this time and that the hardship-induced greed and self-interest characteristic of most characters in this film is all wrong. 3000 Ri is more than well balanced by its share of compassionate adult characters, and doesn't suffer any such handicap. The creators of the anime would be to thank for this, because in almost all respects the anime version of this novel is an original story. (One of the more important differences being that the anime version was stripped of the patriotic undercurrent of Cuore the novel.) Whereas Grave, as Okada points out, betrays its origins inautobiography by its sometimes wooden depiction of characters. It's easy to understand that liberties would need to be kept to a minimum in a 90 minute adaptation, whereas liberties would needs be taken in abundancein order to flesh out a 52-episode adaptation.

One WMT fan at one time astutely pointed out the very noticeable and considerable decline in grittiness in the WMT as the years go by. I think this is a fairly important point, because it helps understand why the WMT was cancelled. Basically, earlier series seem to be a lot tougher and less patronizing than the later series. The harder-hitting and more sober, seminal series from the beginning of the WMT (Heidi, Marco, Flanders, Rascal, Perrine and Anne) got ratings above the 20 mark, whereas the series in the latter half (post-Sara) more light-hearted and formulaic forays into "childrens' anime" suffered a continual decline in ratings (and arguably quality), and that is what eventually led to the demise of the WMT when it was cancelled by its longtime host station, Fuji TV, due to low ratings in 1997. Suffice it to say, perhaps there's more wisdom than meets the eye to a remark made by Shudo Takeshi (creator of Minky Momo) in 1993: "We made the Minky Momo series not by pandering to the kids, but rather with a feeling that if adults could follow, then surely kids will be able to follow as well."

A film which was an influence on Takahata in 3000 Ri, and seems to have exerted some influence on stylistic aspects of the series, was Vittorio De Sica's film The Bicycle Thief (1948). This movie was the origin of the Italian post-war "neo-realist" film movement, and is considered to be one of the hallmarks of western cinema. There are a number of striking similarities between 3000 Ri and The Bicycle Thief, for example the unobtrusive, longer-than-usual camera shots and scenes depicting characters going through menial daily rituals, which would usually have been skipped over in anime and film alike. The pacing in 3000 Ri is also similar: slow, but always focused and never boring. We follow Marco throughout a whole day, and get to feel as if we were in his shoes. As he goes through the streets, we see the details which make every street and building unique, and we see things from his perspective yet also simultaneously from a detatched 3^rd person perspective. Whilst looming buildings are characteristic of Genova, when Marco moves from one town to another later in Argentina, what characterises the cities there is different - they're flat. The cities - and its inhabitants - come alive in both places by fleshing out these radically different conceptions of landscape. Also the director doesn't spare the cities by making them pretty and making Marco's misery into an adventure. The cities are shown to be realistically if unflatteringly dirty and shabby, where needed, and daily life no more glamorous⁷. Marco's journey itself is authentic, as many Italians fled Italy in search of work around the turn of the century. Oftentimes this assiduous attention to realism is tempered by symbolist touches. At one point a squalid immigrant ship upon which Marco has been forced to board is approaching Buenos Aires (the city where Marco beleives his mother to be) and a hull-level camera-shot displays an object bobbing slowly along the waves towards the ship. It bumps into the hull, then tilts over to one side, and sinks beneath the waves, revealed to be the corpse of a horse. Later on, a grimy slum is ironically juxtaposed with a pristine white city. Scenes like this with more meaning than meets the eye are not uncommon, as are rather creative expressionistic nightmare sequences revealing Marco's psychic state. On the surface these are literary devices. And while not an integral part of plot, they serve, rather, to produce a sense of foreboding, and introduce borderline surrealist elements into the story. This innovative combination of authentic, sparse background music, background art establishing realistic but sometimes symbolically desolate landscapes, and script obsessively fleshing out the psychology of a single character, results in a powerful atmosphere unique to this series. Marco's experiences on the new continent reveal to the viewer people living sad but determined lives upon the vast, flat Argentinan pampas^{8 9}, a place where the grass is no greener than in Marco's remote and overpopulated homeland.

The series is called Marco in the German-broadcast version. It receives frequent reruns in Japan and in Europe (as do many of the World Masterpiece Theater series). However, ironically, in Argentina the series was cancelled before even a third of the series had been aired, though this apparently had more to do with fickle viewers channel-surfing for Dragonball Z than the uncompromising way Argentina is portrayed.

This anime tv series was based on only one chapter of Cuore, not the entire story. The original was a "story within a story", the rest of the book being but a diary-novel about the life of an Italian elementary school student. The chapter on which the anime was based, From the Appennines to the Andes, was a story read by a teacher to the students who are the main characters in Cuore. (Note that the entire story was animated by Nippon Animation five years later in 1981, was the last "Calpis Playhouse" series). On the other hand, the other WMT series which to be based on a diary-novel, Daddy Long-Legs, follows the whole of the original, fleshing the diary entries out to produce a more tangible narrative, a sort of growing-up sitcom.

This was Isao Takahata's second credit as TV series general director. His other TV series are Heidi (1974), Anne of Green Gables (1979) and Jarinko Chie (1981), the latter of which enjoys continual airtime in Kansai. The ri in the Japanese title is an antiquated nautical measure of distance, one ri being equivalent to 2.44 miles, transferring handily to our own nautical measure of distance, the league.

If you're in Toronto and you're into weird Japanese animation, then head on over to the NFB Mediatheque tomorrow to experience a masterclass with the master himself, Koji Yamamura, plus a screening of his earlier films. Read an interview with the producer on the NFB blog. See a shot of the film on Yamamura's blog. Yamamura's latest film is being produced in collaboration with the NFB. It's a match made in heaven. I can't wait to see the film.

This image is from the "Growing Up" episode of Nippon Animation's 1986 TV show Animated Classics of Japanese Literature. I watched most of the show way back when. What was most appealing about it was its omnibus approach to the production, with a different team heading each episode. It even features work by ex-A Pro folks like Osamu Kobayashi and Yoshio Kabashima.

The Growing Up episode was by far my favorite of lot for its unique drawing style. The characters had this stately elegance that I'd never seen in any anime before. The designs were classy and classic, and the movement more weighty and calculated and beautiful. It was all so graceful and lovely, every line so delicate and perfect, kind of like Seiichi Hayashi's drawings come to life. (Seiichi Hayashi incidentally drew the drawings for the end credits) It was also directed very sensitively, complementing the low-key and emotionally subtle story of a young girl and her friends growing up in the late 1800s in Japan. It was one of the best animated literary adaptations I'd seen. I haven't rewatched it in a while, but I suspect it still probably holds up fairly well.

Isamu Kumada was the director, character designer and animation director of this episode. I looked for more work by him because I wanted to see more in this vein, but I couldn't find anything quite like this, though as I discovered upon looking into it, he has been prolific doing all sorts of other things.

Isamu Kumada's start in animation is still a mystery to me. All I know is that he was born in 1940, graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts and started out working on anime in the 1970s and 1980s for the likes of Nippon Animation and Topcraft, and then shifted to doing TV ads from his independent studio Studio Arrow, which was just himself and Susumu Shiraume. Isamu Kumada is today best remembered as a TV ad director. He was very prolific in the 90s and 00s in advertising. It was right before he made the switch to doing ad work, at the end of at least a good decade of working in the industry, that he made the wonderful Growing Up episode.

Studio Arrow appears to go back at least to 1976. I found Studio Arrow credited with the animation for the following six early episodes of Group Tac's Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi AKA Tales of Old Japan.

