This awesome crossover fanart kept bothering me for years because I couldn't find out who drew it. Turns out it was You Yoshinari (吉成曜) all along, none other than my favorite animator! No wonder the style looked familiar. I couldn't imagine he'd have a thing for American cartoons.
Born in 1971, You Yoshinari had his animator debut in 1992. Soon after he did action scenes for Evangelion, and has been known as an in-house "genius" at Gainax ever since. His works include animation, illustration and character/mechanical design, but (almost) no directing at all. Maybe that's why he's kind of an obscure name for everyone but animation geeks.
Incidentally he's drawn most of my favorite parts in FLCL and Gurren Lagann. There's just this beautiful flow and rhythm in his animation. It's a great combination of realism and style; he has a good understanding of physics while managing to make every little twitch look flawlessly cool.
Gurren Lagann Parallel Works #8 is a rare direction work of Yoshinari's, though I can't tell how much of it he drew by himself. It's all very much his style though. All the robots in the series were his design too:
Yoshinari also has a trademark lush illustration style which is mostly seen as promotional art for anime, but a couple of videogames too (Grandia III, Valkyrie Profile 1 & 2).
There's so much detail it almost makes my eyes hurt... but the palettes are rather nice. He really loves those purple hues, eh?
Sources:
http://www18.atwiki.jp/sakuga/
http://www.creativeuncut.com/
Animaation ohjaajien esittelyt ovat aina plussaa, sillä heistä on helkkarin vaikea muuten löytää kovasti tietoa. Yhden foorumin olen tälle asialle löytänyt, mutta oli muistaakseni aika kuollut paikka ikävä kyllä.
ReplyDeleteMuuten tutkin animaatiota vain seuraamalla hyvän näköisiä animaatiokohtauksia eri sarjoista kovalevyltä. :)
Wow, so, that first video basically just showed almost every one of my favorite shows. (Including IGPX! Who'd have thought that? It's mildly obscure.) And his illustration is simply beautiful.
ReplyDeleteThanks for enlightening me. I think I'm in love with this man too, now.
Nice to see I'm not alone in appreciating Japanese animators :>
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