Great Anime Directors: Go Nagai

By Mark McPherson
24th May 04

This is a first of a series of biographies on anime directors, both well-known and underground. My first biography will be on the legendary Go Nagai.

Go Nagai is the most outlandish anime director today, but he does have experience. In the 60's, he made comics for a magazine that caused quite a rucus with the Japanese. It's not everyday you see a manga about teachers spying on little girls. Go Nagai desperately wanted to be known and while he was ill he grieved that he would die before releasing his manga, Black Lion.

However, Go Nagai bounced back thanks to Ken Ishikawa. Ken helped Go Nagai get both his manga and anime career off the ground by starting up animation studios. Go Nagai decided that his previous works were a bit too extreme for the Japanese market, so he switched his tactics to appeal to children in the 70's. Go Nagai, however, became one of the most beloved anime directors of the 70's. His series Cutey Honey and Devilman did become treasured classics, but Go Nagai's most popular works were Mazinger Z, Getter Robo and Grandizer. These three series were so successful that often Nagai would combine some of the series together. This brought about a massive fan-base for Go Nagai before the age of Gundam struck.

In the mid-80's, Go Nagai decided the time was right to jump back into the anime world and show the public what he really enjoys doing with anime: having fun with it. Now that more mature titles like AKIRA had been released, Nagai wasted no time on making an anime version of his classic manga, Black Lion. While Black Lion was pretty short, it did raise a few eyebrows in the anime community. So now Nagai has made anime versions of all his manga. What is next? Well, now that anime was becoming more mature he released his other perverted work including Hannappe Bazooka, The Abarashi Family, Deliquint in Drag, Shuten Doji and Kekko Kammen. All of these titles were off the wall, but Kekko Kamen might be a bit of a stretch for people. A show about masked female heroine who wears nothing but a mask and boots does sound a bit extreme.

Go Nagai probably felt a bit restricted when he was making the series Devilman and Cutey Honey, so he decided to revist his classics and put a new twist on them. Devilman, which in the 70's was a beloved children's TV show, was reformed into a two episode OAV series and shocked fans of the original series. Go Nagai had redone Devilman with the addition of nudity, ultra-violence, gore and perversion. Now Nagai was establishing a name for himself. He did the same with Cutey Honey, but Honey lasted longer since it had a lot of fanservice in it.

This still wasn't enough for Nagai. Okay, he's made manga to anime adaptions, redone his classic shows, what more could on do? How about continuing his old series? In 1998, Go Nagai stunned fans of the original Getter Robo series by creating Shin Getter Robo. Shin Getter Robo was much different from the incarnations of Cutey Honey and Devilman as Shin Getter Robo included more violence, more action, a bit of nudity, bits of racism and inclusion of three new Getter Robos. Go Nagai continued this trend with Mazinger Z by releasing Mazinkaiser in 2001.

So what's next on Go Nagai's plate? No one really knows. All you know is you can count on the fact that it will be totally insane and off the wall.

-- Mark McPherson 24th May 04