Waterfall for the Aged (#19A, 1976)
The God of Wind and the Children (#22A, 1976)
The Dragon in the Swamp (#33A, 1976)
The Ghost Ship (#45A, 1976)
The False Idol (#61A, 1976)
The Treasure Geta (#67A, 1977)

I don't know whether Kumada and Shiraume had an official studio at this time or they were just using the title as a collective pen name the way Osamu Kobayashi and Tsutomu Shibayama did around the same time on the same show with "Ajia-do" (their actual Ajia-do studio wasn't founded until 1978). But Kumada was 35 at the time, so it's hard to believe he was just starting out in animation. Thus there seems to be something missing, something before this - how he got into animation I'm still not sure.

Kumada and Shiraume were involved with Topcraft for a while around this time, because at the very least I've found them credited with layout on The Flight of the Dragons (1982).

Kumada and Shiraume also worked together on numerous Nippon Animation productions around this time, including Cuore: School of Love (1981) and Hey! Bunbu (1985-86), on which they were credited together with character design. In a solo capacity, Kumada was the character designer of Nippon Animation's Diary of Anne Frank TV special (1979), Meesha the Bear Cub (1979-1980), Alice in Wonderland (1983-84), Blinky the Koala (1984), Aesop's Fables (1985) and 80 Days Around the World (1987-88) while Shiraume designed Mori no Tonto-tachi (Forest of the Elves, 1986) for Shaft. Isamu Kumada and Susumu Shiraume are together credited for the animation of Growing Up.

After this, sometime in the late 80s, Studio Arrow appears to have shifted focus to work mainly on TV advertisement. Kumada designed posters and wrote picture books, and even published a guidebook called Textural Expression for Designers in 1987. From Studio Arrow, he and Susumu Shiraume produced a large number of TV ads for the likes of Daihatsu and Nissan. To name but a few examples, they did the Notte Kangaroo series for Nissan; the Lismo series for mobile phone company KDDI; and this Badger ad from 1990 for Tokyo Electric. I also discovered that Kumada directed two OVAs released in 1992 adapting classic picture books with engravings by Jiro Takidaira - one entitled The Mountain of Flowers and the other entitled Mochimochi no Ki. (Tadanari Okamoto also adapted Mochimochi no Ki.)

In the course of researching this post, I learned that Isamu Kumada died on September 4, 2009 at age 69.

Kumada also participated in this series of 10 "video book" adaptations of classics of Japanese literature. Each story is read aloud by a narrator to a backdrop of illustrations by different illustrators. Many of them besides Kumada are animators. In fact, most of the people seem to be people who worked on Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi - Gisaburo Sugii, Marisuke Eguchi, Hidekazu Ohara, Mitsuo Kobayashi, Takamitsu Miwa, Hirokazu Fukuhara - so it appears to be kind of an offshoot of that show.

Incidentally, Studio Arrow helped launch the advertising career of Hidekazu Ohara, the great animator responsible for Cannon Fodder and Professor Dan Petry's Blues, not to mention a bunch of episodes of Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi. (The delightfully stylized razor blade kitsune episode he did, which I talked about before here, was in fact what got him the job to do Cannon Fodder - Eiko Tanaka showed a tape of the episode to Katsuhiro Otomo, and that is what got him the job offer.) Ohara worked at Studio Arrow for a while before going independent and going on to become equally creative and prolific and sought-after a creator of animated TV ads. It's from them that he learned the stylistic versatility and blend of techniques that makes his work stand out. He did the whole Qoo series, the Gohan ga Susumu-kun series and the famous Aleph ad that vividly brought to life the Slam Dunk characters.

Isamu Kumada and Hidekazu Ohara are an example of a type of animator we don't hear about much in anime - a more flexible animator who is able to switch between radically different styles depending on the subject matter, who doesn't just work as a cog in one post, but switches around doing different things depending on the project, trying out different styles. They're much more rounded and flexible. It's this experience that paved the way for the creative and unusual styles of Cannon Fodder and Professor Dan Petry's Blues. Young animators today who know nothing but anime style drawings could use this kind of exposure to different styles to expand their palette. A large amount of creative animation work in Japan has been done in advertising work, and therefore is mostly hidden away and disappears quickly and doesn't get attributed to the artists, so it's hard to keep track of. It's a whole hidden side of the animation industry that doesn't get talked about as much.

As a supplement to this post, reproduced below is what I wrote about the Animated Classics of Japanese Literature series some 10-odd years ago in the old WMT database I used to run. Just now I tried looking online for information about the staff for each episode of this series, but I couldn't find anything, which is why I dug this up. For some reason, back then I transcribed the credits of all the episodes I had rented. A few episodes are missing, but it's still better than nothing.

Looking over this, I noticed that the Asunaro Story episode that I also liked was done by the Ajia-do team of Osamu Kobayashi, Tsutomu Shibayama and Yumiko Suda.

青春アニメ全集 Literary classics animated
Started airing April 25, 1986
35 episodes
Produced by Nippon Animation/Dentsu Osaka Branch, aired on Nihon TV
Chief Director: Kurokawa Fumio
Character Supervisor: Mori Yasuji
Ending Illustrations: Hayashi Seiichi

An omnibus of famous works of Japanese literature. Each episode of this series was done by a different creative staff, like Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi, an anthology of Japanese folk tales, resulting in a refreshingly different look and feel from episode to episode, something which is unusual in anime. The resulting variety of styles well complements the different authors represented. Several episodes stand out from the rest, foremost the well-crafted and stylish Growing Up episode by Kumada Isamu. Asunaro story is one of the more lyrical and affecting stories in the series, and Hoichi, again the work of Kumada Isamu, is also good; but even taking the less well done episodes into account, the fact that this series is original and genuinely interesting to watch makes this one of Nippon Animation's best works of the 1980s, a decade which was otherwise downhill for this studio which created masterpieces like 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother and the other early WMT series in the late 1970s.
Student Days is not listed as having been aired at the time of the original Japanese broadcast in the Japanese database I've consulted for the episode listing. Two previously unaired episodes were aired at the end of 1987, a year after the TV series finished broadcasting, so presumably this is one of those.

English sub: The whole series was released with English subs on VHS by Central Park Media. Their credit translations are incomplete and incorrectly list the same animators and art director in each episode; I've made an accurate episode-by-episode credit list (still in progress).

