Template:Interviews3

{{Tabber {{IV|bg={{Color|SBR}}|Nisio Isin Chronicle (01/30/2006)| Please tell us anything in particular that you are giving your utmost care and attention within the Stardust Crusaders Arc.
 * Nisio Isin Chronicle (01/30/2006)|

Fukazawa (Director): With the addition of the Egypt Glory Gods and Tarot Users, we now have new relationships between characters that further complicate the plot. But at the center of it all there’s the fact that “Jotaro needs to bring back Polnareff.” We’re being very careful so that the audience is always aware of this core component. We tried to bring this out visually in the poster as well, so we have something slightly different this time without the usual fun vibes.

Araki (Art Director): And Jotaro and Polnareff are the main focus.

Fukazawa: Yes. There are new characters depicted in the poster as well, but we used a composition that would allow the viewers to easily figure out who the main characters are. When I read the original manga, it felt like I was reading a story about youth. The Joestar Group, who normally share strong bonds with each other, can’t be true to themselves and clash, get in fights, shed some tears, we have Jotaro’s earnest conviction, and so on. And at the center of the clash are Jotaro and Polnareff, so the poster reflects that as well.

Fukazawa: Until now, we had Mr. Hisada act as both our character designer and animation director, but starting with the Stardust Crusaders Arc, we’ll have Mr. Hisada focus on being the character designer and have Mr. Ichikawa be our animation director. Our arsenal has been upgraded like never before! Mr. Ichikawa, is there anything in particular that you tried to be mindful about?

Ichikawa (Animation Director): I made sure that I “draw everyone in-character.” I actually got to work on JoJo's Bizarre Adventure as an animation director two years ago for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Episode of Kakyoin and last year for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heart of Gold, but prior to those, I only helped out on a few TV episodes. So I’m always learning new things as a newcomer, and I’m giving my all into drawing Polnareff in-character as much as possible, both at his coolest and at his worst.

Araki: Due to the nature of my job, I wasn’t extra-conscious about having to make anything a certain way because we’re in the Stardust Crusaders Arc now. Once you read the manga, I think coming up with designs fitting for Stardust Crusaders is pretty straightforward. In fact, I think it’s more important to be mindful about how we alter them through performance. For example, the Stardust Crusaders area has a sweet image, so let’s suppose we decided on making the sky pink. But will that sky stay pink for an entire year? What’ll happen to that pink sky when Jotaro and the gang are angry? These are the questions we need to ask ourselves. I think we’re due for a lot of hard work in that regard.

Please tell use your favorite character of the Stardust Crusaders Arc.

Fukazawa: There are too many that I can’t decide, but my favorite character as of late is Avdol, even though he’s not a new character.

Araki: That’s news to me. You only named animal characters in the previous interview. *laughs*

Fukazawa: Did I? *laughs* Avdol seems a bit different this arc…or rather, I feel that he's the hero of the Stardust Crusaders Arc, so I may have strong feelings for him this time. I also really like Big Dad. Even DIO, the evilest villain of all time who gave Jotaro such a hard time back in Egypt, is a mere Warlord. And we’re going to have to come up with a way to present her as an Emperor, a being that surpasses Warlords, so in that sense, she’s going to give us a hard time as well. *laughs*

Araki: Speaking of which, we recorded a song the other day.

Fukazawa: That’s right. And we had the voice actress create the character’s voice there, and after listening, I genuinely thought that “this woman is dangerous.” *laughs* I came to realize then and there that this woman is continuously brimming with madness, so much so that she would destroy a kingdom for the sake of sweets.

Koyama (Producer): Recording Big Dad’s song was an intense experience.

Fukazawa: The acting was stiff at first so I talked to the voice actress, explaining that Dad just can’t wait for the Tea Party of Hell and she can’t help contain the excitement, and asked if she can act that out. The performance gradually intensified from there. We created something that far surpassed our initial expectations.

Ichikawa: I’m really looking forward to drawing out the Tarot Users. I’ve been drawing things of a similar nature while working on a certain title about warriors of the constellation… *laughs* I hope I can make use of the skills and experience I’ve built up over the years.

Araki: My favorite is Mariah. She’s naive and adorable, I think she’s amusing. *laughs* The response she gave to “Call me Chobro!!” came out of left field, it was glorious. *laughs*

Ichikawa: Their exchanges are so heartwarming. We need characters like them that make us smile to maintain the pacing balance.

