Mitsuo Iso

is a Japanese animator, director, and screenwriter. He began his career as an animator in the mid-1980s and worked as a freelance artist through Neomedia, Studio Zaendo, and Studio Ghibli. Iso is known for his offbeat key animation in the prologue of Gundam 0080, large portions of Asuka's battle in The End of Evangelion and the first half of the tank battle in Ghost in the Shell. Career Iso has worked on Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Gundam ZZ since 1985 as a key animator and in-betweener. This led him to secretly work in the 1988 film Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack under the pseudonym Mikio Odagawa without telling Zaendo, where he was at the time. He was then asked by Sunrise, an animation studio, to act as an intermediary for job offers to the company, and worked under his real name as a job through the company. Sunrise also hired him as an animation director, so he worked under that pseudonym. The battle scene at the beginning of the 1989 OVA Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket made a strong impression on the anime industry and anime fans about Iso. Until then, mobile suits (humanoid giant robots) had mostly been depicted as a whole "mass", but Iso thought that if it was a machine body, it should be separated from the skeleton (chassis), and realized an animation in which the robot's material and structure could be seen. He also carefully picked up the details of secondary effects such as air resistance to missile launches and vehicles floating in the blast to create realistic battle scenes. In particular, his drawing philosophy of accumulating what could happen on the screen had a great influence on the drawing of realistic anime in the following years. In this work, an explosion effect called "Iso Explosion" is noticeable. Director Fumihiko Takayama gave him the opportunity to do some niche design work, and he designed some of the mecha designs and military equipment. He was with Studio Ghibli from 1990-1992. Iso drew keyframes in Only Yesterday, Porco Rosso, Ocean Waves. Iso joined Roujin Z (1991), based on Katsuhiro Otomo's manga, as a mechanical designer at the request of director Hiroyuki Kitakubo. He was supposed to be both the mechanical designer and mechanical animation director, but ended up doing only a partial design as he was asked to join Only Yesterday.