You've probably got an eye on
Space Dandy, right? It's been heralded as a sort of return to form for part of the old
Cowboy Bebop band, and in a lot of ways, it delivers—it's weird, colorful, funny, and an absolute goddamn animator's playground. Director Watanabe has actually taken a novel approach this time around—unlike in his earlier shows, he plays the role of sou kantoku, or general director, for
Space Dandy. The director is actually
Shingo Natsume; he's the guy who has to keep the project humming along on schedule, and much of his artistic duties involve not editing the story or drawing or correcting animation frames but watching and correcting the storyboards, in order to catch artistic and continuity issues before they can even bubble to the surface. Watanabe did that dance for
Cowboy Bebop and
Kids on the Slope, but for
Dandy he makes broad creative decisions (he's pitched in some scripts, as well) and lets the team run wild. Some have wryly speculated that his biggest duty in
Space Dandy is hanging out and preparing his
next project as much as possible!
But Watanabe's taken a novel and really awesome approach to putting this series together. Every episode has new key creative staff—each one boasts a different director, some pretty famous (
Michiko & Hatchin'sSayo Yamamoto,
Steins;Gate'sHiroshi Hamasaki) and some more renowned for strict technical skills (
So Toyama,
Michio Mihara). In that way, despite the fact that Watanabe's steering the ship, every episode's a little different.
except Psycho Pass 2