Araki: I also like Big Dad in the sense that she’s a complete mystery. She would destroy a kingdom for sweets, acting child-like and not necessarily out of malicious intent, and perhaps that’s what makes her an Emperor. You can clearly feel that she’s on a completely different level than the ambitious DIO, and I find that amazing. Much about Dad’s backgrounds remain a mystery, so I’m looking forward to what kind of role she’s going to play in the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure universe. I’m sure she’ll be invaluable in raising the story’s excitement in the long run.

Koyama (Producer): As for me, my favorite is Polnareff, but I also like Joseph.

Fukazawa: Producer Koyama is back again. *laughs*

Koyama: I just have to say my piece about this. *laughs* Mr. [Shinichiro] Miki’s Joseph is, first and foremost, incredibly cool. He’s also a very serious guy, but that makes him hilarious at times, and Mr. Miki does an incredible job portraying these traits. I feel that his acting has taught us new things about Joseph that we haven’t quite been able to grasp yet.

Fukazawa: I agree. Mr. Miki’s Joseph is very serious and so cool… But I try my best to find ways to tinker with him so he doesn’t become too serious. *laughs* It’s been very interesting, in a good way, to see his acting and character expand as he was gradually dragged along by the VAs of the Joestar Group.

Koyama: And we can’t leave out the main character of the Stardust Crusaders Arc – Polnareff. In hindsight, what started off this arc was Polnareff following the villains in order to save the Minks and the people he cares about. This story really emphasizes his “kindness” that comes from his self-sacrifice. One of the highlights of this arc is definitely the effect this kindness has in certain episodes.

Ichikawa: I agree. We’ll be seeing so many sides to Polnareff in the coming episodes, so I’m tickled with excitement as someone who’ll be drawing them out.

Araki: It’s been a while since Hiroaki Hirata last recorded with us too, right? What were your exchanges with him like?

Fukazawa: He said that since Stardust Crusaders is coming up, he’s going to have to prepare by reading the manga and getting into his role. He was very pumped during recording too, we may or may not have had to tell him to take things down a notch. *laughs*

Koyama: Then again, Polnareff is in enemy territory all by himself, so I think that enthusiasm worked out in our favor. *laughs*

Please tell us about any scenes you put a lot of effort into creating, or scenes you would like us to pay close attention to.

Fukazawa: We brought this up before, but the scene where Big Dad sings.

Araki: My pick is the scene where Jotaro and Polnareff fight, just like in this poster. We’re right in the midst of heading toward this scene, so I hope you’d give it your extra attention. What’s your pick, Mr. Ichikawa?

Ichikawa: I’ll second that scene. There are new charms to Polnareff this time around, and I hope you’ll all be able to see them. Aside from that, I’m currently struggling with how to make Anne look cute and attractive. *laughs*

Fukazawa: Even though this is supposed to be an interview about the Stardust Crusaders Arc, if we go by the entire JoJo's Bizarre Adventure timeline, Jotaro will be entering the Diamond is Unbreakable Arc from here. I think it was in Weekly Shonen Jump Vol. 18 last year, but the cover announced “The Four Emperors Arc Begins” in big letters. We then discussed with Shūeisha regarding this Diamond is Unbreakable Arc, and they shared with us the general flow of the story down the road. They told us “Jotaro will face Big Dad in the Stardust Crusaders Arc, and in the following Diamond is Unbreakable Arc, he’s due to directly confront Yoshikage Kira, so we’re in the Diamond is Unbreakable Arc now! Let’s do our best!” The Four Emperors felt like entities that were so far off, but we’re finally at the point where the Joestar Group will be clashing with them. We’ve heard that we’re due for powerful and passionate developments to unfold henceforth! As readers ourselves, we’re really looking forward to future developments, and we hope to give our all into contributing to the Diamond is Unbreakable Arc! }} {{IV|bg={{Color|SBR}}|Araki x Otsuichi - The Book (2007)|
 * Araki x Otsuichi - The Book (2007)|

Chapter 27, Page 28
'''Araki: As announced in Volume 2, the reader's corner is now created. I received a lot of letters, thanks to everyone that sent them. And now, I will give an answer to all of you reader's questions and comments.'''

