Yoshifumi Kondo, who was discovered back on the first Lupin series, later worked on the two Panda Kopanda short films, and here he was again in full force as one of the top key animators. The gadgets and machines in Conan's world don't take the same realistic vibe as Lupin III, but that's really because this is Miyazaki's child.

I've grown to love Otsuka's work as an animator, his legendary attention to realism and detail, his love of machines. Yasuo Otsuka, the 'older brother' of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, served as the Animation Director on Conan, and this series shows the legend at the peak of his powers. As Yasuo Otsuka joked years later, 'He had become a Hulk.' After two tours of duty performing superhuman feats of skill as the sole layout and scene designer for Heidi and Marco, Miyazaki was about to be unleashed. This was his first directorial work since Lupin the 3rd, Series One in 1971-72, and the Yuki's Sun pilot from 1972. But that's another rant.įor Hayao Miyazaki, Future Boy Conan was the chance for him to really stretch his wings. 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother followed in 1976, and proved to be an even more ambitious and epic story than Heidi personally, I think it's the greatest masterpiece of the Takahata-Miyazaki canon. The series was created at Nippon Animation, which had become the home of the World Masterpiece Theater series made world famous thanks to Heidi, Girl of the Alps in 1974. This is a public television network, which was unusual, but it proved to be a good fit for the program, and it helped to forge a long and fruitful relationship with Hayao Miyazaki that continues to this day. Future Boy Conan was produced and aired in 1978 on Japan's NHK network.

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