japanamerica

I first interviewed Hayao Miyazaki for Japanamerica in the early aughts. I was very fortunate. It was the usual story--a friend of a friend of a friend, and so on. He was a bit tight-lipped at first but relaxed and opened up when he realized that I was no otaku .  Later I was invited to interview him live onstage at UC Berkeley in California ( video here ), and we've had a few informal chats since.  When he was awarded a second Oscar this year (third if you count his 2014 honorary statuette), I gave interviews to the BBC, CNN and The Guardian , in addition to a couple of online Japanese media.    The business has undergone a revolution since our first meeting for Japanamerica . File-sharing and streaming media have made Japanese pop culture in general and anime in particular a content goldmine. The reputation of Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli has grown in prominence over the past 20 years, partly owing to its rich and unparalleled catalog of quality content, but also...

In less than a year, Tonko House earns an Oscar nomination By Roland Kelts They had plum roles at one of the best companies in the world and their successes were the envy of their peers. But last summer, two peak-career professionals quit their lucrative day jobs to found a start-up. With no income or investment, they built their own studio, mostly by hand, and started working long odd hours, seven days a week, on the edge of the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, California. Typical Silicon Valley fairy tale? Hardly. These two make animation. “I just felt like I had a lifelong dream to make art,” Tokyo-born, 40-year-old director Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi told me at a café in Berkeley. “And that if I was going to do it, I better do it now.” Tsutsumi and his Tonko House Studio cofounder, Japanese-American 34-year-old Robert Kondo, both left positions at American industry giant Pixar Animation Studios last July — Kondo after 14 years, Tsutsumi after seven. Their resumes include gl...