More Otakon 2009 Guest Announcements

Just when I thought we were wrapping up the guest announcements for Otakon this year, I was pleasantly mistaken. We've got not one, not two, but three, count them...THREE more guests to announce!!!

First up -- director, producer, and president of Artland, Noboru Ishiguro will make his first visit to Otakon. As a director, some of his notable titles are Space Battleship Yamato (first series and first two movies), Macross (original TV series and Do You Remember Love), Megazone 23, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and Tytania. Ishiguro wrote the story for Megazone 23, based on his personal experience: having witnessed how easily the government mechanism can make the public believe distorted truths and motivate them into war. Ishiguro founded his studio, Artland, and still runs it as president after its acquisition by Marvelous Entertainment.

If that wasn't good enough, let's add Matsubara to the mix. Character designer, illustrator and animator Hidenori Matsubara, perhaps best known for his character design work on the Oh My Goddess! OAV series and the Sakura Wars games, will be a guest at Otakon 2009. As a young and hungry animator, Matsubara worked as an in-betweener on the Project A-Ko movies. From there, he served as an animator on Bubblegum Crisis and Gunbuster. Graduating to animation director for Nadia: Secret of Blue Water, he completed the opening animation for Bubblegum Crash, and then served as animation director on Otaku no Video (the inspiration for Otakon). Other credits in this period include work as an animator on Perfect Blue, Gunsmith Cats, and the original Neon Genesis Evangelion series. For the Oh My Goddess! series (and later for the movie), Matsubara served as character designer and chief animation director; more recently, he was character designer for The Count of Monte Cristo. He also served as the character designer of the hit game series Sakura Wars. Currently, Matsubara is working under Hideaki Anno as an animator and animation director on the new series of Evangelion movies.

And to round up the last of this triad of announcements, Otakon brings us Yukio Kikukawa. Producer Yukio Kikukawa has invested over a decade of his career producing the 162 episodes and three features of the epic Legend of the Galactic Heroes. His most recently producers the 26-episode series Tytania, another space opera based on the books by LoGH author Yoshiki Tanaka. As a rare member of the Japanese anime industry from an American-style fandom background (a science-fiction convention-goer), he achieved the status of alpha fan when he chaired Anime Expo Tokyo in 2004. [Source: Otakon]