Noboru Ishiguro (石黒 昇, Ishiguro Noboru; August 24, 1938 – March 20, 2012) was a Japanese anime director, anime producer, and animator. He was the founder and president of the animation studio Artland. Ishiguro is an anime director who has been active in the Japanese animation industry since the 1970s. His representative works include Space Battleship Yamato, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Megazone 23 and Legend of the Galactic Heroes. As a director, he did not emphasize his own style, and instead entrusted important positions to talented and motivated people, regardless of their career. For Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Megazone 23, he selected young artists such as Haruhiko Mikimoto, Ichirō Itano, and Toshihiro Hirano (currently Toshiki Hirano), most of whom were amateurs except for Itano, and placed them at the core of the production to create works of youthful sensibility. Hiroyuki Yamaga and Hideaki Anno of later Gainax, who were still in college, also joined as part-time workers. They only gathered at Artland for about three years, but many of them got their break through with Macross, and later became representative of Japanese animation. Ishiguro became interested in the animation industry after seeing Disney's animated feature film Sleeping Beauty. As an animator, he specializes in effects animation and has made it widely known to the Japanese animation industry that such techniques exist. In Space Battleship Yamato, he worked on many of the effects scenes, which was one of the factors that made the work so special. These techniques were then passed on to Ichiro Itano and Hideaki Anno. Anno refers to himself as a "third generation" in the lineage of Ishiguro and Itano's realism-based effects. These animators, along with Yoshinori Kanada, have led the Japanese animation industry by positioning the effects animator in animation as the F/X or VFX creative director in live action. Ishiguro was good at music, especially classical music, and was one of the few directors in the anime industry who could read music. His participation in the Space Battleship Yamato project was due to the fact that he was favored by producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki, who had musical experience. He also used classical music as background music for the fleet battle scenes with space battleships in Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Ishiguro was a science fiction enthusiast, and the success of Space Battleship Yamato was greatly influenced by Ishiguro's sci-fi imagination in terms of visuals.
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