Kazuhiro Takamura ANIMATION WORKS

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Kazuhiro Takamura has been the character designer for shows such as Mahoromatic, Strike Witches, This Ugly Yet Beautiful World, Binbou Shimai Monogatari, and He is My Master. But that doesn’t even begin to cover the number of series he’s been a part of as an animator or an animation director. Rest assured, Kazuhiro Takamura ANIMATION WORKS beautifully brings together a multitude of anime series all in one book.

This A4-size art book is 160 pages. That’s deceptively large considering that the color illustrations end on page 96. Still, 96 pages is a relative standard for art books. There is also a double-sided fold-out poster. The cover art work’s on one side and profile images of the Strike Witches girls on the other.

Strike Witches is the first feature in the book, with a total of 11 illustrations over 12 pages. Most of the illustrations included came from DVDs sold in Japan, so it’s nice to see them here.

The Mahoromatic section is the longest section. Even though I’ve collected the visual books from the series, there are illustrations in here that I haven’t seen. Mahoromatic takes up 23 pages, with 35 illustrations. The page layouts in this section are especially good because the landscape images are on full pages. And there are no borders on shared image pages.

As mentioned before, Kazuhiro Takamura is also the character designer for This Ugly Yet Beautiful World. There are a total of 14 images over 7 pages, so most of them receive half a page.

The next big section is for He is My Master with a total of 27 illustrations. Four of the illustrations are new for this art book, with several more from original merchandise illustrations. The total includes works originally published in magazines like Megami and Newtype.

Takamura was also the character designer for Binbou Shimai Monogatari. It has a comparably smaller section with just 7 illustrations over 4 pages. This one never really felt like his style, to me anyway.

From this point on are shows that Kazuhiro Takamura worked on, but not as the character designer. There is a lot of variety in this section, and several unexpected illustrations. There are four full-page illustrations of this gorgeous glasses girl.

In the last 23 pages of the color portion of Kazuhiro Takamura ANIMATION WORKS there’s art work from Kare Kano, Neon Genesis Evangelion, FLCL, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Kashimashi ~Girls Meets Girl~, Gundam 00, Blood+, Code Geass and Queen’s Blade. Takamura was the illustrator for the covers of both Code Geass Heroine’s Tribute and Queen’s Blade Perfect Visual Book.

Pages 97 through 153 are the “Monochrome Gallery.” This section has 30 pages of Strike Witches line arts and storyboards. And then there is something less expected: There are several pages of gray-scaled illustrations from Kare Kano, Mahoromatic, and FLCL. I would have liked these in color, but there must have been an issue about re-publication. Either way, not the usual content for a monochrome section in an art book.