The Sky Crawlers

As a student, Mamoru Oshii was fascinated by the film La Jetée by Chris Marker as well as the films of Andrzej Wajda, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Andrzej Munk and Ingmar Bergman. In 1976, he graduated from The Fine Arts Education School of the Education Department of Tokyo Liberal Arts University. The following year, he entered Tatsunoko Productions and worked on his first anime as animation director on Ippatsu Kanta-kun. In 1980, he moved to Studio Pierrot under the supervision of his mentor, Hisayuki Toriumi. During production of the Nils no fushigi na tabi (“Wonderful Adventures of Nils”) and Kagaku Ninja-Tai Gatchaman II TV series, Oshii first met longtime collaborators, writer Kazunori Itō and painter and character designer Yoshitaka Amano. Mamoru Oshii’s work as director and storyboard artist of the animated Urusei Yatsura TV series brought him into the spotlight. Following its success, he directed two Urusei Yatsura films: Urusei Yatsura 1: Only You in 1983 and Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer in 1984. While the first film was adapted directly from the series, the second film was a big departure and an early example of Mamoru Oshii’s contemporary style. It deviated so far from the original manga by Rumiko Takahashi, she barely approved the script.

In the midst of his work with Studio Pierrot, Oshii took on independent work and directed the first direct-to-video OVA series, Dallos, in 1983. In 1984, he left Studio Pierrot and has remained independent ever since. He next wrote and directed Tenshi no Tamago (“Angel’s Egg”) released in 1985, a surreal film with biblical themes featuring the painting-like character designs of Yoshitaka Amano. The producer of the film, Toshio Suzuki, later founded the renowned Studio Ghibli with Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. Following the release of the film, Miyazaki and Takahata began collaborating with Mamoru Oshii on his next film, Anchor. The film was cancelled early in the initial planning stages when the trio had artistic disagreements. Despite their differences, Toshio Suzuki and Studio Ghibli would later help Oshii with his production of Innocence: Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004).

In the late 1980s, Oshii was solicited by his friend Kazunori Itō to join Headgear as a director. The studio pooled the different talents of Itō (screenwriter), Masami Yuki (scenarist/concept), Kenji Kawai (music composer), Yutaka Izubuchi (mechanical designer), Kazuchika Kise (animation director), Akemi Takada (character designer), and Hiromasa Ogura (art director). Together they were responsible for the Mobile Police Patlabor OVA (1988), Twilight Q Episode 2: Meikyu Bukken File 538 (1987), and the Patlabor: The Movie (1989), and Patlabor 2: The Movie (1993) films. Released in the midst of Japan’s economic crisis, the Patlabor series and films projected a dynamic near-future world in which grave social crisis and ecological challenges were overcome by technological ingenuity, and were a big success in the mecha genre. Between production of the Patlabor movies/series, Oshii directed three live action films. The first was The Red Spectacles (1987) which led into his later work Stray Dogs: Kerberos Panzer Cops (1991). The third was Talking Head (1992), a surreal look at Oshii’s view on film executed through a plot about an anime production where the director is missing and has to be replaced by a new one.

In 1995, Mamoru Oshii released his landmark animated cyberpunk film, Ghost in the Shell, in Japan, the United States, and Europe simultaneously. It hit the top of the US Billboard video charts in 1996. After a 5-year hiatus from directing to work on other projects, Oshii returned to directing with the long-awaited Japanese-Polish live action film Avalon shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. His latest animated film Innocence: Ghost in the Shell was selected to compete at 2004 Cannes Film Festival for the coveted Palme d’Or prize, the first animated film in this top category and only the sixth animated film shown at Cannes. The festival described Innocence as a film in which “the political tone has given way to a philosophical one, a hymn to life. Furthermore, the technical rendering is much more formal, mixing 2D, 3D and computer graphics.”

(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamoru_Oshii)