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Otakon Hosts Masao Maruyama, Hidenori Matsubara
posted on by Crystalyn Hodgkins
The staff of the Otakon convention announced on Friday that it will host Masao Maruyama and Hidenori Matsubara at this year's event. Otakon also annonced on Saturday that it will host a screening of In This Corner of the World. Maruyama and Matsubara will both be in attendance at the screening.
Maruyama was involved in the establishment of MADHOUSE in 1972. Since then, he has nurtured talents such as Tetsuro Araki, Atsuko Ishizuka and the late Satoshi Kon. Among the anime he has produced are Unico, Ninja Scroll, Card Captor Sakura, Monster, Death Note, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Paprika, Redline, and Supernatural the Animation. Maruyama left MADHOUSE in 2011 to form MAPPA, and then stepped down as CEO in April 2016 and founded his new Studio M2 in the same year.
This year's appearance will mark his 14th appearance at Otakon, after canceling his planned appearance last minute at last year's convention. Maruyama has also been an honorary staff member at Otakon for many years.
Matsubara has been working in the anime industry since the 1980s, when he worked as an in-between animator on the Project A-Ko anime projects. He has since risen through the ranks of animators to design the characters in almost every Ah! My Goddess anime, Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040, Elementalors, Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo, Ibara no Ō, and Sakura Wars. He is now an animation director on Hideaki Anno and Khara's four remake films of Gainax's Evangelion series, and he served as animation director and character designer for Sunao Katabuchi's In This Corner of the World film.
Matsubara last attended Otakon in 2014.
Otakon 2017 will take place from August 11-13 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. This will be the 24th convention, and the first year the convention is being held in D.C.; Baltimore has hosted the convention for the past 17 years.
Yousei Teikoku, JAM Project, Flow, and singer T.M.Revolution will all perform at Otakon as part of the convention's Anisong World Matsuri music festival event.
