Macross Plus

Shinichirō Watanabe is a Japanese anime filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. He is known for directing the critically and commercially successful anime series Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. Watanabe is known for blending together multiple genres in his anime creations. In Cowboy Bebop,... for example, Watanabe mixes classic cowboy western with 1940s/1950s New York City film noir, Jazz music and Hong Kong action movies, and sets the entire series in space. In his later work, Samurai Champloo, Watanabe mixes the cultures of Okinawa, hip-hop, modern-day Japan, and chanbara. After joining the Japanese animation studio Sunrise, Watanabe supervised the episode direction and storyboards of numerous Sunrise anime, and soon made his directorial debut as co-director of the well-received Macross update, Macross Plus. His next effort, and first full directorial venture, was the 1998 television series Cowboy Bebop. It was followed by the 2001 film, Knockin' on Heaven's Door.
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Shōji Kawamori is a Japanese anime creator, screenwriter and mechanical designer. Shoji Kawamori was born in Toyama Japan in 1960. He attended Keio University in the same years as Macross screenwriter Hiroshi Ōnogi and character designer Haruhiko Mikimoto, where they had a Mobile Suit... Gundam fan club called "Gunsight One", a name they would use years later as part of the Macross series. Shoji Kawamori occasionally used the alias Eiji Kurokawa early in his anime career when he started as a teenager intern member of Studio Nue and worked as assistant artist and animator there during the late seventies and early eighties. Later on his career Kawamori created or co-created the concepts which served as basis for such notable anime series as The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, The Vision of Escaflowne, Earth Maiden Arjuna, Genesis of Aquarion, Macross 7, and Macross Frontier. His projects are usually noted to contain strong themes of love, war, spirituality or mysticism, and ecological concern. Kawamori is currently executive director at the animation studio Satelight.
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