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Utena's Ikuhara Reveals 2011 Mawaru PenguinDrum Work (Updated)
posted on by Egan Loo
Kunihiko Ikuhara, the director of Revolutionary Girl Utena and a number of Sailor Moon television series, announced with a teaser website on Tuesday that the title of his new work this year is Mawaru Penguindrum. King Record's Starchild label also revealed that Mawaru Penguindrum is one of its projects.
The April issue of Index Communications' Kera magazine reported in February that Ikuhara is directing a new television anime series which is slated to air this year. In a profile attached to an interview of Ikuhara in the magazine, the director said that the project was not yet ready to be announced, but it will have a teenager as the protagonist. Ikuhara has been discussing a new project on his blog, and he revealed last May that he is supervising and writing the scripts with a female writer he nicknamed "I-san."
Since Ikuhara directed Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie in 1999, he has worked on only a few anime projects in the last decade. Notably, he storyboarded episode 2 of Gunbuster 2, storyboarded and directed the opening sequence for Nodame Cantabile, storyboarded the 29th episode of Soul Eater, and storyboarded the opening sequence for Sweet Blue Flowers (Aoi Hana). Ikuhara serialized a "Lolita hardboiled" novel called Nokemono to Hanayome in Kera from 2006 and 2007, and he has been collaborating with artist Asumiko Nakamura on a manga continuation in the same magazine since 2007.
Update: The website has two messages — one in white:
We share all my love and all your sin.
When the website is reloaded, the other message appears in black:
I will inform those of you who won't amount to anything.
this article has been modified since it was originally posted; see change history