2/18/2024 0 Comments Office building inside anime art"I saw them doing it, and so I thought I should follow them and sleep at my desk too." On my first day, we were working from that morning until the next, and my senpai all slept at their desks," Isom reminiscences. "Nothing can compare to the Japanese animation industry. When starting at Ogura Kobo in 2008, Isom quickly noticed how the work environment differed to what he was used to in America. It's what I always wanted to do." Arthell Isom works in his Tokyo studio alongside a team determined to better represent diversity in the Japanese anime industry. "At that point, I just wanted to work for him. For him, it was a simple, sure decision, but a precarious one, too Ogura only accepted one artist every year. The life of an animator is already competitive and notoriously coveted, but Isom had set his sights firmly on one goal: to work at Ogura Kobo-the legendary Ogura's animation studio. Failure would simply not be a part of it. A seemingly spur-of-the-moment decision plan began to hatch: he would leave San Francisco and enroll in an animation school in Tokyo. In a fateful encounter with the Japanese cyberpunk original Ghost in the Shell, helmed by acclaimed animation director Ogura Hiromasa, the New Jersey-born artist swung his career dreams into a new orbit. We're just glad we can be one of the studios to help with that." Right now, the world is shifting, and that shift is what's changing the industry, too. Despite these titles, Isom has been-and always will be-an artist, first and foremost. In the studio and among his well-trusted animators, he's the creative director steering some of the most epic anime scenes: Attack on Titan, One Piece, Gintama and Fire Force to name drop a few. "It turns out that it was just another animator watching YouTube tutorials late at night from his home."įirmly in the media spotlight, Isom is an entrepreneur and CEO of D'Art Shtajio, Japan's first Black-owned animation company. Standing among the rows of unmanned Wacom monitors-his animator team accessing them remotely from across the city-he then recalls a paranormal encounter during his all-nighter: "I thought I was hallucinating when I heard sounds in the office in the middle of the night," he laughs. To any unwitting pair of ears, the Tokyo-based artist's declaration is a seemingly light-hearted, if not wacky, introduction, but behind the film of nonchalance and his laidback presence lies a pure blazing creative fuel. "I was up until 4 am last night for a project," Arthell Isom casually remarks the day we met him at his Shinjuku studio.
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