karas.., ....has anyone heard of it Options

[vash1530]

karas is an anime coming out next year but it seems no one has heard of it. THis is sad since it llooks to be the most visualy stunning anime series ever.

[vash1530]

heres an excerpt from an article in the august 2004 edition of Newtype:

Karas Seen

Tatsunoko’s latest creation, Karas--a six-part OVA due for imminent release in Japan--represents a dark departure for the animation studio.

“We always do heroic works with handsome characters.” [Ippei] Kuri (president of Tatsunoko) remarks. “but Karas has a dark hero, and that was a genre we really haven’t done before.” It may share a bird motif with Gatchaman, but that’s where the similarities end: Instead of regal eagles or elegant cranes, the crow (“bad birds who live in nasty places,” Kuri quips) was used as the basis for Karas’ armored lead.

Director Keiichi Sato, who also conceived the show, explains that in the world of Karas, human and yokai coexist. The yokai are traditional Japanese apparitions-akin to the bathhouse customers in Spirited Away-that are invisible to humans. In each city, a yokai takes the form of a young governing priestess, and upon her command, “someone is sent out to preserve the balance between humans and yokai-that someone is there Karas.” To maintain status quo, they either heal or mete out punishment on either side where necessary-but Echo, a Karas watching over Tokyo since the Edo era, goes renegade and raises hell in the human world. “The more humans fear yokai, the stronger the yokai get. He starts to go crazy with that kind of thinking.” Echo’s lust for power threatens to topple the balance and needs to be stopped. “Yuri [Tokyo’s yokai turned governing priestess] has sent out several Karas in the past,” explains Sato, “but they just can’t hold a candle to Echo. The main character, a guy named Otoha, seems particularly well-suited to the task, so he becomes a Karas, and that’s how it starts.”

In order to faithfully realize the hero’s design, Sato turned to 3D. “The more details you add, the harder it is to animate,” he remarks on designing for traditional animation, which includes his retro-styled mecha of Giant Robo and The Big O at other studios. “I’m very picky, so I ended up doing a lot of designs that ended up stressing the animators.” His work on three live-action hero shows (at Toei), culminating with Abaranger (“Power Rangers DINO THUNDER”), was a different experience. “The spatial portion of the design gets expressed on screen. I thought the work was very suited to me. Once I got more feedback [on Karas], I was wondering how I could express those designs without robbing them of their soul, and 3D was the answer.”

Not that he’s abandoned 2D completely. Most of the work’s other elements retain a traditional look, and he’s also mixing in a 2D Karas that appears at the start of action sequences. “Halfway through you swap him out with a 3D Karas using effects,” Sato says. “We’re trying things you don’t see shows doing all that often. Its just my way of having some fun.” Still, mixing 2D and 3D poses certain challenges. “There are a number of different things that look unnatural to the eye, but the way I think of it, those are the things that make for interesting footage.”

After much consideration, Sato decided not to use motion capture to animate the hero. “I wanted to draw out the feeling of animators who work in 3D. If you use motion capture, it’ll look real of course, but there’s no sense of magic in it, nothing amazing. You never really give it the chance to turn into something tricky and neat.” Sato also sought to infuse Karas with visuals that stretch beyond traditional Japanese art, creating a look he describes as “Asian Gothic”; influences include Western gargoyles, Korean Hanhul writing and Singapore’s Merlion statue. And although the story is set in the real-world Shinjuku district, familiar surroundings take on an otherworldly atmosphere. “We purposely did things like taking every syllable in Japanese and coming up with a Chinese character for it. None of that writing actually exists anywhere.” Adorning the building and show signs, the writing looks like Japanese at a glance-but isn’t. “Young people in Japan will see it and go ‘What the hell is this?’ That’s the kind of reaction I want to evoke.”

-August 2004 NewType USA

i havn't seen the newly released dvd but i did see a fansub that i got last summer and i wloved what i saw. from the color, details, and lighting in the 2d/3d hybrid visuals to the epic orchastrated soundtrack, it threw me right into the action as the opening sequence is a mid-air battle between the renegade karas and one of the karas' sent before otoha. im gonna buy it this weekend and im sure it'll be even better on a tv than my laptop!