Komatsubara, Kazuo

Komatsubara Kazuo was an animator and character designer and one of the founders of Oh! Production. He died due to a cancerous tumor on his neck on 24.03.2000. Beginning with Devilman in 1972, Komatsubara moved on to work on other important 1970s anime shows including Cutey Honey (1973), Getter Robo (1974), Getter Robo G (1975), UFO Robo Grendizer (1975), and Magne Robo Gakeen (1976), working closely with and succeeding Nagai Go on character designs for many of these shows. For the 1987 OVA remake of the Devilman series, Komatsubara worked as both character designer and animation director. He then caught the animation fandom book at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s as the character designer for Matsumoto Leiji's Space Cruiser Yamato series, as well as working on the anime TV series Space Pirate Captain Harlock and the anime film Galaxy Express 999. Komatsubara became the most popular anime character designer for Matsumoto's characters, and many of his illustrations were featured on the front covers of various magazines. At the same time, Araki Shingo was also a very popular character designer at Toei Animation, though he was beginning to do more work for Tokyo Movie Shinsha. Because of this, Komatsubara began to focus more on his work for Toei Animation. He collaborated with Rintaro on several projects, including the 1980 anime TV series Ganbare Genki and the anime film Metropolis (released in 2001, after Komatsubara's death). When not working on adaptations of the works of Nagai and Matsumoto, Komatsubara worked as character designer on shoujo anime series such as Miracle Shoujo Limit-chan (1973) and High-step Jun (1985). In 1984, he was invited by Miyazaki Hayao to participate in the production of the anime film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, for which he did character designs and acted as animation director. Miyazaki acted as an advisor to Komatsubara during this time, and Komatsubara indicated he learned many things from him as a result of this mentoring. Komatsubara also created original characters (not based on manga or other references) for the J9 series, including Galactic Whirlwind Braiger, Galactic Gale Baxinger, and Galactic Hurricane Sasuraiger. (Source: AniDB)