The comparison of the OP with Ergo Proxy is particularly apt as Nakazawa did key animation for that OP as well! Interestingly, Ergo’s OP was directed by Naoyuki Onda, who did key animation on the Kill Bill segment.

If you delve back into the 90s, you’ll also find that Nakazawa directed the OP for the Lodoss War TV series, which was good enough to spawn a copy cat (Himiko Den) and is by far the best thing in the entire series (Maaya Sakamoto, Yoko Kanno and gratuitous wind blowing hair and petals everywhere). I’m not sure which Rayearth OP he did, but both OP1 and OP3 are surprisingly well directed and animated.

Comedy is exquisite, but rather forgettable in the long run IMHO.

Manganimation is a brilliant website – one of the chief contributors is manuloz, who posts quite frequently on Animesuki and always seems to be first with sakuga videos and news. Well worth checking out (also try Catsuka if you’re looking at French animation websites).

@IKnight: I’m often amazed at how little anime fans know about anime directors and creative staff. Personally, I place more importance in a director than animation studio. For example, Gurren Lagann’s director Hiroyuki Imaishi’s previous work Dead Leaves was animated at Production IG but it shares such a visual resemblance/sugar rush style to said epic mecha show. Here’s a name for you to track down if you haven’t discovered him already: Mamoru Hosoda, arguably the best new anime movie director coming out of Japan right now; Hosoda’s so good he’ll take Shonen Jump franchise movies like One Piece Movie 6 and turn it into an amazing experience.

@Xerox: You’re welcome. I had you in mind when I was writing this (especially the spotlight on Comedy), so I’m glad you liked it! Good luck with the house move, too!

@Outlawstar: He most certainly does

@rwaggie: Unfortunately, no. There may have been something on Stage6.com to download, but they shut down last week All I can think of is perhaps trying to contact the person who posted it on YouTube. Out of interest, have you seen much of the Ani*Kuri shorts? If you’re into artsy anime, they are some great one minute shorts by some famous directors (including Satoshi Kon, Makoto Shinkai (his new style is very Ghibli-like) and more). One clip from AniKuri embedded below, its the Satoshi Kon contribution:

Will do, will do. Comedy was amazing. You’ve done it again, I’ve always, always, always, always wondered who did that Linkin Park video, who did O-ren Ishii’s ten minutes of fun and why the opening to Blood+ was so much better than the actual show. Nakazawa, wow, the world’s suddenly making sense, he is the man behind all the amazing snippets of animation. That shampoo commercial was stunning, stunning, gorgeous, unbelievable. The commercial bit just totally blew me out of the water, I did not see that coming at all. Seeing how I’m a pretty big fan of Asian Kung-Fu generation, I’m going to have to look into that music video.

Oh god, thank you, thank you for this post. I’m going to do dig up ‘Comedy’ and store it forever and show it to my friends and put it on my iPod. Christ…

This has reminded me why I think we should talk about individuals more and studios less.