Tag: obits

April 2, 2023 · 0 comments

Ryuichi Sakamoto’s first taste of fame was in the late 1970s, when his band Yellow Magic Orchestra competed with Kraftwerk to become the kings of electro-pop. With synthesiser tracks like “Heroic Raydeen” (a reference to an old anime show), the YMO set the standards for electronic music around the world, kick-starting a boom that has […]

March 9, 2023 · 0 comments

Takahiro Kimura, who died on 5th March, first got the idea that animation might be the career for him when he saw episodes of Armoured Trooper VOTOMS and Blue Meteor SPT Layzner in his student days. “As for the university,” he later remembered, “well, I realised that if I wanted to graduate at the rate […]

February 20, 2023 · 0 comments

“Manga artist Leiji Matsumoto has departed for the sea of stars.” That was how his daughter Makiko Matsumoto, who heads his office Studio Leijisha, announced Matsumoto’s death on 13th February of acute heart failure in a Tokyo hospital, at the age of 85.

December 28, 2022 · 0 comments

Yuji Nunokawa, who died on Christmas Day, was not a well-known name among Anglophone anime fans, but he was  a powerful figure in the Japanese cartoon business, instrumental in many of its international successes. Born in Sakata City, Yamagata, into a family of tailors, his initial career direction was in graphic design – even later […]

December 19, 2021 · 0 comments

The actress Sayaka Kanda, who died yesterday, will be remembered as a media hyphenate – on stage and screen, and a voice performer not only for animated characters, but for their songs. She was, in fact, even more than that – a lyricist under several pseudonyms, and a producer for her own record label. Throughout […]