See ‘Mad Max’ Anime Designs By Mahiro Maeda
There’s a book to be written on the decade and a half development ofGeorge Miller’sMad Max: Fury Road. At varying times, plans for the film featured a roster of other projects which came and went asFury Roaditself soldiered on.
A companion film calledFuriosawas planned at one point. Even earlier on, that movie was envisioned as an anime prequel or companion toFury Road. Now we’ve got designs from that abandonedMad Maxanime, done byMahiro Maeda, thanks to a Japanese TV show.
Some background: back in 2009, after one attempt to makeFury Roadhad failed, and Miller’s development ofJustice Leaguewas also scuttled thanks to a writer’s guild strike, Miller toldMTVhe was working up an R-rated 3DMad Maxanime:
The anime is an opportunity for me to shift a little bit about what anime is doing because anime is ripe for an adjustment or sea change. It’s coming in games and I believe it’s the same in anime. There’s going to be a hybrid anime where it shifts more towards Western sensibilities. [Japanese filmmaker Akira] Kurosawa was able to bridge that gap between the Japanese sensibilities and the West and make those definitive films.
That script was co-written withNico Lathouris. More recently, Miller toldThe Playlist"We were going to do [‘Furiosa’ as] an anime before [Fury Road] was delayed a second time when we were rained out of Australia. But because we were delayed that didn’t happen, and so we’ve got that script, and we’ve got another one."
More succinctly, he toldCinemaBlend, “…as part of this digging down deep, we did write backstories – so we were going to do an anime based on the Furiosa character.”
Some designs for the film were done by Mahiro Maeda, the anime designer behindGankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo, and who worked on designs for Evangelion and contributed animation toNausicaa,Castle in the Sky,andPorco Rosso. Reportedly, theseMad Maxdesigns ended up incorporated as inspiration forFury Road.
Thanks to a Japanese TV show andCrunchyroll, some of those designs can be seen:
You can see the full Japanese TV report here, albeit in untranslated form.
As for the story itself, Miller said weeks ago,
It’s more Furiosa’s story and how she came about. Even though it’s a chase, to really make the film as authentic as possible we wrote backstories to every vehicle, to every character. We knew Nic Hoult’s character Nux from the moment he was conceived, we knew who his parents were, how he became a War Boy.
