Kawamori Panel Writeup-
Yes he did this in person.
-Calls himself an audio-visual creator due to his work on all stages of an anime from initial concepts, and storyboarding to direction and mechanical designs. Directs from the audience's perspective with the goal of evoking emotion.
-He was born in a small town, in the mountains in the Toyama prefecture. The area would see heavy snow in the winter time, to such an extent that they might have leave their house out of the second floor.
-When he was three, he moved closer to the city. Was shocked to see locomotives in Yokohama and the reason why a lot of his work revolves around culture shock is probably due to that culture shock he received when he was three. (I don't particularly buy this as how much does a three year old really remember?)
-He was fascinated with the Apollo Project in school such as the Apollo 11 landing. His dad was an engineer and took him to naval air stations/bases a lot. During base open houses, his dad would show him the buttons to press to open the hangar and he would get into trouble as a result.
-Was into this German block thing called Fischertechnik especially the modular aspects. One of the ideas in the toy was used in the Vector machine in Aquarion. Wasn't until middle school that he started drawing, still feels at times that he's not really good at it as he started late.
-There was apparently this club/group at Nue and so he got to hang out with Kazutaka Miyatake, designer for Battleship Yamato, another member was artist Naoyuki Kato of Crusher Joe. Starship Troopers was the origin point for robot anime in Japan. (This segment I didn't particularly understand that well but it was like a club or something at the studio and he interacted with a lot of high profile animators/designers/writers as a result)
-Hiroshi Onogi and Haruhiko Mikimoto were all classmates with him in high school. They made a manga in high school called High School Days. He did the mecha design and Mikimoto obviously did the female lead. (They showed the cover so I guess they still have copies)
-When he was a sophomore in college, he joined Studio Nue while still being a student. Apparently was involved in the early design work for Optimus Prime. (I didn't know he was involved in the creation of Transformers) They had an issue with the engine and cockpit when it transforms, in that both would disappear. So decided for next work he would keep both the cockpit and engine.
-They got rejected by producers over something called Genesis (I know spelling is wrong but the name is similar sounding). So came up with the concept of Macross literally overnight such as giant enemies, a mega transforming battleship, and an aircraft carrier with town inside it.
-Mikimoto and himself were majoring as mechanical engineers (I'm not sure if the translator was correct in that they were majoring in engineering or rather design) and so were having meetings at school. They got kicked out of class ocassionally for talking too much. With the Valkyrie, he wanted to make the jump from toy like transformations to military orientation.
-He was told aircrafts don't sell.
K:"When someone tells you something won't sell, it means there is a big chance in it!" That means nobody has done it so there's a viable market for it.
-Really wanted to nail the design so spent a year refining it and played with a model of the F-14. Looked at the gap between the sides of the F-14 and thought it could be folded in. Once he had a rough idea and generally figured out how he wanted the design, he then spent another two weeks perfecting the design that would become the Valkyrie. The rough draft was a lot 'stubbier'.
-So made a mock up and brought it to the same toy company who said it wouldn't sell. Executives saw the mock up, and even the same one who said it wouldn't sell stood up and said 'let's do it'.
-Got pushback around the idea of 'solving' war without weapons but pushed it through anyway. Thought the episode Love Flows in original Macross was critical to that concept.
-Was 23 and still going to college but reached a breaking point during making of the movie, Do You Remember Love, and dropped out.
-For Macross Plus, went to Air Combat USA to actually pilot an airplane for research, along with Itano. They used that as a reference.
-The Next has a mech in it. Surprise. Silhouette definitely looked like a Kawamori design. The character silhouettes also looked flamboyant so I'm not expecting a realistic story here. Kawamori apparently did learn from the mountain as they didn't talk about the show at all.
