The
Solty Rei series is the major career work of artist Shuzilow.HA, who
went beyond character designs on this series to also handle some of the
voice casting and production design. It's a series of action and ideas,
about a former hunter who has lost his family and a robot girl who has
lost her memory - they meet, and the story goes from there. Solty Rei's
ideas come from the way the series treats the concept of humanity,
ideas that mirror some of today's questions. "The background story for
the series is a futuristic world where you have people who are 100
percent human and the robots in this world are the poor," he said. "The
rich retain fully human bodies. The rich people buy organs and body
parts from the poor and you can get a mechanical body for free. That
concept may have gotten lost because it was hard to explain over the 24
episodes." It's a dark series that took eight years to get into
production, beginning as a video game concept that wasn't made at first
and then became an animated series. The shows feature a mixture of cute
girls and tough-looking guys, easy for Shuzilow to create but tough to
animate - he said he had to work hard to find an animation staff who
could make those characters move convincingly. Among that staff are
Kenichi Sonoda, the artist best known for his Bubble Gum Crisis
designs, who drew Solty Rei's body suits and armor, and the mecha
designer from the Last Exile series.
Shuzilow
also was an animation director on the Gankutsuou - Count of Monte
Cristo series, shows known for their unconventional use of texture
mapping to replace colors in the character animation. "It was the first
time that instead of coloring in animation, we did the layering of
texture," he said. "It took a lot of time and effort. I think that it
probably took a lot of money. It wasn't the technology restricting us,
but we spend so much time on the texture that we had simpler character
designs." (Those designs were made by artist Hidenori Matsubara,
previously featured on this site.) Gankutsuou also portrays those
characters in a flat, traditional two-dimensional style, a deliberate
decision by Shuzilow, who saw it as his response to the rise of
three-dimensional animation. "Since I'm old school, hand drawn
animation comes easier to me. Looking at the finished product, you can
tell the most popular are the mixed works that incorporate hand drawn
animation and CG work. I try to pick out which is which when I see
that. It feels a little strange, having become used to seeing all hand
drawn, when I see children or young adults watching it without seeing a
difference it's okay. I just have a personal preference toward drawing
by hand."
The
Solty Rei series is the major career work of artist Shuzilow.HA, who
went beyond character designs on this series to also handle some of the
voice casting and production design. It's a series of action and ideas,
about a former hunter who has lost his family and a robot girl who has
lost her memory - they meet, and the story goes from there. Solty Rei's
ideas come from the way the series treats the concept of humanity,
ideas that mirror some of today's questions. "The background story for
the series is a futuristic world where you have people who are 100
percent human and the robots in this world are the poor," he said. "The
rich retain fully human bodies. The rich people buy organs and body
parts from the poor and you can get a mechanical body for free. That
concept may have gotten lost because it was hard to explain over the 24
episodes." It's a dark series that took eight years to get into
production, beginning as a video game concept that wasn't made at first
and then became an animated series. The shows feature a mixture of cute
girls and tough-looking guys, easy for Shuzilow to create but tough to
animate - he said he had to work hard to find an animation staff who
could make those characters move convincingly. Among that staff are
Kenichi Sonoda, the artist best known for his Bubble Gum Crisis
designs, who drew Solty Rei's body suits and armor, and the mecha
designer from the Last Exile series.
Shuzilow
also was an animation director on the Gankutsuou - Count of Monte
Cristo series, shows known for their unconventional use of texture
mapping to replace colors in the character animation. "It was the first
time that instead of coloring in animation, we did the layering of
texture," he said. "It took a lot of time and effort. I think that it
probably took a lot of money. It wasn't the technology restricting us,
but we spend so much time on the texture that we had simpler character
designs." (Those designs were made by artist Hidenori Matsubara,
previously featured on this site.) Gankutsuou also portrays those
characters in a flat, traditional two-dimensional style, a deliberate
decision by Shuzilow, who saw it as his response to the rise of
three-dimensional animation. "Since I'm old school, hand drawn
animation comes easier to me. Looking at the finished product, you can
tell the most popular are the mixed works that incorporate hand drawn
animation and CG work. I try to pick out which is which when I see
that. It feels a little strange, having become used to seeing all hand
drawn, when I see children or young adults watching it without seeing a
difference it's okay. I just have a personal preference toward drawing
by hand."
