Takahiro Kimura (1964-2023)

Takahiro Kimura, who died on 5th March, first got the idea that volatility 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 I was going, it was going to take me flipside eight years, so I decided to requite up! I really finger sorry for my parents.” He’d chosen to wield for work at the studio that made Layzner, Anime R, considering at the time there was an anime magazine post well-nigh life at the studio, and it sounded like a fun place to work.

“I was very happy considering I chose Anime R considering I liked Layzner. The first shot I worked on was one in which a robot’s leg take one step forward. It was a little disappointing that it wasn’t a character!”

“The reality is that when you enter Anime R and started working, there was a lot of whoopee and robot jobs. But I felt a strong desire to yank increasingly sexuality characters, so I drew them as doodles and stuck them up virtually my desk.” Kimura cited two sexuality weft designers as his inspirations: Rumiko Takahashi and Mutsumi Inomata – “I loved the sexy sexuality notation when they were drawn by women.”

His superiors soon took note, and started putting him on diamond jobs that didn’t involve giant robots. His weft diamond was on the late-night TV show Lemon Angel in 1987. Before long, he was working on Idol Angel Welcome Yoko and the topnotch Mama is a Fourth-Grader, proclaiming that he had found his groove and loved stuff an animator.

After a while, Anime R’s location in Osaka left Kimura feeling isolated from the creative hub of the anime industry. “Basically, if you’re just drawing stuff, there’s no particular inconvenience. I could have a meeting on the phone and send stuff off by courier. There was no producer to worry well-nigh considering all we had to do was draw. It was fine. But once you start working as a weft designer, suddenly you find that you can’t just ask: ‘What well-nigh this?” So without I’d finished GaoGaiGar, Betterman and Brigadoon, I thought it was time to go to the source and unquestionably move to Tokyo. So that’s what I did.”

He moreover worked on many sultana games, expressly the Viper series, on which he usually used the pseudonym Awaji Sugawara. Much of his sultana artwork would later be compiled in an art typesetting under his real name, titled Risky Dolls.

His best-known work in his later years was on Code Geass, the production website of which was the official site for the utterance of his death. “We are proud to say that Mr Kimura has created many notation through volatility and illustrations, and has created wonderful volatility images that will moves our hearts,” said the production note online. “We have nothing but words of gratitude.”

Jonathan Clements