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Michael Arias

By leocorrea | October 15, 2008

Michael Arias began his career doing special-effects on Hollywood films including The Abyss and Fat Man and Little Boy. In the early 1990s he moved into the areas of computer graphics and software development, he worked for the Softimage special projects team in Japan. Arias developed for the 3D software Softimage XSI a Non-photorealistic rendering shader that gives computer graphics animation the appearance of traditional cel-shaded drawings.The software was first utilized in 1997 for Hayao Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke in English release) and has been used in Miyazaki’s subsequent films. Arias was a segment producer and additional sequence director on The Animatrix: Beyond, released in 2003.

Arias began work on the project that evolved into Tekkon Kinkreet in 1999.He made a pilot film with Koji Morimoto, which won praise from critics in Japan and Europe. Morimoto wanted to make the film in 3D, but the project disappeared for a while when he and Arias realized the difficulty of expressing emotion in the 3D medium. Originally Morimoto was supposed to direct Tekkon Kinkreet, but he lost interest in the project.[7] In 2003, while working on The Animatrix, Arias picked up Tekkon Kinkreet again. He persistently urged Studio 4°C to make the film, telling Eiko Tanaka (president of Studio 4°C) that “he actually only did his best for Studio 4°C because he wanted to make a Tekkon movie.”

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