News

Lost Gainax Project Reborn

In 1992, Gainax started work on what would be their second major motion picture (the first being 1988's Wings of Honneamise). Entitled "Blue Uru", and sporting a crew including Yamaga Hiroyuki (Director/Screenplay: Wings of Honneamise), Anno Hideaki (Director: Neon Genesis Evangelion), and Sadamoto Yoshiyuki (Executive Producer/Character Design: Wings of Honneamise), the flight action film was to be higher-quality than any animation produced to date.

The project was suspended (due to "various vicissitudes", as their web page put it), but now the project is being revived, and is being reworked to fit more with the changes in animation that have come about in the last seven years. Since the designs would need to be completely reworked, the originals are being compiled into a hybrid computer CD-ROM known as the "Blue Uru Frozen Designs Collection."

The CD-ROM, which retails for 5800 yen, contains over 300 images, including mechanical, character, and background designs. The fighter planes were designed by Shirow Masamune (Ghost in the Shell, Dominion, Appleseed) as well as Miyatake Kazuki. Also included are 134 pages of storyboards, Yamaga Hiroyuki's screenplay (in Japanese), concept gallery and storyboards. Additional Quicktime movies of a conversation between technical director Tsuruta Kenji and creator Yamaga Hiroyuki cover such topics as the project's origins, what they were hoping to accomplish with the film, and what the forthcoming reworked project is planned to be.

Sadamoto Yoshiyuki has also included his full-color illustrations for use as desktop pictures, as well as Blue Uru icons. The CD-ROM will run on nearly every computer made after 1992 (both Mac and Windows).

September 11, Gainax will also release a comprehensive weapons database hybrid CD-ROM (which WILL be bilingual) that will include hundreds of 3-D rotoscoped images and loads of information as well. More information on both of these discs is available at their website, http://www.gainax.co.jp/menu-e.html.