Tetsuya Aoki has spent a career designing robots, cars, planes and
weapons, and some of those designs have traveled to your store shelves.
Aoki, who created the designs for the 1990's Transformers series that were
broadcast in the U.S., has been designing transforming robots for a decade
now, for Transformer and other robot series, including the five-member
sentai shows best known as Power Rangers in North America. And that job
is as much a toy design job as an animation or film design job, because
much of his work is translated into hinged plastic toys which are sold
around the world. "There will be robot toys as long as there are children,"
he said.
The transforming robot toy is engineered as much as it's designed;
Aoki compared the creation of those gadgets to solving a puzzle. Most puzzles
don't take two months to solve, though - and Aoki said that's the typical
amount of time needed to make a workable toy. "I meet with the executives
at Bandai and they talk about making something that will fit the interests
of people. They try to find something that fits the concept of the show
and will hold interest as a toy." There will be more of those toys heading
to North America with the arrival of new Ultraman shows on U.S. TV, he
said.
Aoki has now moved on the create a magical girl comic called Angel's
Wing for Plex Comics. "Robots are directly assembled while human characters
are freehand drawings. If you ask which is harder, they're both hard on
the other hand, I like both of them...I'd like to work on non-robot things
for a while." He's created the characters and stories for the comic, and
he's looking forward to a chance to draw a story involving humans. There
are no robots in Angel's Wing, mostly cute girls in skimpy outfits. But
the inside back cover of Angel's Wing has an ominous dark drawing of a
hulking robot; Aoki hints that the drawing is a preview of his next robot
project.