#1: The Izu Dancer
Original work: Kawabata Yasunari
Director: Takasuka Katsumi
Animation director: Kabashima Yoshio
Character design: Kabashima Yoshio
Screenplay: Yoshida Kenji
Music: Sakata Koichi
Art director: Kawamoto Shohei

#2: Sea Roar Part one - Spring awakening
#3: Sea Roar Part two - Summer storm

#4: The grave of the wild chrysanthemums
Original work: Ito Sachio
Director: Kumada Isamu
Animation director: Iimura Kazuo
Character design: Kumada Isamu
Screenplay: Yoshida Kenji
Music: Sakata Koichi
Art director: Mukuo Takamura

#5: The wind rises
Original work: Hori Tatsuo
Director: Morita Hiromitsu
Animation director: Yanase Joji
Character design: Tsutsui Momoko
Screenplay: Matsuda Shozo
Music: Sakata Koichi
Art director: Shibata Chikako

#6: The fruit of Olympus
Original work: Tanaka Hidemitsu
Director: Matsushima Akiko
Animation director: Yazawa Norio
Character design: Yazawa Norio
Screenplay: Matsuda Shozo
Music: Yamamoto Junnosuke
Art director: Yamamoto Junko
Storyboard: Kasahi Hiroshi

#7: Botchan Part one - The new professor gets mad!
Original work: Natsume Soseki
Director: Kondo Eisuke
Animation director: Kitahara Takeo
Character design: Motomiya Hiroshi
Screenplay: Miyazaki Akira
Music: Shimazu Hideo
Art director: Kudo Ken'ichi

#8: Botchan Part two - Defeat Red Shirt!
Original work: Natsume Soseki
Director: Kondo Eisuke
Animation director: Kitahara Takeo
Character design: Motomiya Hiroshi
Screenplay: Miyazaki Akira
Music: Shimazu Hideo
Art director: Kono Masamichi

#9: From "Harmonium and fish town" in Wandering Days
Original work: Hayashi Fumiko
Director: Okabe Eiji
Animation director: Iimura Kazuo
Character design: Ishino Hirokazu
Screenplay: Miyazaki Akira
Music: Yamamoto Junnosuke
Art director: Kawano Jiro

#10: The dancing girl
Original work: Mori Ogai
Director: Ishikuro Noboru
Animation director: Shimada Hideaki
Character design: Shimada Hideaki
Screenplay: Yoshida Kenji
Music: Sakata Koichi
Art director: Kaneko Hidetoshi

#11: Asunaro story
Original work: Inoue Yasushi
Director: Suda Yumiko
Animation director: Shibayama Tsutomu
Character design: Kobayashi Osamu
Screenplay: Yoshida Kenji
Music: Yamamoto Junnosuke
Art director: Tanaka Shizue

#12: A roadside stone Part one - Dreams of middle school
Original work: Yamamoto Yuzo
Director: Okabe Eiji
Storyboard: Kurokawa Fumio
Animation director: Ishino Hirokazu
Character design: Mori Yasuji
Screenplay: Yoshida Kenji
Music: Shimazu Hideo
Art director: Tojo Toshihisa

#13: A roadside stone Part two - Hard days
Original work: Yamamoto Yuzo
Director: Okabe Eiji
Storyboard: Kurokawa Fumio
Animation director: Ishino Hirokazu
Character design: Mori Yasuji
Screenplay: Yoshida Kenji
Music: Shimazu Hideo
Art director: Tojo Toshihisa

#14: Growing up
Original work: Higuchi Ichiyo
Director: Kumada Isamu
Animation director: Kumada Isamu
Character design: Kumada Isamu
Screenplay: Kuni Chisako
Music: Koroku Reijiro
Art director: Kawamoto Shohei
Key animation: Kumada Isamu, Shiraume Susumu

#15: The priest of Mount Koya

#16: Kwaidan: The tale of Hoichi
Original work: Koizumi Yakumo (Lafcadio Hearn)
Director: Kumada Isamu
Animation director: Kitahara Takeo
Character design: Kumada Isamu
Screenplay: Miyazaki Akira
Music: Sakata Koichi
Art director: Kubota Norio
Biwa: Tsuruta Kinshi

#17: Akagawa Jiro: Hometown casebook
#18: Akagawa Jiro: Voice from heaven

#19: The theater of life
Original work: Ozaki Shiro
Director: Okabe Eiji
Animation director: Kon Shinnosuke
Character design: Murao Mio
Screenplay: Nakanishi Ryuzo
Music: Shimazu Hideo
Art director: Uchida Tatsuhiko

#20: Season of the sun: A dangerous youth
Original work: Ishihara Shintaro
Director: Ishikuro Noboru
Animation director: Shimada Hideaki
Character design: Shimada Hideaki
Screenplay: Nagahara Shuichi
Music: Yamamoto Junnosuke
Art director: Kanemura Katsumi

#21:
#22: Sugata Sanshiro Part 1: Child of fate of Kodokan
#23: Sugata Sanshiro Part 2: Mountain storm special attack
#24: Sugata Sanshiro Part 3: Showdown at Ukyogahara

#25: The harp of Burma Part 1: Noplace like home
Original work: Takeyama Michio
Director: Ishikuro Noboru
Animation director: Shimada Hideaki
Character design: Shiraume Susumu
Screenplay: Yoshida Kenji
Music: Sakata Koichi
Art director: Ito Shukei

#26: The harp of Burma Part 2: Song of separation
Original work: Takeyama Michio
Director: Ishikuro Noboru
Animation director: Shimada Hideaki
Character design: Shiraume Susumu
Screenplay: Yoshida Kenji
Music: Sakata Koichi
Art director: Ito Shukei

#27: Akechi Kogoro: A walker in the attic
#28: Akechi Kogoro: A psychological test
#29: Akechi Kogoro: The red room
#30: The New Story of Tono
#31: Love climbing to heaven

#32: Shiro returns to the north
Original work: Togawa Yukio
Director: Matsushima Akiko
Animation director: Abe Masaki
Character design: Abe Masaki
Screenplay: Kuriyama Shizuyo
Music: Yamamoto Junnosuke
Art director: Yamamoto Junko

#?: Student Days
Original work: Kume Masao
Director: Matsushima Akiko
Storyboard: Kuzuoka Hiroshi
Animation director: Kiyoyama Shigetaka
Character design: Kiyoyama Shigetaka
Screenplay: Matsuda Shozo
Music: Yamamoto Junnosuke
Art director: Yamamoto Junko

I wrote a bit about Toei Doga's forays into the OVA market in my entry on Vampire Wars (1990). I just had the chance to see another outing from them from slightly earlier.

Xanadu: Dragon Slayer Densetsu (1988) is a light-hearted and half-hearted fantasy adventure in the same vein from Toei from a few years earlier. Both OVAs are mildly entertaining but forgettable fluff. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The saving grace of this generic outing is Koichi Arai. Xanadu is to Koichi Arai what Vampire Wars is to Hamasu Hideki - his first job as character designer and animation director. Both OVAs were one of the early stepping stones in these great animators' careers. They're one of the first places you can turn now to get a sense of the animator's style in these early years.

Koichi Arai is probably best remembered for his work on 3x3 Eyes (1991), which was another OVA foray from Toei, like Xanadu and Vampire Wars, but a somewhat better one. Not that he hasn't done outstanding work elsewhere. 3x3 Eyes was just his biggest gig. He's been a lone animator for the most part since then.

He's the reason I bothered watching this, and I was happy to find that even at this early stage his style is evident. Koichi Arai's drawings are more distinctive than Hideki Hamasu's. I could see a clear resemblance not only with 3x3 Eyes but even with the opening sequence Arai did for Kemonozume episode 8 in 2006.

It's kind of the nascent form of his style in 3x3 Eyes, as opposed to the more realistic style he showed himself capable of in Crying Freeman episode 1 (1988). He drew a unique and easily identifiable sequence in episode 5 of Shonan Bakusozoku in 1989, so I was expecting his style would probably already be identifiable a year earlier.

There were other animators drawing in a realistic style at Toei in the mid-80s when Koichi Arai was learning the ropes, for example Junichi Hayama. But Arai's work stands out as being particularly well observed - a new, more modern style of drawing. He seemed to represent a new generation emerging. It's probably not a coincidence that Arai worked as an animator on the baby room sequence in Akira around this time. He was one of the pioneer realistic animators of the day.