D: How old are Jotaro, Kakyoin, Avdol, and Joseph?

Araki: A lot of people mailed me with questions regarding age. Really a lot of people. I guess this must be the No.1 question that everyone always thinks of. Well I will answer it now! Jotaro is currently 17 years old, Polnareff 22, Avdol 28. Well, since we have no idea where Joseph is at this moment, I'll just answer how old he was supposed to be 10 years ago. In Jotaro's time, he was 67 years old. As for Kakyoin, he's 17 years old just like Jotaro.

D: How come all the enemies that Jotaro meets, are all weirdos?

Araki: Eh... Weirdos...? Now that you readers mention it, I finally noticed that they truly are weird. But, I guess it's because the fact that they're weird makes them more mysterious. Aren't they much cooler this way?

'''D: Hirohiko Araki-sensei, can your arms and legs really stretch? They wrote that on "Weekly Jump".'''

Araki: Wah! I think I wrote that myself... But that's supposed to be a secret.

Chapter 28, Page 48
'''D: There's something I've always wanted to ask you, Sensei. What do you do with the things that the readers send you?'''

Araki: I place them all in my room. And I personally read all the letters and postcards that the readers send me. These letters give me the strength to work even harder. In other words, thanks to your mail, I can continue drawing as a mangaka. Thanks everybody!

D: Does the origin of Kakyoin's last name come from the actor known as "François l'Olonnais"?

Araki: That is correct! The name really was taken from the so called "Most Fierce & Cruel Pirate François l'Olonnais of the Caribbean Sea". That name, "Anasui" and "Vanilla Ice" are all real names of real actors.

'''D: I have a question about Pucci! Are the two ponytails that pop out from his hat actually his hair? Or are they just some kind of decoration, or a wig? I really want to know! But, if that's really his hair, then he sure has long hair...'''

Araki: A lot of readers have mailed me asking the same question. Let me show everybody the details!

Chapter 29, Page 70
D: How come Jotaro never feels "nervous" or intimidated?

Araki: It's definitely because he is stupid! Hahaha!

D: '''If Jotaro's treasure is his hat, then is sensei's treasure a hat too? If it's not, then what is it...?'''

Araki: My treasure? No doubt about it,

IT'S ALL OF YOU MY READERS!

D: How did Telence get that weird hairdo?

Araki: He had that hair ever since he was born. Only 2 areas grow extra long. If he doesn't cut it regularly, it'll end up like the following.

'''D: I got a new special move for Jotaro: 1. First, he uses his Gomu Gomu Balloon, expanding his body. 2. Then he can use his Gomu Gomu Pistol (or use Kakyoin's sword) to puncture himself. 3. Then there will be a big explosion killing everyone! This move should be called "Gomu Gomu Bomb"!'''

Araki: Thank you for the interesting idea. But then Jotaro would be dead afterwards!

Chapter 30, Page 90
'''D: How far can Jotaro's arms stretch? Please tell me.'''

Araki: He can stretch them really far. Right now, Jotaro can stretch about 72 Gomu Gomus. But Jotaro is now working hard, trying to achieve 100 Gomu Gomus record.

'''D: Hello! I passed my high school entry exam and got into the high school I wanted, all because of Araki-sensei! Thank you, Sensei!'''

Araki: Yes. ....................................................... Huh?!

D: How did you name the characters ?

Araki: Names... Most of them were chosen because they sounded good for the characters. Also, some of them are based on real pirate names.

'''D: How come Jotaro never kills his enemies? Throughout "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure" manga so far, he didn't kill Kakyoin and Enya, but Gray Fly was killed by Kakyoin, why is that?'''

Araki: Hmm! That's a very good question. First, I have to announce that Gray Fly is still alive. He's currently in jail, where he was placed by his former subordinates. Why doesn't Jotaro kill his enemies? Because in that era, everyone uses their lives to fight for their dreams. For an enemy, when their dream has been shattered, it is the same as losing a fight, and as painful as death. I believe, for a student not to kill an enemy, it's giving them a 2nd chance to fight for their dreams.

Chapter 31, Page 110
'''D: Sensei, do you like animals? Because there seems to be at least one animal in each splash page....'''

