HIROYUKI OKIURA
Director, JIN-ROH |
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On May 8, 1999–two years prior to its official U.S. theatrical release–an advance subtitled print of JIN-ROH screened at UCLA. Its director, Hiroyuki Okiura, born 1966, attended, and his unlined face could have passed for a teenager's. A black buzz-cut, baggy white jacket, and blue plaid shirt completed the effect of a naive country boy on his way to the big city.
It's far from the truth; Okiura is from the brawling industrial prefecture of Osaka; and although JIN-ROH is his first film as a director, he's no naïf. Okiura broke into his profession at the age of 17, assisting on Ryosuke Takahashi's gritty and unglamorous vision of future mecha combat, the TV anime show ARMORED TROOPER VOTOMS. As a soldier in the anime industry, he's stayed young on the outside, but when asked at UCLA how he felt about directing JIN-ROH's haunted script with its doomed love affair trying to hide itself from conspiracy and murder, Okiura simply smiled and said, "I like dark stories."
Okiura relished the chance in JIN-ROH to display the techniques he has developed over the previous decade, working on and with some of the most creative names in Japanese animation. As an artist, he has been strongly associated with three works from AKIRA's Katsuhiro Otomo–first as a key animator on AKIRA (1988) and ROUJIN-Z (1991) and then as an animation director on the as-yet unreleased Otomo film MEMORIES (1993).
Okiura's partnership with Mamoru Oshii began with the masterful PATLABOR 2 (1993). By the time of 1995's GHOST IN THE SHELL, he was one of Oshii's top brass, doing double duty on GHOST as co-key animation supervisor and character designer. It can be said that JIN-ROH displays the influence of The "dim look" Otomo and photography director Katsuji Misawa developed on AKIRA, a particular urban noir, is also the look of JIN-ROH. Okiura has a liking in the film for scenes set in the hour before sunrise, and in the hour after sunset, and in JIN-ROH he makes either look and feel darker than midnight.
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