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Katsuya Kondo

Katsuya Kondo

Visual Effects

Biography

Katsuya Kondō (近藤 勝也, born June 2, 1963, in Ehime Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese manga artist, character designer, animator, and animation director. He is best known for his character design work on the Studio Ghibli films Kiki's Delivery Service and Ocean Waves, as well as the PlayStation game Jade Cocoon. His character designs are considered the epitome of the Studio Ghibli style. After graduating from high school, he began working for Osamu Dezaki and Akio Sugino at their Studio Annapuru. Under the direction of Shinji Ōtsuka, Kondō worked as a key animator of the TV anime series Cat's Eye. He then worked as a free agent on such shows as The Mighty Orbots, Rainbow Brite, and Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears. His first work with Studio Ghibli was as a key animator on Castle in the Sky. After working on the Gainax film The Wings of Honneamise and the OVAs Devilman and Meikyū Bukken File 538, Kondō began to be known for the high quality of his work. Kondō collaborated with Ken'ichi Sakemi on a manga retelling of the Joan of Arc story, as well as doing the character designs for the Jade Cocoon video game series. He also collaborated with Sakemi by creating the character designs for the 1990 NTV TV movie Like the Clouds, Like the Wind (based on Sakemi's novel Kōkyū Monogatari), which tells the story of a young country girl who is chosen to become one of the Emperor's concubines. He also worked with Tomomi Mochizuki on the NHK Minna no Uta music video titled Kaze no Tōri Michi, produced by Ajia-do Animation Works for Sayuri Horishita. In 2007, he was announced as the supervising animator of the Studio Ghibli film Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. He also wrote the lyrics for the film's theme song. Description above from the Wikipedia article Katsuya Kondō, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Known For

Howl's Moving Castle
8.4

Sophie, a young milliner, is turned into an elderly woman by a witch who enters her shop and curses her. She encounters a wizard named Howl and gets caught up in his resistance to fighting for the king.

Howl's Moving Castle

2004
Princess Mononoke
8.3

Ashitaka, a prince of the disappearing Emishi people, is cursed by a demonized boar god and must journey to the west to find a cure. Along the way, he encounters San, a young human woman fighting to protect the forest, and Lady Eboshi, who is trying to destroy it. Ashitaka must find a way to bring balance to this conflict.

Princess Mononoke

1997
Den-noh Coil
7.4

Den-noh Coil, Coil — A Circle of Children, is a Japanese science fiction anime television series depicting a near future where semi-immersive augmented reality technology has just begun to enter the mainstream. The series takes place in the fictional city of Daikoku, a hotbed of AR development with an emerging city-wide virtual infrastructure. It follows a group of children as they use AR glasses to unravel the mysteries of the half real, half Internet city, using a variety of illegal software tools, techniques, and virtual pets to manipulate the digital landscape. Den-noh Coil, in development for over a decade, is the series director debut of Japanese animator Mitsuo Iso. It premiered on NHK Educational TV on May 12, 2007. Due to the animators involved in its production and its unusually high-profile television broadcast time slot, Den-noh Coil was highly anticipated.

Den-noh Coil

2007
My Neighbor Totoro
8.1

Two sisters move to the country with their father in order to be closer to their hospitalized mother, and discover the surrounding trees are inhabited by Totoros, magical spirits of the forest. When the youngest runs away from home, the older sister seeks help from the spirits to find her.

My Neighbor Totoro

1988
Kiki's Delivery Service
7.8

A young witch, on her mandatory year of independent life, finds fitting into a new community difficult while she supports herself by running an air courier service.

Kiki's Delivery Service

1989
The Boy and the Heron
7.4

While the Second World War rages, the teenage Mahito, haunted by his mother's tragic death, is relocated from Tokyo to the serene rural home of his new stepmother Natsuko, a woman who bears a striking resemblance to the boy's mother. As he tries to adjust, this strange new world grows even stranger following the appearance of a persistent gray heron, who perplexes and bedevils Mahito, dubbing him the "long-awaited one."

The Boy and the Heron

2023
Castle in the Sky
8.0

A young boy and a girl with a magic crystal must race against pirates and foreign agents in a search for a legendary floating castle.

Castle in the Sky

1986
Ponyo
7.8

When Sosuke, a young boy who lives on a clifftop overlooking the sea, rescues a stranded goldfish named Ponyo, he discovers more than he bargained for. Ponyo is a curious, energetic young creature who yearns to be human, but even as she causes chaos around the house, her father, a powerful sorcerer, schemes to return Ponyo to the sea.