Even when he wasn't drawing realistic people like in Crying Freeman, the same basic approach seems to underpin his animation. Arai was able to combine more realistic timing and drawing with comical deformation and humor when necessary. His drawings were both more stylish and more real. You wouldn't necessarily call the designs of 3x3 Eyes realistic, per se, but somehow the movement was. He brought a new sensibility to the timing and conceptualization of a movement. Also, the faces of side-characters in the crowd were clearly stylized in a more realistic way. With just a few lines he managed to establish a unique facial form the communicated an individual - something I'd only seen from Katsuhiro Otomo before.

His realism wasn't the brute-force realism of the old guard of Toei, who pounded you with detailed drawings of muscle men. Just the opposite - he pared down the drawings to a minimum of lines and moved the body more three-dimensionally. He had a unique new way of making something seem real. Even if the design wasn't realistic, the movement would be, or a part of the drawing would be. For example, one of his trademarks is showing the teeth in detail and showing the gums, as in the shot below. It seems to have the effect of injecting a feeling of reality into an otherwise unrealistic drawing.

The thing I wasn't expecting is that this OVA isn't pure Toei. Many of the staff are ex-Bebow. The top five names listed in the animator credits (Naoyuki Onda, Tomokazu Tokoro, Keiichi Sato, Hiroyuki Ochi and Koichi Usami) are all prominent expatriates of Bebow. More specifically, they were all involved in Relic Armor Legaciam, which came out just a few months before Xanadu.

Legaciam was made by Atelier Giga. In fact, it was their only production. Atelier Giga was a short-lived studio founded in March 1987 that brought together the animators who had left Bebow in the fall of 1984 to form a studio called Studio Pack with those who left after Cool Cool Bye in 1986. The studio went belly-up after Legaciam, sending all the Bebow animators scattering to the four winds. (many went to AIC)

I don't know how these Bebow animators came to be working on Xanadu together, but clearly it must have been one of the first things they did after Atelier Giga broke up.

Two distinct styles dominate Xanadu: That of Koichi Arai, and that of Bebow. I'd even say that most of the animation feels like Bebow. Koichi Arai doesn't dominate the proceedings like he did in 3x3 Eyes. Naoyuki Onda in particular is a big presence. He seems to have animated the masked baddie and his wife, not to mention the blue-haired character. The blue-haired guy and the woman baddie's face his this distinctive broad, oval shape that's unique to Onda, while the baddie has a more photorealistic style. I was wondering if the baddie might in fact be the work of Hideki Hamasu, who was the assistant animation director, but I'm not sure enough of his style to be able to ID it whereas the eyes do seem to be in Onda's style.

Many of the other shots have a certain Bebow vibe - a particular layout, pose or expression that gives me deja vu, as if I'd seen something similar in Cool Cool Bye or an earlier Bebow production. I can't pin it down to a particular animator except to narrow it down to one of those four other than Onda.

I like the drawings of Arai and the Bebows. Arai's got his own unique style, and so does Onda. The masked baddie I presume to be by Onda has an appealing realistic look, with a well-defined nose and lips and realistically proportioned eyes (as opposed to huge balloons), unlike all of the other characters in the show, who have more stylized 'anime features'.

This was Arai's first time designing characters, and he managed to carve out a fairly unique style without being too radical. The protagonist's expressions are vivacious and pliable and fun to watch. It's definitely not as extreme or exciting as 3x3 Eyes or Crying Freeman episode 1, but still nice for a Koichi Arai fan. I wonder if he designed the baddies too, because they have a completely different style.

Apart from these guys, I guess the rest of the people are Toei folks. Junichi Hayama is the only name I recognize. Well, also Michio Fukuda, who has gone on to focus on directing. Junichi Hayama is one of the better Toei animators of this period. I'm not positive, but I think this part of Shonan Bakusozoku episode 5 was done by him, to give an example of his work.

The interesting thing about the 'realistic' movement in animation in Japan in the late 80s/early 90s was that it's multifarious. It's not just about Akira. You've got a certain style that developed at Toei under folks like Takaaki Yamashita and Koichi Arai, then you've got the Bebow folks like Naoyuki Onda, then you've got Akira and the people it influenced. But even among the ex-Akira animators there's a big difference between the realistic style of, say, Shinya Ohira and Hiroyuki Okiura.

One of my favorite bits in the ep not from a character drawing standpoint was the swivel shot at the beginning where the mecha zooms off past a big lizard monster. It's well executed and stylish. Then there's a shot where the baddie has his face up close next to the captured heroine and tentacles emerge from his face. It's successful at being disturbing due to the realistic way the guy's face is drawn and his calm expression.

As for the story, it's a hodgepodge of fantasy tropes, a halfhearted effort at best. The setting mixes sci-fi with fantasy - you've got wizards and flying machines - but nothing in the story uses the trappings whatsoever.

We start out in the future in the middle of a battle between ambulatory robots in Europe. Suddenly, a bright light engulfs the protagonist's machine and everyone blacks out. When they wake up, they're in D&D land. No explanation is ever provided as to why this happened. There's a cute girl with a flying squirrel mascot, an evil wizard wearing a Char Aznable helmet trying to use black magic to enslave the world, an army of lizard men, and even a legendary sword in a stone destined for the one true hero. It's all there.

Don't come here expecting anything original, or for it to make sense, or to find well-developed characters or epic storytelling like in Lodoss Wars or something. They clearly set out to make a lighthearted D&D romp to capitalize on the popularity of Nihon Falcom's dungeon crawler game of the same name, and that's all this is. It's actually surprisingly entertaining and innocent, and the quality of the drawings makes it easy to watch. It has something of the spunky, playful quality of Xabungle. It's not completely over-the-top comedy, but it's rarely serious for more than a few moments. Even when it's serious it doesn't feel that serious.

This was an OVA in the 80s, and that can only mean one thing: tentacles! Out of nowhere, we even get a nude tentacle scene in this OVA - nothing explicit, but suggestive. If it was AIC I'd understand, but coming from Toei Doga, it feels a little forced. Clearly, Nausicaa was influential in more ways than one.

Not to be confused with this Xanadu.

XANADU: DRAGON SLAYER DENSETSU
(dir. Atsutoshi Umezawa, 50 min, released March 1988)

Osamu Kobayashi directed the second half of this episode. Merely knowing this fact should be enough to tell you that something is afoot. We've become used Osamu Kobayashi showing up every year or so in a nice animated television program from Japan, and proceeding to create an episode that clashes with the rest of the show. His latest does not disappoint in that regard.

Before reading this, if you have any intention of watching this series, or if you want to truly appreciate what Osamu Kobayashi has done with this episode, I'd advise that you watch the series in sequence up to this episode before reading this post or anything else about this episode on the web. Otherwise it'll ruin the impact of something special.

So watch it first. Or if you don't care, go right ahead. I don't use jumps often, but this time I will. My impressions after the jump.

WTF?

Osamu Kobayashi just punked every viewer of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, that's what.

He gleefully dismantled the saccharine, stylized, cute, sexy, facile cartoon edifice of this show and replaced it with a bunch of sad, ugly, miserable Japanese men and women working in a drab, rust-stained slab of an office in the middle of Tokyo.

Welcome to the real world, people.

I love the way this show reels you in for five episodes with animation that epitomizes everything escapist and entertaining and fun about animation, and then punches you in the face with reality right when you've gotten comfortable.

I laughed quite a bit watching this episode. There's the whole suddenness of it all that's funny, of course. But once you look past that, it's actually very nicely done besides that. It's a fairly well done satire of office politics in Japan, grounded in real human behavior in a real human situation. The biggest irony is that, for all the work they put into packing every garish and hyperactive second of the previous episodes with all sorts of visual and linguistic gags, the understated irony of this episode comes across as funnier.