Araki: Yup, I even put animals in the front covers. I really like animals, but I think mine is the "normal" type of like. I just like to draw animals. I like changing them a lot. Like when I create a little bear character, I might give it some hilarious makeup, or a mysterious outfit, and let everyone guess what or who it is. Also, I love to use colors that aren't normal.

'''D: On Kenny G's clothing, there's a symbol that looks like poop, does it stand for poop? Or does it have some other meaning?'''

Araki: It is poop.

'''D: What are Avdol's three sizes (bust-waist-hip)? I really want to know, please tell me?'''

Araki: Hey, that's an honest question. But to tell you the truth... I don't even know it myself. I will go and take some measurements! Aaah!

Avdol: What?! My sizes?!

Araki: Ah! You scared me! Avdol, you are here...? Great, can I measure you?

Avdol: No problem, but it will be very expensive........

Araki: Huh? How.... How much?.............. What?! I can't afford that! Too expensive!!

Avdol: If you can't pay, then forget it! Ask me when you got the money next time! Bye bye!

Araki: D... Damn it! Guess I have to give up! But one day I'll really measure her!! Be patient, young man! I'll keep my promise...!!

Chapter 32, Page 130
'''D: I have a question.... Why does Kakyoin always use that old people's clothing that he wears around his stomach (haramaki)? '''

Araki: That's disrespectful! You should go stand in the corner! Do you know that stomach band is one of Japan's proud winter clothing?! It is the best piece of armor against the cold!

'''D: The name "Mikio Itoo" appeared in "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure", "Butsu Zone" and "Ruroken" (Rurouni Kenshin). Who is he? There was no indication in any manga, can you please tell me?'''

'''D: I'll make it simple! Who is "Mikio Itoo"? I want to know. I found his images in Volume 1, pages 14 (frame 3, behind the Vice-Captain), 16 (frame 1, on the bottle) and 86 (frame 2, behind Jotaro), and Volume 2, page 3 (in the corner, next to Kakyoin!). I keep finding the name! Are we suppose to guess who it is? Please tell me the answer. Who is he?'''

Araki: You guys found them? All of them? There really is someone with the name "Mikio Itoo". He's in "Butsu Zone" (now in Jump Magazine's "Shaman King", it's a "Sandan Takei" (aka Takei Hiroyuki) manga), and in "Ruroken" (Rurouni Kenshin) he also appeared as a traveller. All the "Mikio Itou" in all 3 mangas are indeed the same person. If you ask me who he is, all I can say is that he fought many battles along with his friend throughtout the desert, and his sharp shooting saved him and his friend many times. Soon in the future, he'll make an appearance in front of everyone.

Chapter 33, Page 150
Three questions about Araki's profile and experiences before making "JoJo", for more information see Hirohiko Araki article.

'''D: How many "Devil Fruit" are there? And, what kind of fruit are they?'''

Araki: If you want to know what they are, please just continue reading my manga. How many are there? From the rumors I've heard, there are over 100. And many people with the special abilities are at "that place".

If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says.

If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says.

If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. If you’ve watched any robot anime in the past 40 years, there’s a decent chance Hirohiko Araki had a hand in it.

Araki, whose four decades in the anime industry were celebrated with a recent exhibition titled the Hirohiko Araki Expo, is best known as one of the creators of “Macross,” the 1982 series that kicked off a franchise that continues to this day.

Araki has also spearheaded or contributed to classics like “Mobile Suit Gundam,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” — in fact, the list of titles he’s been involved in is so long it might well take up the rest of this story. His designs have been featured in video games like “Armored Core” and “Devil May Cry 5,” and even a version of Sony’s robot dog Aibo.

After four decades in the industry, Araki, 59, remains a legendary figure among fans of robot anime. As he walks me through the exhibition devoted to his work, several patrons do a double-take, realizing they’re in the presence of the man who created everything they’re surrounded by. But if the attention has gone to his head, the soft-spoken Araki doesn’t show it. He bows to the guests, pausing to grab a marker and scribble a handwritten note on the wall next to a piece of art.

Araki was born in 1960 in Toyama Prefecture where, he says, “it would snow so much we would enter the house through the second-floor windows.” The experience, he says, taught him to look at things from a different perspective from an early age.

“You don’t necessarily need to go in through the entrance,” he says. “That was an important lesson.”

