Genius Party

Masaaki Yuasa was born on 16 March 1965 in Fukuoka, Japan. He is an anime television and film director, screenwriter, storyboard artist and animator known for his wild free form style.
His most known series “The Tatami Galaxy” won the Grand Prize in animation at the 2010 Japan Media Arts Festival, held annually at the National Art Center in Tokyo.
Masaaki Yuasa’s early career in animation include directing the OP and ED of the 1990 anime, Chibi Maruko-chan as well as the 5th and 6th seasons’ OP and the 3rd and 4th seasons’ ED for Crayon Shin-chan. Along with a small selection of Crayon Shin-chan episodes, he also directed episode 10 of the 1994 anime, The Hakkenden.

Yuasa was also a key staff member as Animation Designer, Character Designer, and Supervising Animator on the short film, “Noiseman Sound Insect”, which was released in 1997. This short film marked the start of Yuasa’s long standing career with Studio 4°C, a studio notorious for their abstract take on animation and their willingness to really bend the limits of conventional anime. It was working with this studio that really helped open up Yuasa’s range of talent, allowing him to experiment freely with the directorial style that has since made him famous.
In 1999, Yuasa directed and storyboard’d the pilot episode to Production I.G’s children’s cartoon, “Vampiyan Kids”.

Yuasa’s next major step in his career and perhaps the biggest for him, was stepping on board as co-screenplay writer, storyboard artist, and animation producer for J.C.Staff’s award winning short film “Cat Soup”. The film’s bizarre story, surreal visuals, and unspoken dialogue really showcase how far Yuasa can stretch his wings in terms of his creative abilities alongside director Tatsuo Sato.
Just a year following Cat Soup‘s international success, Yuasa returned to Studio 4°C to his first full fledged directorial role as the director of “Mind Game”. The film’s title mostly speaks for itself as the nearly 2 hour long film drags its viewers on a real roller-coaster of a ride following the surreal adventure of a manga artist named Robin Nishi. Robin Nishi is of course also the pen name of author who created the original manga that the film was based off of, although the film is hardly autobiographical.

In 2006, Yuasa found himself working with Madhouse studios on a 13 episode televisions series, entitled “Kemonozume”.
The male lead character, Momota Toshihiko, is a swordsman trained to hunt and kill man-eating monsters called shokujinki, as well as the heir to the Kifuuken school of swordsmanship. Toshihiko falls in love with a woman named Yuka Kamitsuki, who turns out to be one of the shokujinki. Despite this direct conflict however, the two run away together in the hopes of living out their twisted romance together.
In 2008, Yuasa was involved with two different projects; one was his directing his own television series produced by Madhouse studios, and the other was directing one of a series of shorts in the Genius Party anthology by Studio 4°C. The sixth of the seven short films in the first Genius Party collection, titled “Happy Machine”, once again employed the somewhat bizarre art style Yuasa had developed with Mind Game and carried over into Kemonozume.

The same year, Yuasa directed the award winning 12 episode long television series, “Kaiba”. (Unlike his previous works Yuasa used a new art style that seems to have drawn from elements of Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishinomaori’s art styles, 1950s retro future, and 1960s psychedelia.) While technically considered to be a romance, and quite obviously a sci-fi, the story really serves as more of an adventure through the bizarre world of the future in which the story takes place first and foremost.

Skip ahead another two years in Yuasa’s career and we get to a title you all might be more familiar with, his major television series, “The Tatami Galaxy” (2010).
The story follows a nameless protagonist who comes to a realization in the second year of his life in university that in chasing a foolishly naive dream of finding love and living a happy, easy life style, and in becoming involved with one particular person, he has wasted the past two years of his life. The protagonist proclaims that if only things had been different two years ago, everything in his life would be different. And so by a twist of divine irony, time rewinds itself to two years in the past, when the protagonist first entered university and joined the club where he met the particular person who ruined his life. Yuasa has also contributed some character design to the French anime-inspired cartoon series Wakfu, and directed the opening sequence to A-1 Pictures Studio’s animated sci-fi epic, Welcome to the Space Show. —91.8thefan