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NEWS: Range Murata Confirmed for Gonzo's 2011 TV Anime

Gonzo, has, and always will be, one of my favorite studios.

All they need is Mahiro Meada or Koichi Chigara(two directors who same able to bring out Gonzo's best) to direct this mystery, and.... us, U.S. fans will wait patiently.

Don't get me wrong, I love Range's stuff as much as the next one. The fact that he's been brought on, further convinces me that they're gonna pull ALL the stops for this.
With any luck, I hope it'll be the Inception of anime.

Range Murata was the character designer for such Gonzo anime projects as [...] Solty Rei [...]

I can see a potentially big problem here. Although Murata's art and character designs are great, they have a level of detail that is very hard to reproduce on typical TV anime budgets.

This brings up Shangri-La, the 2009 commercial fiasco that, more than anything else, nearly drive Gonzo under. Murata's promotional art initially got a lot of people excited. Furthermore, I thought it ended up being a flawed but decent series overall. Regardless, it was the commercial flop among 2009 anime TV series, with DVD sales (the life blood for late night anime) for most of the R2 volumes in the hundreds. Gonzo did not even bother to commission Murata drawings for the last few volume covers, replacing them with some generic pictures that have nothing to do with the anime. Furthermore, Shangri-La was largely a self-produced venture, so the financial impact was particularly great. While Gonzo also had two major hit series in 2008 (Strike Witches) and 2009 (Saki), these were contract vehicles for groups led by Kadokawa (who replaced them for Strike Witches S2) and Square Enix, respectively, and presumably didn't make up financially for the Shangri-La failure.

There were a number of reasons people have criticized Shangri-La, but the thing 2ch posters (who after all are fairly representative of the main target market) focused on the most was the quality of animation, particularly the character animation. It's obvious that budget didn't match the ambitiousness of the project. The backgrounds range from gorgeous to fairly rudimentary, but the character animations are pretty consistently low quality, particularly for poor Kuniko, the main character. Her facial features vary noticeably from episode to episode, and in any of her screen version is at best a very sketchy distant relative of the Murata design. Since love for the (usually female) characters typically drives R2 DVD/BD sales for late night anime nowadays, this pretty much doomed Shangri-La to oblivion. BTW, poor Takahashi Mikako, Kuniko's voice actress. This was her first lead role after over a decade of constant activity in the industry . . . only for this to happen.

In their current state. I don't see how Gonzo can budget a full TV series that does justice to Murata character designs. So I hope this is an OVA they're planning. And though you have to respect Gonzo for always being willing to experiment, the 3-D TV thing honestly just makes me feel queasy.

Gonzo told ANN during March's Tokyo International Anime Fair (TAF) that it was developing a potential Spring 2011 project that would take advantage of the new stereoscopic 3D televisions now entering the marketplace.