An interview with Cowboy Bebop’s director/character designer/composer team. Contains a couple nuggets of information (Yoko Kanno was composing ost pieces a year before production started, Ein was modeled after Yoko Kanno, the “new genre unto itself” eyecatch quote was inserted into the show without Watanabe’s permission).
Ken Akamatsu talks about his favorite parts of the Love Hina manga and his limited role in the anime adaptation. His answer as to why he wasn’t able to get involved with the adaptation (that weekly manga made him too busy) is an interesting contrast with DN Angel’s Yukiru Sugisaki, who published monthly and was heavily involved in the adaptation.
A short piece on the process of dubbing anime. There’s lots of informational material on this available in English already (VA con panels are ubiquitous fixtures of the scene, and get on youtube now and again), but it does give an idea of the timescales involved in working on such a project – about 12 hours of voice acting work for a main character, per episode.
This feature article on Spirited Away includes a bit with Pixar bigwig John Lasseter talking about his role in localizing Spirited Away.
Prior to the release of the Ghost in the Shell 2 manga, Masamune Shirow talks about some plot details, the ten year gap between 1 and 2, and liking Wallace and Gromit.
This article is a short one talking about the launch of the Bandai Channel, one of the earlier online streaming services for anime, with a couple of points made on logistics.
Anime Insider/Invasion (had different titles at different points during its run) was a magazine published by Wizards of the Coast during the big boom in the US, from about 2001 to 2009. I recently acquired close to the entire ~60-issue run at a swap meet. While the majority of the material is either thinly veiled promotion or puerile stuff reminding me why I’ve withdrawn somewhat from the US community, there’s typically at least one pure article/interview per issue. I’ll be posting them here as I see fit, including ads that come in pages in between the articles (mainly as a way of verifying that I’m not accidentally skipping pages).
This article interviews Kia Asamiya, the author of Steam Detectives and Silent Mobius, who had a particularly interesting career that took her to the US and saw her working on the Star Wars Episode 1 manga.
Continued from part 1, here are the rest of the directors that managed to notch multiple credits on 10,000 plus per volume hits. 13 guys directed two non-sequel hits, which, adding in the 4 from before, gives a total of 17 people in the history of anime to make this particular list.
As before, note that while anidb and ann are being used, they are potentially incomplete sources. For example, Tsuda Naokatsu only receives Uta Kata production assistance credit on ann. I will generally give direction credit to anyone who is listed as a director on one of the two sites, and directed a plurality of the episodes. Series director vs. plain Director titles for shows that gave the two to different people were tricky to interpret – I opted to give the title to the staffer listed as just director.
An Important Note About The Classification: I only included non-sequel anime when looking for directors. This means nothing with some manifestation of a 2 in the title. Ditto for Gundam or Macross franchise entries after the original. My rationale is that it’s a lot harder to make a prime-time anime from scratch, even with popular source material, than it is to continue living in a house you or someone else built. I count A Certain Scientific Railgun and Mononoke as spinoffs rather than sequels, as the series they spun off of are considerably less well-established franchises.
Unless you’re Urobouchi Gen,* if your name headlines the trailer of a given series, odds are you’re its director. Director credits are the first non-voice actor bit of information given on staff pages of ann, anidb, and mal show pages. And that’s how it should be; as important as good writing can be, directors have the desk the buck stops at when it comes to power and responsibility to make decisions in show production, often holding full or partial authority to rewrite an episode script. Ano Hana was written as part slapstick/erotic comedy before director Tatsuyuki Nagai got his hands on the script. Beyond that, directors supervise the visual component of anime, making sure a series’ art says what it’s supposed to and flows from shot to shot.
A lot of complex factors go into an anime being either a success, hit, or failure, but it’s really hard for an untalented creator to accidentally produce a hit more than once. And while hit tv anime aren’t the only achievement that deserves recognition (JMAF grand prizes and Oscars would be two others), they are one of the bigger ones; excluding sequel seasons, less than 100 people have managed to notch this achievement in the 50+ years since Astro Boy first aired.
This is the very short list of directors who have headed at least 3 separate hit franchises, with some supplementary information. A similar post on those who have made 2 shows will be up sometime in the near future.
This list was compiled from something’s list of 10k+ shows, with supplementary resume data pulled from ann and anidb. While I am making heavy use of these databases, I don’t trust them to be 100% complete: Seiji Kishi’s pages show an 8-year gap between his first credits and his first series directed in which he does (supposedly) nothing. Not only that, but anidb and ann disagree on whether his first work was as an in-betweener on Ruin Explorers or on Eiga Nintama Rantarou (anidb lists the former, ann the latter). Tatsuyuki Nagai’s first credit is as an episode director, a position not typically awarded to newbies. More likely their full histories aren’t chronicled here, though that only applies to secondary roles played in production. It’s an important thing to be aware of.
An Important Note About The Classification: I only included non-sequel anime when looking for directors. This means nothing with some manifestation of a 2 in the title. Ditto for Gundam or Macross franchise entries after the original. My rationale is that it’s a lot harder to make a prime-time anime from scratch, even with popular source material, than it is to continue living in a house you or someone else built. I count A Certain Scientific Railgun and Mononoke as spinoffs rather than sequels, as the series they spun off of are considerably less well-established franchises.
This week has been pretty great across the board. I just thought I’d jot out a quick list of things I liked about it.
Animetics 