Top 6 Quotes & Sayings by Katsuhiro Otomo

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Japanese artist Katsuhiro Otomo.

Last updated on December 19, 2024.

Katsuhiro Otomo is a Japanese manga artist, screenwriter, animator and film director. He is best known as the creator of Akira, in terms of both the original 1982 manga series and the 1988 animated film adaptation. He was decorated a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2005, promoted to Officier of the order in 2014, became the fourth manga artist ever inducted into the American Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2012, and was awarded the Purple Medal of Honor from the Japanese government in 2013. Otomo later received the Winsor McCay Award at the 41st Annie Awards in 2014 and the 2015 Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême, the first manga artist to receive the award. Otomo is married to Yoko Otomo. Together they have one child, a son named Shohei Otomo, who is also an artist.

Japanese - Artist | Born: April 14, 1954

Source: Wikipedia

Approximately 400 cuts - that would make 25 percent of the total - use CGI. I worked on the Steamboy's animation production based on the usual handwriting method. Digital animation is just supplementary. I didn't do anything surprising, because the idea is to overcome the limitation of expressions done by handwriting with the help of CGI.

Katsuhiro Otomo

During the production of the Steamboy film, what I put my most effort in was the process of layouts, and I did my best to check every detail. Once this process is done precisely, we will get great backgrounds from our art team. This makes the team effort fun. I can't create a movie by myself. It is worthy only because many staff bring new ideas and techniques. I think the appeal of being the director is to encounter such new things, which I don't possess. It is absolutely wonderful to create something new based on teamwork. It is something that I couldn't appreciate in my cartoonist days.

Katsuhiro Otomo

The cartoonist's work is solitary; even when dealing with editors and assistants, there is no such excitement as to creating unexpected drastic changes for projects. But by the same token, manga can't be drawn by a lot of people, as done in film.

Katsuhiro Otomo

Although all studios are now moving towards digitalization, a foundation in which we draw pictures by hand hasn't changed, so I foresee that we will continue to keep it in the future. After all, we used the digital method based on a conception of expanding and advancing the expression of the traditional animation cel in Steamboy. The first goal of this project was to overcome limitations of camera angles caused by platforms. On that aspect, I won't go back to the traditional method. I hoped to combine the merits of the traditional method of cel animation with the merits of the new CGI method.

Katsuhiro Otomo

Since the waiting time required during the rendering process has been dramatically shorter in the last 10 years, I think that CGI animation has finally become practical. It is a fact that I processed the Steamboy work based on the assumption that the machine spec would be higher. In that context, young 3D animators have also gotten more skillful in recent years. But what I didn't expect is that the skills of traditional 2D animators have become worse, and notable young animators have not come out to the scene. This is a big issue for the industry.

Katsuhiro Otomo

The industry in Japan moving toward CGI is not as severe and extreme as in the U.S. The animation industry in the U.S. is firing 2D animators and closing those studios, but I think it's possibly because the national traits of the U.S. prefer super-realism. Since Japan is a country that prefers plane vision, I don't think we will leave 2D and substitute hand-drawing with CGI entirely.

Katsuhiro Otomo

Top 6 Quotes & Sayings by Katsuhiro Otomo

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