What makes this whole thing delightful is that it will probably get people up in arms. It would actually be disappointing if it didn't. It's pretty clear this episode is 100% troll.

The drawings are how they are on purpose - not because Osamu Kobayashi can't draw or whatever it is he's usually criticized for. The whole thing is clearly an elaborate joke, and I'm positive Hiroyuki Imaishi is totally onboard with it.

What's the joke here? The joke is quite simply: This is Hamaji's Resurrection.

Back when it came out in 1995, Shinya Ohira's episode of The Hakkenden shocked and dismayed the viewers of that OVA series by suddenly abandoning the sleek, conventional drawings that came before in favor of ultra-realistic, ugly characters with distinctly Japanese features. The drawings here are closely modeled after the drawings in Hamaji.

Hence it's both a visual homage and a play on the sudden stylistic contrast that so shocked viewers. The joke is immediately apparent to anyone who's seen that episode. Except that Shinya Ohira was simply doing what he wanted to do - create more raw and powerful human drama, to do which he had to re-design the characters into realistic and believable human beings so that the drama would feel real - whereas this episode sets out to mimic that impact in a playful and ironic way. Actually not too surprising coming from this studio, and from a show with such a sassy sense of humor.

This episode may well be able to replicate the impact of Hamaji to an extent, since many, if not most, people who watch this show will never have heard of Ohira or any of this stuff. So they may react quite naturally in dismay to what they're seeing. I hope so. But it should be pretty obvious that it's a joke to most people, because the stylistic contrast is so extreme - taking the whole impact of Hamaji and ratchets it up to the logical extreme.

"What if we suddenly had an episode that was ultra-realistic in the middle of this super-cartoony show, like Hamaji's Resurrection?" You can just picture Kobayashi and Imaishi tittering away at the idea as they hatched their secret plot in the back rooms of the studio.

They could have gone even farther by completely divorcing the whole thing from the show. But they even were nice enough to integrate it all with the running concept of the show - that there is a ghost that Panty & Stocking have to come along and defeat. And they did it in a surprisingly poetic and meaningful way.

The old guy turns out to be a ghost, transformed by years of pent-up anger at the persecution and goading of his crass co-workers. When he's plied against his will with a tower of beers as humiliation by his boss, the geyser of projectile-vomited beer that he unleashes is a metaphor for his breaking point - all the anger and punishment he's bottled up behind the meek facade, finally coming out. He's the kind of guy who's always been used as a doormat by everyone he meets, gliding through life like a ghost invisible to everyone, until one day everyone learns what his name was when they see him on the news for going on a shooting spree.

So beyond the obvious visual parody aspect of this episode, it's actually got some teeth - it's a realistic satire on contemporary Japanese social mores that wouldn't have been out of place on Paranoia Agent.

But the sweet thing about this episode is that it's got a happy ending. Nobody notices it was him who was the ghost, ironically, and he got those signatures to make his little girl happy. He goes back to work to pretty much the same afterwards, though his coworkers maybe don't quite look down on him as much as before now that he's shown he can flip if pushed too far.

The episode has a lot of hilarious Kobayashi touches throughout - the little UFO at the beginning, the poster for an old period drama called Showa Zannyo-den, the hilarious little girl who acts naughty at the dinner table because of the bad influence of a cartoon called Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, the ultra-realistic taxidermied sea turtle, etc. It's great because it actually doesn't look like Kobayashi - but it's clearly something only he could have done. In a way that's even better, because it shows off what he's really good at. In particular, the extended shots during of the dinner scene and the bar scene were really great. I love shots like this where he keeps the camera still and just observes all the little antics these characters go through.

Kobayashi, man, I love you. This was great. I'm so glad he's still getting to do his thing like this.

On the staff side of things, it should be mentioned that Osamu Kobayashi directed and stoyboarded and Takashi Mukoda was the animation director. Both were animators. Thus it's talented animator Takashi Mukoda whom we have to thank for the recreation of the look of Hamaji. Ayako Hata is present as an animator - she's well known for being good at doing scenes of nuanced everyday life acting, so her skills would have been put to good use here.

Animator list:

Masashi Karino, Emi Uehara, Chiaki Nakashima
Ayako Hata, Naoyuki Asano

Takashi Mukoda, Osamu Kobayashi

Groundwork: Osamu Kobayashi, Takashi Mukoda

One of the most ambitious train-wrecks in OVA history, Yamato 2520 was released between 1994 and 1996 in an attempt to revive the Yamato franchise. Originally planned for seven episodes, only the first three were ever released. Episode 3 ends as if everything were on course, leading into a next episode. Only silence followed.

It was an ambitious project. The Yamato was re-designed by Syd Mead (Blade Runner) in a sleek, angular, futuristic style breaking with the old Japanese battleship look. Mead also provided reams of beautiful conceptual art that hinted at a new visual approach for anime. For the soundtrack, they traveled all the way to New York to get David Matthews to compose the score. (the one from the Manhattan Jazz Quintet, not the Dave Matthews Band) He composed more than 100 different songs. It was thus an international collaboration. And on the Japanese side, they got some of Japan's best artists onboard - Mahiro Maeda, Toshiyuki Kubooka, Takashi Hashimoto and Shoichi Masuo. It was poised to be something great.

Why did they stop after 3 episodes? Supposedly, the production studio went out of business. But clearly there has to be more to the story that that, because you sense trouble in the waters even as you're watching the three episodes that were released. Despite all of the wonderful animation that was made, much of the show feels awkward and strained.

Yamato 2520 thus joins the ranks of other glorious failures from the battleground of 1990s OVAs: 3x3 Eyes (which ended prematurely on episode 4, although I don't know for sure if it was cancelled) and I'm a Space Miner (which ended after its second episode, definitely prematurely). 4 episodes, 3 episodes, 2 episodes. Even earllier, Relic Armor Legaciam ended prematurely after only one episode. There are probably other examples. Ironically, many of these incomplete OVAs are among my favorite OVAs ever produced. It's strange how the best projects seem to invite disaster.

When Yamato 2520 started coming out, another ambitious 7-part OVA was almost through its run: Giant Robo. 5 episodes had already come out. I watched this show in real time, and I recall distinctly how the space between episode releases became longer and longer, until the last episode took almost two years to come out, leaving many fearing it never would. Yamato 2520 didn't even have that luxury. As it happens, there is a lot of staff overlap between the two projects, so perhaps the resemblance isn't coincidence.

Giant Robo turned out to be one of the best OVA series ever released. Finally, an OVA series that did everything right: Epic sci-fi action-adventure that actually felt epic, a variety of interesting characters, great sense of style, high production values. Would Yamato 2520 have been a similar success had everything gone according to plan? I have my doubts. The first three episodes give a good indication what kind of story we were dealing with. Although for the most part it had good production quality, the story feels too regimented: An introductory first episode, a second episode spent entirely building the ship, the third episode with the crew discovering how to pilot the ship. Too little happens, and what happens is not interesting or surprising. There is none of the constant surprises, twists and excitement of Giant Robo. And the characters feel like cyphers. None of them are developed into interesting characters. They just seem to tag along to man the controls.

But watching it for the first time a few days ago, that's not what I felt was the real problem. It seems clear that there were behind-the-scenes staff issues well before the studio went out of business. After episode 1, some of the best members of the team left the project. The changes impacted the quality of episode 2 and 3, suggesting the studio was already struggling during the production of those episodes. Heck, there are signs of struggle since before the release of the first episode.

