I dig the music.

Yoshinori Kanada tribute made by someone that isn't me.

I'm just gonna quote wikipedia...

Yoshinori Kanada (金田 伊功, Kanada Yoshinori^?, born February 5, 1952 in Nara, Japan) is an influential Japanese animator.

Best known of his popular work in 1984, Birth, one of the first OVAs released in the market. He may not do much character designs, but he is famous of his character animation skills, his characters literally come alive on the screen. His work in Galaxy Express 999 (1979) and Harmegeddon (1983) has been very influential to an entire generation of animators in Japan. These two works also served as partial inspiration for Takashi Murakami's Superflat art movement. During the 80s and 90s, he has worked with the famous director, Hayao Miyazaki closely in several movies from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind to Princess Mononoke. Also, he is known for breaking down the directorial system in animation allowing individual key animators to exert their own style into a particular work.

Amazing to see how one animator giving power to individual directors on productions led to a multitude of stylistic movements on Japan that are still going strong today and continue to create even more influences. Anime is not one dimensional and shouldn't be counted out simply because there are no "anime historians" around to talk about the GOOD qualities of eastern animation. For the most part the West largely ignores the amazing things they get away with that are simply taboo in animation over here.

Eastern and Western animation are fairly similar in how homogenized they are stylistically. Western has their generic "look" just as the East does. However, we excell at our qualities just as they have certain things that they absolutely kick our asses at. The unfortunate part is that we hog the spotlight despite how stifled I think our industry is, whereas they catch a lot of flack for being "cheap" yet they excercise much more freedom and experimentation in their craft. Chew on that I suppose.