I’m posting this so folks can see where the style employed by Imaishi on his current GAINAX show, Gurren Lagaan comes from. Kanada, is I believe, the Galaxy Express 999 animator that Takashi Murakami draws his line from 19th century artists to in his Superflat theory.
AniPages Daily has a biography on the chap and an article on which animators can be considered to be in the Kanada school.
That Kanada came up working on giant robot shows like Getter Robo G makes if very apt that Imaishi has created such a brazen tribute to classic super robot shows. On a side note, that whole furore over Lagaan’s episode 4 was just ridiculous. On one side, episode 4 was great, and the overreaction on behalf of 2ch shows how focused on surface homogenity anime fandom has become. On the other side, anyone working for GAINAX really can’t complain about otaku nowadays. Particularly if your main contribution to the world’s art is Princess Maker.
GAINAX, more than anyone, has moved anime fandom further towards mindless consumption of homogenous product in the last decade. I mean, they produced an artbook dedicated to Evangelion MERCHANDISE. And that was just a year or two after the show. Goodness knows how many volumes they could produce now? Japan’s otaku don’t resemble the wannabe creators of the idealistic self portrait Otaku no Video, and GAINAX’s post-Eva direction has had a great deal to do with this state of affairs.
In the interests of full disclosure, I did actually purchase that artbook dedicated to Eva merch back in the nineties.