In February 1994, fully a year before episode 1 came out, they put out an hour-long documentary on the inception of the project. It showed tantalizing footage of Syd Mead at work drawing designs. Ten months later in December 1994, another documentary was released, labelled episode 0, as if to buy them some more time because they hadn't been able to make as much progress as intended, and it was taking too long so they had to put something out. Episode 0 contained a lot of nice footage of space battles. Episode 1 finally came out in February 1995. Incidentally, the first concept images for the project actually appeared way back in 1988, so the project had a very long inception period.

The interesting thing is that, in episode 0, Mahiro Maeda is credited as the director (kantoku), Shoichi Masuo as the line director (enshutsu) and Takeshi Shirato as the chief director (soukantoku). Shirato Takeshi maintained that credit in episode 1. Mahiro Maeda, however, wound up only drawing the storyboard. There is no credit for director. Three other line directors and one assistant line director were responsible for processing Maeda's storyboard, rather than he himself doing it. This suggests that for some reason he had to step away from the project after having completed the storyboard, rather than seeing his storyboard through to completion himself as the director.

As for Shoichi Masuo, in episode 1 he is credited with visual effect director (enshutsu). The "enshutsu" credit in episode 0 is presumably a shorthand for this. Shoichi Masuo did stay on throughout the project in the same capacity. It's primarily for his and Takashi Hashimoto's special effects that I like this series and find it worth re-visiting.

Episode 1 is an interesting beast in many ways. There's a great structure, but the execution feels wobbly. Maeda's storyboard is excellent, but it's like it's not properly carried out. Sometimes the pauses are just a little bit too long, and it overall feels awkward, clearly a product of someone other than the storyboarder having processed his own storyboard. Not only this, there are no less than four line directors, which is clearly a bad sign.

That's another of the problematic aspects of this show: There are too many cooks in the kitchen. There's a project supervisor, a supervisor, a chief director, a director, a storyboarder, several line directors, and four people working on the script. It seems symptomatic of underlying issues.

If it weren't for the issues with the directing of episode 1, it could have been a nice little film. Maeda's storyboard is great. Every beat is spot on, and he creates a great flow. He's got a good sense for how to present drama in terms of the framing of shots and the choreography of action. It's unfortunate that he wasn't able to process his storyboard on this one.

The character animation is handled by Toshiyuki Kubooka, who coincidentally was the character designer of Giant Robo, not to mention the character designer and chief animation director Anno Hideaki's Aim for the Top! (1988). The combination of Shoichi Masuo, Mahiro Maeda and Toshiyuki Kubooka obviously brings to mind one thing: Nadia of the Blue Water. They were three of the indispensable figures behind the show. Maeda storyboarded episodes 10, 16, 22 and 35 in addition to being the show's main concept artist. Kubooka storyboarded episodes 12, 31 and 39 and sakkan'd episodes 2, 20 and 36. Masuo I wrote about before. Masuo and Kubooka together worked on episode 2 of Nadia, so you can see the two of them together in action years before. Kubooka and Maeda would work together a few more times over the years on Origin: Spirits of the Past and Maeda's own Gankutsuoh TV series and Gala short.

Watching episode 1 of Yamato 2520 feels like a flashback to Nadia, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. All the main aspects were done by one of the main Nadia guys - directing, character animation and effect animation. It felt like, if it had been done well, it could have been the next step in the evolution of that style. I particularly like Kubooka's design work on the show - the simple, universal character style is appealing in itself, and it's well suited to this kind of epic story and facilitates more active character movement.

It's unfortunate that this first episode feels somehow hobbled by the shoddy way Maeda's storyboard was processed. It would have been nice to at least have one perfect episode. As it stands, episode 1 has a lot of very nice work, and if you squint your eyes, you can see the faint outline of a potential classic.

Episode 1 opens with an action sequence involving two kids racing their jets in the sky. The scene where the boy ejects from his jet is tense and exciting thanks to the animation and directing. Masami Goto was an animator in this episode, so I assume he must have been responsible for animating most of this section. It was right around the same time that he did animation on Macross Plus, another great OVA from this era, and the style of the action in episode 1 is reminiscent of the type of jet fighter action you see in Macross Plus. It's a pleasingly earthy and unexpected way to open a show about giant battleships in space - it's reminiscent of the way they opened the Star Trek reboot.

It's actually one of the most memorable parts of the episode. It suggests the magic that could have sparked if the talent of all those involved had had the chance to coalesce perfectly into something beyond the sum of its parts. Maeda did a pilot for a film called R20 Galactic Airport in 1991, but it never got off the ground. It feels like episode 1 gives a basic sense of how it might have felt if he'd had the chance to do it.

It's a shame that pilot didn't come through. I would like to see a feature directed by Maeda Mahiro. His storyboards reveal rare cinematic instinct. It's amazing that, for all of the work he's done in the industry over the years, and all of the talent he's obviously oozing, he never had the chance to direct a feature-length film. At least with his own Blue No. 6 of 1998-2000 he got to do a proper sci-fi action OVA series.

Kubooka's character design work reminds me of yet another great OVA series from this period - Green Legend Ran, whose characters were designed by Toshimitsu Ohashi. Both are among my favorite of this period. It's my ideal style in many ways.

In episode 2, Takeshi Shirato handles the storyboard and enshutsu, and Kubooka is no longer present as character designer or sakkan. He's now credited with "original character design", the ultimate insult. The pacing/directing feels very different from episode 1. Simply put, it's boring and insensitive. It doesn't have the intelligence and the sophistication of Maeda's storyboard. Shirato is one of the figures who worked on the original Yamato, and it shows. The directing feels old-fashioned and bland.

Episode 3 was storyboarded by Shigenori Kageyama and is a scant improvement over episode 2. The animation quality of episodes 2 and 3 is very uneven. Combined with the boring story, which feels like nothing more than filler leading up to the actual events to follow in episodes 4-7, there isn't much that makes episodes 2 and 3 worth watching. It's ludicrous to pace a 7 episode series in such a way that the first three episodes are throwaway introductory episodes. They at least have to be interesting. Things might have been considerably more watchable had they maintained the staff of episode 1 on throughout the rest of the show.

Another issue is the music. The music itself is decent, but badly incorporated. It doesn't match what's going on most of the time. The music is too declamatory, seeming to narrate events that aren't happening on the screen. Either that, or they did a bad job of choosing when to play which piece. The mix is also uneven. Often the music is so loud that I can't hear what people are saying. Getting basic things like this wrong is a sign that there were some fundamental issues with the handling of this series. They had their priorities wrong. They go to New York to get this music, but they don't even bother to make sure it fits the show. They get these great staff to work on episode one, then they get rid of all the good people in episode 2 and 3.

Other little gripes: After seeing Syd Mead's concept art in the preview documentaries, I felt kind of let down by the ordinary look of the show itself. It didn't seem to bring alive Syd Mead's vision. Apart from the battleships, obviously. Also not enough world-building: They didn't show enough scenes of life in this future world to create a feeling of a thoroughly conceptualized fantasy city and society. They instead focus almost exclusively on the character drama. Also too much verbal exposition: Too much information is thrown at us in boring monologues about what happened before this, and who so-and-so is.

