×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

Daicon films (special)

Have you seen this? want to / seen some / seen all

Go back to Daicon films main page

Trivia:

At the time this was produced, Gainax wasn't an official company, and was staffed by volunteers who were mainly college students. If it weren't for this opening animation sequence for Daicon III held in Osaka in 1981 for the 20th Japan Science Fiction Convention, Gainax would have never come into being.

These two films are pillars of early otaku culture and directly inspired some characters from "Otaku no Video"

"Daicon" has several wordplays. First, it can be translated as "Big Convention". Second, it is a play on how Osaka (the convention's host city) is written in kanji. And finally, "Daicon" is a play on "daikon" a type of white radish found in Japan. As a result, the spaceship Daicon resembles a giant daikon.

The powered suit that attacks the little girl in Daicon III was designed by Kazutaka Miyatake for the Japanese edition of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers novel.

Both short films were shot in 8 mm film. Daicon IV was originally planned to run at 15 minutes on 16 mm film, but was shortened to five minutes due to time and budget constraints. Both films were not completed until the morning of their respective conventions.

Macross animation director Ichiro Itano provided his "Itano Circus" style in Daicon IV's flying swords sequence.

Osamu Tezuka was shown the Daicon III animation hours after its premiere and commented: Well, there certainly were a lot of characters in the film. ... [T]here were also some that weren't in the film." He pointed out that none of his characters were featured in the film. Because of this, the animators added Tezuka's characters in Daicon IV.

Clarifying the comment - the Daicon IV animation uses two songs from Electric Light Orchestra, "Prologue" and "Twilight", which are tracks 1 and 2 respectively from side 1 of ELO's Time album. If the short showcasing the Daicon IV production work (rough animations, color testing, etc) is counted, then "Hold on Tight", side 2 track 6 is also used.

You can contribute information to this page, but first you must login or register
This encyclopedia is collaboratively edited by the users of this site
DISCLAIMER add information report an error lookup sources