Mamoru oshii

Mamoru Oshii - Lucca Comics & Games 2015

Mamoru Oshii (押井守, Oshii Mamoru^?, born in Tokyo on August 8, 1951), is a film director, television director and writer of Japanese origin, famous for his stories with oriental philosophies. He has directed a number of highly popular anime, including Ghost in the Shell , the Patlabor films, and the Urusei Yatsura series. He also holds the distinction of having created the first OVA (anime produced exclusively for sale on video), Dallos. For his work he has received numerous awards and has been a candidate for others as well known as the Palme d'Or and the Golden Lion.

She currently lives in Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan with her two dogs, a basset hound named Gabriel and a mongrel named Daniel.

Biography

He was born in the Ōta district, as a student he experimented with his own visual creations, being passionate about cinema, he once claimed to have seen 1000 films in a year. He graduated in 1976 from Gakugei University in Tokyo, the following year he began his professional career. It is also known that although he was not religious, he became very interested in the Christian religion, something that was reflected in some of his works.

Career

He began to be interested in the worlds of science fiction, in any of the audiovisual fields, from a very young age. He shot several 16mm shorts for pure entertainment before turning professional. After finishing his film studies, he began in the animation industry working for the Tatsunoko Production studio in mid-1977, debuting as an assistant in the Ippatsu Kanta-kun series.

In 1980 he joined the then unknown Pierrot studio, taking charge of the Nils Holgersson series. Oshii also collaborates as a scriptwriter in other series and films, highlighting the two films in the Urusei Yatsura saga, created as a manga by the well-known Rumiko Takahashi. Oshii would witness first-hand the appearance of a new animation sales system: the OVA (Original Video Animation), considered a revolution within the industry due to the enormous new possibilities it opened up. It was the Pierrot studio that devised this new system, and Mamoru Oshii had the honor of directing the first product released in that format: Dallos, a five-episode miniseries, which is considered the first work with Oshii's personal stamp. Its plot, dark and disturbing, places us in a future in which the Moon is already colonized and exploited by man, and a revolutionary group of lunarites begins a fight to improve their living conditions against the government of the Earth, who in turn intends to hide the secrets of an extraterrestrial structure, a space station called Dallos.

From that moment, Mamoru Oshii became a reference. In collaboration with Studio DEEN, he wrote and directed another high-quality OVA in 1985: Tenshi no Tamago, an experimental and confusing but highly recommended work, which featured designs by Yoshitaka Amano. Two years later he directed two more OVA stories about strange disappearances in Tokyo: Twilight Q.

For one of his most extensive projects, he devised a multiple story, which already hinted at the complex science fiction world of his following works: Kerberos Panzer Cop, embodied in the first place in the script for the manga of the same name, which featured Kamui Fujiwara's drawings. The story recreated an alternate future in which Japan had become a police state, with a totalitarian government employing brutal repressive force against riots and crime. He then decided to enter the field of live action films and Oshii himself would adapt his script into a trilogy of films known as Kerberos Saga: The Red Spectacles (1987), StrayDog: Kerberos Panzer Cops (1991) and Jin-Roh. (1999). The latter, unlike the first two, was an anime film where Oshii was in charge of the script, leaving the task of director to a trusted colleague with whom he had worked on previous occasions: Hiroyuki Okiura.

From 1988 his definitive consecration took place with a saga that achieved worldwide prestige thanks to him: Patlabor. Oshii was in charge of directing Patlabor: The Movie and Patlabor 2: The Movie, in addition to the first 6 OVAs. Patlabor's feature films are two of the best works of his career, and rank among the best anime films ever, thanks to an adult plot, full of details, marrying the advances and conflicts of the future world with political plots and characters. extremes. In addition, in those years he would still have time to change register and direct the parody Gosenzosama Babbanzai!, in 1989.

In 1992 he wrote and directed Talking Head, a 1992 live-action film, a surreal meta-film mystery involving the production of an anime called Talking Head.

Ghost in the Shell

In 1995, Mamoru Oshii gained international recognition thanks to the blockbuster Kōkaku kidōtai (Ghost in the Shell), an incredible feature film that generated admiration for Japanese animation throughout the West. Ghost in the Shell is based on Masamune Shirow's novel of the same name.

The Ghost in the Shell universe represents a step forward in the visual and creative imagery of science fiction: this work analyzes the conflicts that human evolution will raise, the creation of new forms of intelligence and the search by of these of his "soul".

Avalon

If with the success of Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii had won admiration in the field of animation, the same would happen in the field of live action with the feature film Avalon, in 2001, praised in equal parts by the most conservative critics and their audience. From the aesthetics of the film to the paranoid confusion experienced by its protagonists, everything makes this a decisive part of the science fiction of the new millennium, influenced by the increasingly blurred border between the virtual and the real. We must highlight the slow, almost poetic rhythm of its images, and the elegance and solemnity of its soundtrack.

Blood, the last vampire

Before resuming the plot of Ghost in the Shell, Oshii would devise a multimedia work, which covered a large part of the entertainment methods: Blood: The Last Vampire. This story of evolved vampires, published in July 2002, shows the most commercial face of Oshii, and his capacity for innovation by proposing a story that is not revealed in a single format, but rather becomes clearer with each of its "components".: a novel series (written by Junichi Fukisaku), the animated film (directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo), the manga (by Kenji Kitayama and Benkyo Tamaoki), and the PlayStation 2 video game.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

Aware of the impact that Ghost in the Shell continues to have among fans of good science fiction, Oshii decided to expand that universe, but another film did not seem enough to encompass his project. Thus, while he was fully dedicated to the preparation of Innocence, the film sequel, he also contributed arguments that could be captured in the television series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, released in 2002.

The success of the series and its subsequent release on DVD led to its continuity in a second season (Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG), released in 2004.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence was released in the spring of 2004 with a budget of 2.5 billion yen. It was one of the most anticipated films of recent years, and its quality exceeded expectations. In the West, it was presented in the very Official Section of the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

Awards and distinctions

Venice International Film Festival

He received the José Luis Guarnier Critics Award at the 2008 Sitges Film Festival for The Sky Crawlers.

In 2017, he received the Winsor McCay award at the 44th "Annie Awards" ceremony, making him the sixth Japanese recipient of this award.