So as I said previously the UY staff featured three of the members of Headgear. Which raises the question – who are Headgear?
Headgear are/were the creative team behind Patlabor. The Schaft Enterprises website explains:
Schaft Enterprises – A Patlabor Website – Headgear:
Headgear is the collective name given to Patlabor’s creators. Usually a series will be credited to a single person. In Patlabor’s case it was credited to a creative team. The main reason was publicity. At the time anime magazines would only set aside two pages for an anime based on another persons work such as a manga. If the manga version was published first, their would be less pages in anime magazines for Patlabor. Another reason was to sell Patlabor as an anime, they needed to have a director and character designer. Once the main members came together, Patlabor became a team effort rather than just an anime based upon Masami Yuuki’s manga.
So Headgear were:
Mamoru Oshii
Masami Yuuki
Kazunori Itoh
Yutaka Izubuchi
Akemi Takada
Oshii, Itoh and Takada are the 3 who worked on Urusei Yatsura.
That Schaft Enterprises website mentions that Itoh and Takada were married. Which leads to my first unanswered question – are they still married?
They seem to stop working together at some point in the nineties. However that might not mean anything, as Takada seems to have done little anime work in the last 10 years. This post from 1992 on rec.arts.anime suggests they had been seperated, as does this messy list of “Did you knows…”. Hmm.
Mamoru Oshii was the first Chief Director on UY
Kazunori Itoh was a screenwriter on UY
Akemi Takada was the character designer and sometime animation director UY
Those are my key starting points, but I want to put in some thread of Izubuchi and Yuuki’s careers too. Likewise there’s other UY staff that have interesting careers worth noting:
Oshii’s sucessor Kazuo Yamazaki
Yuji Moriyama
Katsuhiko Nishijima
Those are the ones that catch my eye so far, for the sheer OVA-ness of their post UY career.