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Anime Expo - Sunday - Studio Pierrot
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If you heard occasional cheers from the lower level
of the Anime Expo area on Sunday, this is the reason why. On a big screen,
snippets of the opening themes from series such as Urusei Yatsura (Lam
the Invader Girl), Kimagure Orange Road (Capricious Orange Road), Fushigi
Yuugi (Mysterious Play) and Yu Yu Hakusho (The Ghost's White Paper) were
shown to an audience that applauded their favorites. The opening sequences
were part of the two decades of shows produced by Studio Pierrot of Japan.
(The English titles for the shows were taken from Pierrot's translations,
by the way.) |
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"I appreciate the fact that you guys gave us a good
response," said Yuji Nunokawa, founder and president of Pierrot, who named
the company after his love of the circus ("Pierrot" refers to a traditional
french clown and has become synonymous with "clown" in Japanese). That
company could get closer to the U.S., and not just for its series that
have become popular with American fans. Pierrot has an animation school,
and there's a chance that there could be an American branch of that school
in the future... |
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...which is one of the ideas expressed by Hikaru
Sasahara, president of Digital Manga, a company that has a partnership
with Pierrot and would like to produce films with Pierrot in the U.S. "We
are a very young company," said Sasahara. "We want to make manga palatable
for a U.S. audience." Digital Manga wants to sell anime and manga goods
in the U.S., including material from Pierrot titles. They're also hoping
to experiment with a colorized, partially animated version of one of Osamu
Tezuka's manga series... |
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...the Wonder 3 series, a tale of space aliens who
come to Earth to judge the world and end up trying to save the world. The
colorized manga could be prepared as streaming video over the Internet
one day, Sasahara said. Digital Manga's president noted an irony in his
presentation at the Disneyland Hotel: his father ran a small, struggling
anime studio in Japan, and "He used to tell me `I wish I was a Disney.'" |