Only the mecha and effect animation maintains a constant level of quality throughout the series. And ultimately, it's primarily for the mecha/FX animation by Takashi Hashimoto and Shoichi Masuo and that I think this series was actually successful as an endeavor (not to mention being the main thing that makes Yamato 2520 worth seeking out 15 years later). The space battles are beautiful and epic as befitting the material. The human sections may or may not work, depending on the viewer.

Takashi Hashimoto is credited as chief animation director while Shoichi Masuo is credited as effect animation director. Hashimoto didn't correct drawings, as the credit implies. He was given that title out of deference for his work by producer Yamazaki. As a condition for working on the show, Hashimoto asked that he have direct access to Yamazaki to give advice as to what to do and not to do, and that he have permission to alter the storyboards of his parts if necessary. Thus he not only drew and corrected a lot of the animation himself, he also made sure the storyboards for the battle sequences were right, and even drew some of the storyboards himself.

I mentioned Macross Plus before. As it turns out, Hashimoto was heavily influenced by Yasushi Muraki's work on Macross Plus. Both knew each other before, and considered each others rivals of sorts. Muraki had even been invited to work on Yamato 2520, but he chose to work on Macross Plus. When Hashimoto saw the amazing work Muraki was doing on that show, it prompted him to do the best he could on Yamato 2520. And that's undoubtedly the reason the space battle sequences have such an incredible feeling of power. Hashimoto worked on overdrive to make them as realistic and impressive as possible. There were no limits on the number of drawings he could use, so he packed those scenes with tons of movement. Incidentally, Hashimoto also did a lot of work on Giant Robo prior to working on Yamato 2520.

You can see a lot of clips from the show on YouTube. This one shows a good selection of the work of Takashi Hashimoto and Shoichi Masuo. Hashimoto would have done the various shots of ships fighting starting here, including the ship getting hit by a laser beam and exploding and the ship on fire falling downwards towards the sun. Masuo would have done the planets exploding at the beginning and the ships exploding later on.

The shot shown above, which you can see in motion here, seems like a shot that would have been handled by Masuo. What gives it away is the style of the explosion mainly, although ironically the layout seems identical to one he drew for a shot of the Nautilus exploding, which I described as an example in my post on Masuo. Masuo's explosions for some reason usually have this pink color, and he adds these specks you see around the rim of the explosion, something he presumably learned from Hideaki Anno. The reason for his credit as special effect director, besides the fact that he drew a lot of the explosions, is because he provided a lot of instructions in terms of how to process the animation - such as what kind of mask to use in certain situations. He had a lot of specialized knowledge of that kind that he put to use.

Hashimoto's explosions look different. They don't have the same color, and their forms are different. Hashimoto also focused on a different kind of movement. Masuo drew mainly the static shots of explosions, whereas Hashimoto drew the scenes with more tricky movement, such as the very cool first-person perspective shot here of an enemy fighter flying over one of the ships and dropping a bomb on it. But clearly Hashimoto learned a lot of technical tricks from Masuo during his experience working on Yamato 2520.

Makoto Kobayashi, the great mecha designer, was one of the few figures who stayed on throughout the duration of the production. Hashimoto also learned a lot of tricks from Kobayashi about spatial concepts - for example if a ship is in perspective, you can use a flat color for the bit further out to make it seem further out, or you can omit certain lines from a drawing to make a ship look suitably huge. He's undoubtedly one of the other figures who helped elevate the show's production values to the next level. As the mecha designer, he would have been responsible for adapting Sys Mead's drawings. It was a good choice. I can't think of many other people in Japan as close in sensibility. He's very prolific as a designer and has a style like nobody else - realistic yet bizarre.

Mecha specialist Kunihiro Abe joined the team for episodes 2 and 3. He has worked on things like Silent Mobius, Steam Boy, the new Gundam Z movies and Gundam 00. He alternated with Takashi Hashimoto doing the mecha work on the 6 episodes of the Orguss 02 OVA series, which came out just afterwards and thus probably shares some similarity in the mecha style with this series. (The opening of Orguss 02 was incidentally animated entirely by Takashi Hashimoto.)

Other notable faces in the animator list include Koji Sugiura, Tadashi Hiramatsu, Norimoto Tokura and Keisuke Masunaga in episode 1, Yasuhiro Irie in episode 2 and Toshie Sugiharu as an inbetweener in all episodes. Sugiura, Irie and Sugiharu are of course now Bones regulars. This shot in episode 2 looks like Tokura's work, but he's only credited in episode 1, so I'm not sure if it is.

Although this project was wobbly on other fronts, they assembled a strong team to support the quality of the drawings of the spaceships. After all, this is a show entirely set in space. The protagonists really are the spaceships, and there are a ton of those. Atsushi Takeuchi is another talented mecha animator who worked on the show. (albeit only episode 1) It would have felt pointless to even bother reviving Yamato if you didn't really update it, and in that sense they did a good job. The mecha animation, at least, was the state of the art for its day. (It looks way better than the mecha in last year's movie.)

Judged overall, Yamato 2520 appears to fail to appeal to Yamato fans, as it's far too removed from the original show, as well as to outsiders like me who never watched the show before and just want to enjoy a good show, as it's beset by technical problems and doesn't gel into good entertainment. What does make it genuinely worth revisiting after all these years, though, is all the hard work put into the show by the mecha staff, led by Takashi Hashimoto, Shoichi Masuo and Kobayashi Makoto. Thanks to their intricate mecha and effects animation, giant battleships combating in space has never been more majestic and epic.

Yoshinobu Nishizaki is the producer and mastermind behind all this Yamato stuff. He has shown a single-minded dedication to Yamato that defies all bounds. He was engaged in an acrimonious lawsuit with the creator of Yamato, Leiji Matsumoto. He won, and now he seems to be devoting his life to creating as many sequels as possible. Apparently the four movies and three TV series made from 1974 to 1983 were not enough. In 1985 he attempted to push the space opera genre pioneered by Yamato in a new direction with the movie Odin, but it flopped. So he made Yamato 2520. And now he's back at it again. Last year he released a film entitled Rebirth Yamato (trailer) helmed by many of the same staff as the original Yamato and the Odin movie - director Takeshi Shirato, supervisor Masuda Toshio, animation directors Kazuhiko Utagawa, Shinya Takahashi and Tomonori Kogawa. Yet another is due for release in December of this year: a live-action/CGI action drama entitled simply Space Battleship Yamato (trailer). You can be sure that if this one is successful (and it stars Kimutaku), that will just be the beginning of the sequel frenzy.

Brief aside about Eiichi Yamamoto's involvement in Yamato: Writing this reminded me that I've always wondered how he came to be involved as a fixture of the series, so I just checked his fictional memoir Mushi Pro Koboki and found passing mention of Yamato at the very end. In the last days of Mushi Pro, Nishizaki had been hired as acting president at Mushi Pro Shoji, the trading firm that managed the Mushi Pro Copyrights. That's how the two got to know each other. Nishizaki soon went freelance and asked Yamamoto for help. Nishizaki wanted to get into anime, so he presumably asked Yamamoto for his help because he was an experienced animation director and he was newly free from Mushi Pro. The two of them put together the original Proposal document for Yamato that started the whole franchise. He helped supervise, structure and write the original series and helped put together the TV compilation movie. Indeed, aside from Yamamoto, many of the staff who worked on the show were ex-Mushi Pro folks.

You can see more images from the show and from Syd Mead's concept art and also get a good run-down of the content of each episode at this site.

