KOJI MORIMOTO Animation Director, STUDIO 4°C
Founder of leading Japanese animation studio, STUDIO 4°C, Morimoto-san is one of Japan’s premiere anime directors. At AFA08, he will speak about his creative work and also about his much-awaited latest animation “Genius Party Beyond - ‘Jigen Bakudan’.
Morimoto-san’s has worked on the TV series “Tomorrow's Joe 2” as a grunt animator, and as animation director Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira” in addition to many other anime works before he founded STUDIO 4°C with producer Eiko Tanaka and fellow animator Yoshiharu Sato.
Since then, he has directed various provocative and pioneering animations from music clip “Extra” for Ken Ishii to anime films like “Noiseman Sound Insect”, “Eternal Family” and “The Animatrix - ‘Beyond’”.
Besides working as a motion graphic artist, Morimoto-san also works as an illustrator, DJ and director of live videos.
MARIMI SAKURAI Project Manager, STUDIO 4°C As Project Manager, Sakurai-san handles the initial planning, budgeting and negotiation of a project and upon project completion, Sakurai-san also handles promotion, distribution and sales activities for the company’s products.
Sakurai-san will speak about the animation industry and share her insights of what happens behind-the-scenes in the industry.
Background of “Genius Party” and “Genius Party Beyond” It started in 2001, 7 years ago, when Eiko Tanaka, executive producer of STUDIO 4℃ planned out the “short omnibus animation where various artists can join” and it turned into the current “Genius Party” project. In the fall of 2002, production started. Eiko Tanaka was in charge of curating the directors, and selected them based on their ability to produce highly creative works. “Genius Party Beyond” is the follow up compilation to “Genius Party” that was released in 2007.
“JIGEN BAKUDAN / Dimension Bomb” Director Koji Morimoto had been involved in this project long before the name of ”Genius Party” was confirmed. This time, what his challenge was to incorporate all the images he had through his life into one movie. It took him more than half a year to prepare a storyboard that would make the visual images appeal to the audience rather than just the story.
Making this “JIGEN BAKUDAN” structure was like creating a music promotional video. After finishing the production of the storyboards, storyboards were turned into a video storyboard movie. Juno Reactor and Director Koji Morimoto also shared the ideas of the music throughout the whole animation. It is said that this process was so smooth, removing any barriers for languages.Around the same time, character designs and background designs started. Koji Morimoto drew all of the layout of each scene by himself, discussing his visual images with art director Kibun Shinbayashi, There are many scenes that express the reality of depth and width of the space, with a few scenes in the movie using 3D. 3D was used several times when the animation movements were simulated, but at the final stage, most of all the animations cuts were drawn by hands.
