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Katsuhiro Otomo (1954 - )
Date of Birth: 14 April 1954 BIOGRAPHY Alongside Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Otomo is the best known name in anime in the West, thanks to the phenomenal success of his 1988 epic Akira. However, to label Otomo purely as an anime director would be wrong as he has had less of an impact on the development of the form than one might expect - his contributions to the world of anime purely as a director have been surprisingly few and far between, but his influence as a writer and designer and the enormous impact that Akira made on Western anime fandom cannot be underestimated. Otomo was obsessed with manga, film and television from a very early age and it was clear even early on that he wanted to forge a creer as a manga artist. After graduating from Sanuma High School, he headed for Tokyo to realise his ambition and was soon employed to adapt Prosper Merimee's short novel Mateo Falcone for the popular weekly magazine Action. The adaptation, retitled A Gun Report, first appeared in October 1973, and was the first of a series of self-contained stories that Otomo would create for Action, and in true manga fashion, he dabbled in many and various subjects. Throughout the 70s, Otomo continued to hone his skills, graduating to headline stories and longer strips before embarking on the ambitious Fireball, a complex tale of mankind locked in a struggle with an all-powerful supercomputer. The story was never completed but it was important for many reasons, not least of which were the proto-cyberpunk leanings of its plot and for being Otomo's first sustained exploration of the interaction between Man and machine. It also featured government scientists locked in a struggle with terrorists for control of a devestating new technology, a theme that Otomo was to return to in his later work, Akira. Even more ambitious was Domu (1980 - 1982), a huge horror story about psychics at war in a run down Tokyo housing complex. The story took two years to tell in the pages of Action and was a massive success, netting Otomo Japan's prestigious Grand Prix award for a Science Fiction story, the first time that a manga had been so honoured. The early 80s were a boom time for Otomo who became increasingly prolific. The war story Kibun wa mo senso (an adaptation of Toshihiko Yahagi novel) and It's a Crazy, Crazy World quickly followed as did Otomo's first attempt at film-making, a 16mm film titled Give Us Guns. He also made his anime debut in 1982 when he was asked to contribute character designs to the epic Harmagedon: Genma taisen and the space opera Crusher Joe, both of which were released in 1983. By the time the films were released however, Otomo had already embarked on his magnum opus, the ground-breaking masterpiece Akira. Taking eight years to run its course and published bi-monthly in Action, it grew into 2000 pages of art, subsequently collected in six volumes. The sprawling story made Otomo a superstar and was equally popular when it was translated into English and other languages. As the story of Akira wound its ever-more-comlex way to its conclusion, Otomo took the reins for the first time as director when he helmed one segment of the anthology piece Meikyû monogatari (1987). He followed this with work on another anthology, the highly regarded Roboto kânibauru (1987) before starting work on a big screen adaptation of Akira. It's become de rigeur in some quarters to pillory Akira for being successful, to dismiss it as somehow not "real" anime and even to claim that its success has somehow "damaged" anime. All nonsense of course. It's a staggering achievement and its arrival in the West ignited fandom like no other film or TV show had managed before. It remains the high water mark for anime and is one of the truly great SF movies - animated or not. Akira pretty well ended Otomo's work in manga. The Otomo scripted The Legend of the Mother Sarah was serialised in Young magazine and it proved to be his final work for the print medium. Instead, Otomo concentrated on movies - Warudo apaatoment hora was his first attempt at a live-action film and he soon became popular as a collaborator in many capacities, as script-writer, character designer and the, more cryptically, "supervisor". A decade after the global success of Akira,
Otomo announced that he would be returning to anime to write and direct
Steamboy,
a project that endured many tribulations and took years to get to the
screen. At the time of writing (February 2004), the film is finally
due for a release in July 2004. Whether it has the same impact as Akira
remains to be seen. GENRE FILMOGRAPHY 1979 1981 1982 1983 Harmagedon:
Genma taisen (animator, character designer) 1987 Roboto kanibauru
(director (segments Coming Soon and See You Again)) 1988 Akira Production Report (performer (himself)) Fushigi monogatari: Hachi neko wa yoku asagata kaette kuru (script) 1991 Warudo
apaatoment hora (director) 1995 1997 1998 2001 2002 2004 NON-GENRE FILMOGRAPHY 1981 1988 REFERENCES MAGAZINES Cinefantastique vol.32 no.6 (February 2001) pp.35-45
(USA) Monthly Film Bulletin vol.58 no.686 (March 1991) pp.67=68
(UK) Perfect Vision vol.5 no.19 (Autumn 1993) p.138 (USA) Screen International no.1129 (10 October 1997) p.4
(UK) Screen International no.1427 (31 October 2003) pp.21-24
(UK)
Last Updated: 1 January, 2009
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