Yamato 2520 main credits

All episodes
Future concept design: Syd Mead
Yamato original design: Leiji Matsumoto
Chief director: Takeshi Shirato
Supervisor: Toshio Masuda
Score and arrangement: David Matthews
Music director: Kentaro Haneda
Script producer and supervisor: Eiichi Yamamoto
Script: Yasushi Hirano, Eiichi Yamamoto, Yoshinobu Nishizaki

Episode 1 (released Feb 1995)

Storyboard: Mahiro Maeda
Art director: Yusuke Takeda
Character designer: Toshiyuki Kubooka
Mechanic designer: Makoto Kobayashi, Atsushi Takeuchi, Takashi Hashimoto
SF groundwork assistance: Aigaki Toyoda, Jun Fukue, Masanobu Endo, Hitoshi Nozaki
Layout sakkan: Mahiro Maeda, Toshiyuki Kubooka, Atsushi Takeuchi, Takashi Hashimoto, Masahiko Ookura, Koji Sugiura, Hidetoshi Yoshida
Visual effect director: Shoichi Masuo
Chief sakkan: Kazuhiko Utagawa
Sakkans: Shinya Takahashi, Takashi Hashimoto, Shoichi Masuo
Mahiro Maeda, Jun Matsumoto, Yotoaki Fukushima
Joji Kikuchi
Key animators: Michiyo Sakurai, Shizuo Kawai, Takao Yoshino
Shinji Morohashi, Takashi Koizumi, Masahiro Sekiguchi
Tsutomu Murakami, Koji Kataoka, Tadashi Hiramatsu
Takashi Hyodo, Norimoto Tokura, Kazuhiro Itakura
Jun Matsumoto, Hiroyuki Yokota, Tatsuya Abe
Shigetaka Kiyoyama, Yoshitaka Kato, Masami Goto
Izumi Shimura, Sadatoshi Matsuzaka, Keisuke Masunaga
Masaaki Iwane
Inbetween check: Kazuo Tanaka, Kaname Wakabayashi, Futoshi Higashide
Inbetweeners: Toshiharu Sugie et al.
-----
Line directors: Hideki Takayama
Ryo Yasumura, Shigeto Makino
Assistant line director: Kiyotaka Isako

Episode 2 (released Dec 1995)

Storyboard & line director: Takeshi Shirato
Art director: Yusuke Takeda
Original character design: Toshiyuki Kubooka, Hiroyuki Kitazume
Character design: Aki Tsunaki, Nobuaki Nagano
Art groundwork design: Hiroshi Sasaki
Mechanic design and groundwork design: Kobayashi Makoto
SF groundwork assistance: Arigaki Toyoda, Chiaki Kawamata, Jun Fukue
Masanobu Endo, Hitoshi Nozaki
Literary production assistance: Koji Miura
Chief sakkan: Takashi Hashimoto
Character sakkans: Shinya Takahashi [elder], Shinya Takahashi [younger], Aki Tsunaki, Nobuaki Nagano
Mechanic sakkans: Jun Matsumoto, Ryuji Shiromae, Kunihiro Abe
Special and mechanic genga: Shoichi Masuo
Key animation: Yasuhiro Irie, Shizuo Kawai, Masahiro Sekiguchi
Takashi Sogabe, Kiyotaka Nakahara, Tsunenaka Nozaki
Takashi Hashimoto, Futoshi Higashide, Akihiro Fukui
Shoichi Masuo, Hajime Matsuzaki, Shinichiro Minami
Satoru Minowa, Tatsuo Yanagiya
(Anime Spot)
Kazunori Hirota, Takeyuki Suzuki
(K Production)
Shigenobu Nagasaki, Shirotsugu Ohshima
(Cockpit)
Masaaki Iwane, Hisao Muramatsu, Toshio Mori
(Studio Yamato)
Mikine Kuwahara, Futoshi Higashide, Shinji Morohashi
Takao Yoshino
Inbetweeners: Toshiharu Sugie et al.

Episode 3 (released Aug 1996)

Storyboard: Shigenori Kageyama
Art director: Kazushige Takato
Original character design: Toshiyuki Kubooka, Hiroyuki Kitazume
Character design: Aki Tsunaki, Nobuaki Nagano, Kazuhiko Utagawa
Art groundwork design: Hiroshi Sasaki, Makoto Kobayashi
Mechanic design and groundwork design: Kobayashi Makoto
SF groundwork assistance: Arigaki Toyoda, Chiaki Kawamata, Jun Fukue
Masanobu Endo, Hitoshi Nozaki
-----
Assistant director: Makoto Kobayashi
-----
Chief sakkan: Takashi Hashimoto
Character chief sakkan: Aki Tsunaki
Sakkans: Kazuhiko Utagawa, Shinya Takahashi, Takeshi Shirato,
Nobuaki Nagano, Ryuji Shiromae
Animation supervisor: Tatsuo Yanagiya
Key animation: Kunihiro Abe, Keiji Ishihara, Minoru Kobata,
Takashi Koizumi, Kobayashi Makoto, Hisashi Saito,
Ryuji Shiromae, Masahiro Sekiguchi, Hikaru Takanashi
Aki Tsunaki, Nobuaki Nagano, Tsunenaka Nozaki
Takashi Hashimoto, Akihiro Fukui, Shoichi Masuo,
Hajime Matsuzaki, Shinichiro Minami, Satoru Minowa
Masaki Yamada
(Anime Spot)
Kazunori Hirota, Takeyuki Suzuki
(Studio Cockpit)
Masaaki Iwane, Hisao Muramatsu, Toshio Mori
(Studio Yamato)
Futoshi Higashide, Mikine Kuwahara, Toshiharu Sugie
Shinji Morohashi
Inbetweeners: Toshiharu Sugie et al.

Chinese indie animator Lei Lei (AKA Ray), whom I've mentioned several times previously, just won the award for best narrative short at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. You can see the short (I'm assuming it to be the full short) on his Vimeo account here. Congratulations to Lei Lei and nice to see him getting recognition.

Phil Mulloy's Goodbye Mister Christie won for best feature animation while David O'Reilly's The External World won for best independent short. I haven't seen either film, but both are undoubtedly well deserving of the win based on their past work. As a fan of Ruth Lingford, I was happy to see her latest film Little Deaths win the prize for best experimental/abstract animation.

Full list of OIAF 2010 winners

I'd be lying if I didn't say I'm disappointed Midori-ko didn't win. But then again, not having seen either film yet, I can't judge which is more deserving. It would have been a great coup for Kurosaka to come out of nowhere and win. Oh well. I was hoping to read some reviews of Midori-ko by people who saw the film at the festival, but I haven't found anything yet. I doubt the film's going to come to Vancouver anytime, so I'm left to hope it gets a DVD release sooner rather than later.

The official site for Midori-ko has been up for a while now, and they just posted a trailer for the film, which gives the first real glimpse into what to expect. It looks amazing. It mentions this remarkable statistic: It took him 13 years to make and 30,000 drawings.

In an unrelated note, I just discovered the trailer for the movie Magical Hanja: Stopping the Resurrection of the Great Devil, produced by DNA Productions of South Korea and featuring Kang Won Young as the animation director. I wrote a post about it back in April, as I like Kang Won Young's work and the film promises to be his biggest statement to date. It apparently came out on August 19, 2010. Did any readers in South Korea see this film? The trailer shows some nice looking animation, some of the best I've seen from Korea. It feels influenced by Japanese styles of movement yet unique and original. It looks even better than I was hoping, at least in terms of the animation, so I look forward to seeing this, even if just for the animation.