Tatsufumi Itou

Date of death: May 23, 2020

Tatsufumi Tamakawa Tatsufumi was born May 28 in Japan. He was an animator and director belonging to Studio Cockpit. He changed his name from Tatsufumi Tamakawa after marrying character designer Mariko Itou (伊藤真理子) on September 27, 2008.

While living in Morioka, he formed an amateur group together with 3 friends, named Animation BeroBero. They produced a short 8 mm anime called Bakuhatsu Choujin Kanada Man (爆発超人・金田マン), which drew inspiration from animator Kanada Yoshinori, whom the group admired, and made him to a hero in this short. It was presented at an amateur film festival in 1985 and drew attention of established anime magazine Animage.

As director Tamakawa was known to take care of important episodes of a series and showed the ability to carefully select a fitting tempo to his work as shown in several episodes of acclaimed TV anime Figure 17, Kaleido Star, Mai Hime and Princess Tutu.

(Source: AniDB)

Twitter: @Tastufumi_Itoh