Kazuo Komatsubara (小松原 一男 or 小松原 一夫,Komatsubara Kazuo; December 24, 1943 – March 24, 2000) was a Japaneseanimator,animation director and character designer born inYokohama,Kanagawa Prefecture,Japan. He worked as anindependently contracted character designer forToei Animation in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a member of theboard of directors of animation studioOh! Production (which he helped found along withNorio Shioyama,Kōichi Murata, andKōshin Yonekawa).[1][2] He died on March 24, 2000, due to acanceroustumor on his neck.
Beginning withDevilman in 1972, Komatsubara moved on to work on other important 1970sanime shows includingGetter Robo (1974),Getter Robo G (1975),UFO Robo Grendizer (1975), andMagne Robo Gakeen (1976), working closely withGo Nagai on character designs for many of these shows. For the 1987OVA remake of theDevilman series, Komatsubara worked as both character designer and animation director. He then caught the animation fandom boom at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s as the character designer for theSpace Battleship Yamato series, as well as working on the animeTV seriesSpace Pirate Captain Harlock and the anime filmGalaxy Express 999. Komatsubara became the most popular anime character designer forLeiji Matsumoto's characters, and many of his illustrations were featured on the front covers of various magazines.
At the same time,Shingo Araki was also a very popular character designer at Toei Animation, though he was beginning to do more work forTokyo Movie Shinsha. Because of this, Komatsubara began to focus more on his work for Toei Animation. He collaborated withRintaro on several projects, including the 1980 anime television seriesGanbare Genki and the anime filmMetropolis (released in 2001, after Komatsubara's death).
When not working on adaptations of the works of Nagai and Matsumoto, Komatsubara worked as character designer onshōjoanime series such asMiracle Shōjo Limit-chan (1973) andHai! Step Jun (1985). In 1984, he was invited byHayao Miyazaki to participate in the production of the anime filmNausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, for which he did character designs and acted as animation director. Miyazaki acted as an advisor to Komatsubara during this time, and Komatsubara indicated he learned many things from him as a result of this mentoring.
Komatsubara also created original characters (not based on manga or other references) for theJ9 series, includingGalactic Whirlwind Braiger,Galactic Gale Baxinger, andGalactic Hurricane Sasuraiger.
Listed alphabetically by year. Credits are forboth character design and animation director unless otherwise noted.
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