#shingo araki

[retrosofa]

Front and back cover of the Cutey Honey Original BGM Collection CD. The front illustration was done by Shingo Araki and Michi Himeno. The back image of Honey Kisaragi originally came from a record book released in 1973.

Tracking listing:

Cutie Honey (TV size) - sung by Yoko Maekawa

St. Chapel Academy

Panther Claw

Honey Kisaragi's Secret

Behold! Honey's Transformations

Flash Bridge

Here is the Hayami Family

Fashionable Honey

Battle ~Silver Fleuret~

A Fleeting Happy Ending?

Honey of the Night Fog (TV size) - sung by Yoko Maekawa

Scanned from my personal collection. This was a gift from my good friend Mitch Hang. Please do not repost without my permission.

[fujikosouvenir]

Andromeda Shun vs Pisces Aphrodite ✊💄🌸 from 聖闘士星矢 真紅の少年伝説 Saint Seiya: Legend of Crimson Youth (1988)

[luanasaoriart]

Diamond mommy 🌹

(Inspired by one of Rebecca Sugar's sketches)

[elbereth-de-lioncourt]

Coffret DVD Collector 2006 Artbook Scans

[zegalba]

Shingo Araki: Hitomi to Tamashii (2012)

[rovbookshelf]

The first time Araki drew Oscar, it was a colored copy of Ikeda’s manga. It was created so the staff could familiarize with the characters and the overall feel of the work.

After that was the first draft, which was specifically drawn for the television series. However, this design made it difficult to animate the character. It was particularly hard to express facial expressions, so a second draft was created. In this version, the eyes were made larger and the face was given more distinctive features.

But this time, it ended up looking too different from Ikeda’s original. Therefore, the third draft was made to more closely resemble Ikeda’s design while still being easy to animate. But even this version had eyes that were too gentle. Since Oscar is, in some respects, like a man, there was a request to make the eyes sharper. The result was the fourth draft shown on the page to the right.

This was intended to be the final design, though there may have been slight revisions. And now, Araki's Oscar begins to move.

Director Tadao Nagahama:

"Basically, I would like be as faithfully as possible to the original work. When I read The Rose of Versailles, I felt that it had something in common with the kind of beautiful character types I’ve worked with before. This may be a bit of an extreme way of putting it, but I think if you took the robots out of Voltes V and Tōshō Daimos, you might end up with a story similar to this.

So, for my part, I’d like to take what I’ve done up to now and build off of that for this production. What I want to depict most is Oscar’s way of life and her pure soul in my own way."

Animation Director Shingo Araki:

"To be honest, I had never read the manga, seen the film, or even the Takarazuka version. So at first I was a bit panicked. But now, I think I’ve finally come to have a better understanding, feeling my way along little by little.

I think Oscar belongs to what you’d call a beautiful character type in anime, but the fact is that Oscar is a woman. However, because she also possesses masculine traits, I feel that this the arrival of a new kind of character in anime. In that sense, she is a challenging character and it’s a difficult work."

All the different versions

From Animage September 1979

[juanhaku]

Seiya

#saintseiya

[iconuk01]

The hierarchy of Saints of Athena is established from the outset of the series...

The weakest are Bronze, who can move at Mach 1, and of which there are 48.

The most famous of these are the main five characters in Saints Seiya:

Pegasus, Draco, Andromeda, Cygus (Swan) and Phoenix. Though others seen above include Lupus (Wolf), Monoceros (Unicorn), Hydra (Snake), Ursa Major (Great Bear) and Leo Minor (Lesser Lion).

(The manga has the Bronze Cloths be rather minimalist in design and colour, with the idea that the lower ranks had less metal in their cloths than the higher ones because the metal allowed them to focus their energy and Bronze Saints couldn't handle any more)

But the designers for the anime (the legendary team of Shingo Araki and Michi Himeno) altered the colours and designs, which I have to agree with. The bodysuits gained colours, the hair went a little more wild (Andromeda Shun went from brunette to green, and Phoenix Ikki when from black to blue)

Then Silver, who can move at anywhere from Mach 2 to Mach 5, and of which there are 24

The most famous of these we see include Aquila (Eagle), Ophiuchus (Serpent holder), Cetus (Whale) and more.

And then Gold, who have awoken their 7th Sense and can thus move at the speed of light (Which is quite the increase) and of which represent the 12 signs of the Zodiac. (Technically 13 if you count Ophiuchus.... but that's a long, long story)

The Olympian Gods have their Kamui, which outclass everything else (of course)

We only ever see one, and that's Athena's which manages to combine battle-ready prowess with a ballgown aesthetic that I suspect you really need to be a goddess of War and Wisdom to pull off.

But there is another category, revealed in the Hades Chapter which was a bit unexpected.

Slightly disturbingly, the Cloths in Saint Seiya are alive in some sense, they have a sort of cosmic awareness, but no obvious personality or mind of their own, though we know the Andromeda Cloth spelled out a warning once)

But it's left very vague and mystical.

So when the Cloths need to be repaired, there needs to be human blood in the reforging. Not in a vampire sense, but a sacrifice from someone to honour the Cloths themselves.

Normally, for such a situation it's the Saint themself, which makes sense.

However, when the main five's Bronze Cloths were left shattered by their battle against the Gold Saints (who were miseld into believing that the current incarnation of Athena was NOT the real one), the surviving Gold Saints offered their blood instead, as penance for their near lethal fuck up, and to honour the Saints who had stood by Athena against all odds.

And this allowed the Cloths to change and evolve, growing stronger and allowing the Bronze saints more power. Ironically, most of them now covered LESS than the originals, which made them a bit more faithful to the manga, including replacing the full helmets with tiara like headpieces which did allow their Araki hair to billow more pretilly.

And then, during the Hades Chapter, due to a dramatic set of circumstances, the Bronze Cloths come into contact with the blood of Athena herself.

And the blood of an actual god making contact with the Cloth transforms them again (becoming grander and fancier) into the imaginatively named God Cloths.

The manga kept a solid gold colour for all of these redsigns,

The anime adopted the God Cloths too, but kept the more colourful look they'd gone with from the start, which is hard to argue with

No idea why I put this together... but... well, thank you for coming to my TED talk I guess.