Worked on Gundam, Cowboy Bebop, more at Bandai Visual

Character designer and animator Nobuteru Yuki reported on Wednesday that veteran Bandai Visual anime producer Minoru Takanashi passed away.

Takanashi developed content at Bandai Visual for nearly three decades. He served on most Macross projects, including Macross II, Macross Plus, Macross 7, Macross Zero, and the proposed but unproduced live-action Macross movie. He was also Bandai Visual's producer or project planner behind such popular anime as Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, Gunbuster, Giant Robo, The Vision of Escaflowne television anime and Escaflowne anime movie, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, Jin-Roh - The Wolf Brigade, Wolf's Rain, and Arjuna. As such, he was a frequent industry guest of Anime Expo and other overseas conventions.

According to Yuki, Escaflowne would not have been made without Takanashi's "project-planning powers." More recently, Takanashi worked on the Concrete Revolutio anime and product development for Space Battleship Yamato 2199.

Before he joined the anime industry, Takanashi and fellow anime fan Masahiro Chiba were part of Macross Attack Team, a group that created the influential set of Sky Angels dōjinshi (self-published works). Similar to how several Gundam dōjinshi creators eventually became the main staff of the first Macross or how several dōjin filmmakers eventually formed the anime studio Gainax, Takanashi and the other M.A.T. members would eventually parlay their fan efforts into official anime projects.