#blue uru

Uru in Blue / Aoki Uru ( 蒼きウル )

I might’ve mentioned this before, but in 1999, Hiroyuki Yamaga gave an interview at Fanime, and mentioned that he was working on some short stories that he’d publish as a novel. The last one - he hoped - would be animated. They’d be about knights on a world slightly different from ours who fight in jet fighters. Pretty rad, right?

Since this was around the time of GAINAX’s second failure to make Blue Uru, I supposed that the two might be related. It’d explain a lot if they were. Nobody in the west knew what the movie was even supposed to be about. An early version of the script got put out on CD in 1998, but it never surfaced on the web as far as I can discover, and certainly not in English.

Just this Friday (at Fanime, funnily enough), Hiroyuki Yamaga gave a surprise panel (!) on Blue Uru, where he finally said what it’d be about: knights who fight in jet fighters. Mystery solved.

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that Yamaga decided he’d turn the story into something a bit more modest when it started to look like Blue Uru wouldn’t get made as a movie.

A shame the stories never materialized.

Yamaga said later in that 1999 interview that people who wanted to be the next GAINAX didn’t need to be in anime - that having something you wanted to show was the important part - but it seems Yamaga himself could never quite accept anything else. Perhaps that’s why he chose to work on Mahoromatic and Abenobashi instead of finishing his stories.

"Overture" to be released worldwide next spring; Uru has US$40 million budget planned

Gainax's newly-launched official Facebook page for the Blue Uru (Aoki Uru) anime film announced today that they had a green light for a pilot film, which is scheduled to be released in 2014. Blue Uru is a long-awaited sequel to Gainax's 1987 film Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise.