This issue features a long piece by journeyman TV director Hideo Watanabe, veteran of Fist of the North Star (pictured) and Voltron, about the centrality of storyboarding to animation. Now available as a free PDF from the University of Niigata, the second volume of Minori Ishida and Kim Joon Yang’s Archiving Movements continues to assemble interesting articles about the world of Japanese animation – the editors are keen to stress that their journal is open to discussions of many forms of visual media, but are plainly enjoying the opportunity to dedicate much of their page-space, again, to anime, for as long as they can get away with it.

Even the alternate names denote the behind-the-scenes battle over whether interfering producers, determined to call it “The Something of Something”, would get their way, along with an airline sponsor adamant that “Wings” should be in the title. As chronicled elsewhere, not the least in the memoirs of Toshio Okada, Wings of Honneamise had a gloriously busy, high-quality production history, fought over by its passionate creators, its grim money-man, and distributors and exhibitors determined to turn it into something that it wasn’t. Royal Space Force), made at the tail end of the cel-and-pencil days, but also with the last great gasp of Bubble-era boondoggle money. It seems to have been produced as an argument towards how Niigata should proceed with its research, starting with what materials should be preserved, and how they could be studied.įor the sake of argument, the materials presented in the exhibition, and discussed in the conference, were from the Gainax classic Wings of Honneamise (a.k.a.

Archiving Movements: Short Essays on Materials of Anime and Visual Media, edited by Minori Ishida and Kim Joon Yang, is related to a patchwork of international initiatives – an anime archiving project at Niigata University, an exhibition in Singapore, and a brief mini-conference in Stockholm.

Anime a history jonathan clements