Ponyo

2008
The Secret World of Arrietty
7.7

14-year-old Arrietty and the rest of the Clock family live in peaceful anonymity as they make their own home from items "borrowed" from the house's human inhabitants. However, life changes for the Clocks when a human boy discovers Arrietty.

The Secret World of Arrietty

2010
Porco Rosso
7.8

In Italy in the 1930s, sky pirates in biplanes terrorize wealthy cruise ships as they sail the Adriatic Sea. The only pilot brave enough to stop the scourge is the mysterious Porco Rosso, a former World War I flying ace who was somehow turned into a pig during the war. As he prepares to battle the pirate crew's American ace, Porco Rosso enlists the help of spunky girl mechanic Fio Piccolo and his longtime friend Madame Gina.

Porco Rosso

1992
The Wind Rises
7.8

A lifelong love of flight inspires Japanese aviation engineer Jiro Horikoshi, whose storied career includes the creation of the A-6M World War II fighter plane.

The Wind Rises

2013
Ronja, the Robber's Daughter
6.7

Ronja is the only daughter of Mattis, a bandit leader who lives in a castle in the middle of a large forest. When Ronja grows old enough, she ventures into the forest to interact the strange and magical creatures that live there. She learns to live in the forest through her own strength, with the occasional rescue from her parents. Ronja's life begins to change, however, when she happens upon a boy her own age named Birk.

Ronja, the Robber's Daughter

2014
When Marnie Was There
7.9

Upon being sent to live with relatives in the countryside due to an illness, an emotionally distant adolescent girl becomes obsessed with an abandoned mansion and infatuated with a girl who lives there - a girl who may or may not be real.

When Marnie Was There

2014
From Up on Poppy Hill
7.5

Yokohama, 1963. Japan is picking itself up from the devastation of World War II and preparing to host the 1964 Olympics—and the mood is one of both optimism and conflict as the young generation struggles to throw off the shackles of a troubled past. Against this backdrop of hope and change, a friendship begins to blossom between high school students Umi and Shun—but a buried secret from their past emerges to cast a shadow on the future and pull them apart.

From Up on Poppy Hill

2011
Pom Poko
7.2

The Raccoons of the Tama Hills are being forced from their homes by the rapid development of houses and shopping malls. As it becomes harder to find food and shelter, they decide to band together and fight back. The Raccoons practice and perfect the ancient art of transformation until they are even able to appear as humans in hilarious circumstances.

Pom Poko

1994
Ocean Waves
6.4

At Kichijōji Station, Tokyo, Taku Morisaki glimpses a familiar woman on the platform opposite boarding a train. Later, her photo falls from a shelf as he exits his apartment before flying to Kōchi Prefecture. Picking it up, he looks at it briefly before leaving. As the aeroplane takes off, he narrates the events that brought her into his life...

Ocean Waves

1993
Royal Space Force - The Wings of Honneamise
6.9

On a future Earth, war between the Kingdom of Honneamise and its rival, The Republic, is inevitable. As evolving technology creates new ways to wage war, a small group seeks to propel mankind into space in their world’s first spaceflight program. For astronaut candidate Shirotsugh Lhadatt, it’s a personal odyssey as he grows from an aimless young man into a leader willing to put everything on the line in order to move the human race forward and away from the brink of Armageddon.

Royal Space Force - The Wings of Honneamise

1987
Twilight Q
6.5

A Knot in Time — Reflection — Mayu found a camera floating in the ocean while she was on vacation. A very unusual camera. The film, mostly intact, reveals a picture of herself with a man she has never seen before. But that is not all. The unusual part is that this camera has not been made yet... and will not be made for another two years. And soon, Mayu finds herself swinging uncontrollably back and forth through time like a pendulum... Mystery Case — File 538 — A down-on-his-luck detective accepts the first case to come his way: surveillance of a man and a little girl. But who are they? And why do aeroplanes that fly over them turn into giant imperial carp? An investigator's normal methods do not apply when reality itself no longer applies...

Twilight Q

1987
Only Yesterday
7.4

In lyrical switches between the present and the past, Taeko contemplates the arc of her life, and wonders if she has been true to the dreams of her childhood self.

Only Yesterday

1991
My Neighbors the Yamadas
7.0

The Yamadas are a typical middle class Japanese family in urban Tokyo and this film shows us a variety of episodes of their lives. With tales that range from the humorous to the heartbreaking, we see this family cope with life's little conflicts, problems, and joys in their own way.

My Neighbors the Yamadas

1999