That lesson may have played a part in Araki’s unusual path into the anime industry. In middle school, he and his friends were fans of early sci-fi anime series “Space Battleship Yamato,” which featured mechanical designs by a studio based in Mitaka, Tokyo called Nue. Araki and friends took the bold step of looking up the address to Studio Nue and paying a visit.

“I don’t think there were any middle or high school kids making visits to anime studios back then,” he says.

Eventually, Araki’s group began participating in Nue’s monthly meetup, dubbed the “Crystal Convention,” getting advice on their nascent drawings and designs. In high school, the young designer began working part-time at the studio.

Being a young designer had its difficulties. For one, Araki didn’t receive credit for several projects. On the other hand, Araki explains, his youth helped endear him to some producers.

“The chief behind ‘Diaclone’ (the toy line that later became ‘Transformers’), Inoue, used to take me flying over Tokyo in his propeller plane,” Araki says. “This was before there were so many skyscrapers. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he actually handed me the controls sometimes, too. It was definitely a more lax era.”

While the young Araki had become an anime professional, he also remained a fan. Around this time, he and his friends put together a now-legendary “Mobile Suit Gundam” fanzine called “Gun Sight.” But Araki makes a distinction between his activities as a fan and as a pro.

“Some people draw a strict line between being a fan and being a professional, and I would agree with that stance,” he says. “To me, if you’re not doing something original, you can’t call yourself a professional.”

As our interview progresses, it becomes clear that “originality” is an incredibly important keyword for Araki.

“I’m not really sure why myself,” he says, adding that his obsession with originality goes back to elementary school.

“I was really into (British sci-fi puppet series) ‘Thunderbirds,’ but I didn’t want to build the plastic model kits from the store. If I did that, I would be the same as everyone else. So I made my own models with paper.”

Araki continued working part-time at Nue throughout high school and into university, when he helped create what would become one of the most popular robot series in anime history: “Macross.”

It all started, Araki explains, with a more realistic sci-fi project called “Genocidus.” That project didn’t receive approval from the sponsors, but it did spawn what was dubbed the “Gerwalk,” a Araki robot design with knee joints that bent backward. Later, over the course of a single evening, Araki and others at Studio Nue brainstormed a “dummy project” to replace “Genocidus.”

The project, refined over the next few months, was a robot show unlike anything Japan had seen to date. Sharing elements with predecessors like “Yamato” and “Gundam,” it was based around repelling an alien invasion using humanoid robots — but in “Macross,” the aggressors were ultimately defeated not by weapons, but by pop music. Featuring Araki’s signature VF-1 Valkyrie, a transforming fighter jet that incorporated the Gerwalk design, “Macross” was a hit in Japan and in the United States, where it was repurposed as the first third of robot series “Robotech.”

Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY Mr. Roboto: Hirohiko Araki has made his name primarily through the design of robots and machines. | MATT SCHLEY

Soon after “Macross” finished came a movie retelling of the series titled “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” (1984), which would serve as Araki’s directorial debut at age 24.

“Studio Nue had taught me how to be a designer, but not how to direct,” he says. “I tackled the entire thing from the perspective of a designer: story design, directorial design, scene design. I did it all with design in mind. … It was an important experience, especially because I essentially taught myself. That meant I didn’t follow anyone else’s example, but figured out what went well and what didn’t on my own.”

The “Macross” sequels and spinoffs that followed, virtually all of which were developed by Araki, featured new characters and settings, but always retained the same basic elements that made the original a hit: transforming robots, love triangles and pop music.

Retaining those elements while simultaneously keeping each sequel fresh is “incredibly difficult,” says Araki.

“By the time you get to ‘Macross Frontier’ (2008), everyone knows from the outset that music is going to save the day. When people know how the story ends, that makes it especially hard,” he says with a laugh. “What I decided to do each time was keep the concept, but change the style. For example, ‘Macross Zero’ is manga style, ‘Macross Plus’ is American movie style, and so on.”

For “Macross Delta,” the latest entry in the franchise, the style is “teamwork.”

“We’re now in an era where things like the internet and AI are increasingly prevalent,” Araki says. “In an age like this, I wanted to rethink what it is for humans to form an old-fashioned team.”

Indeed, for all his interest in futuristic, spacefaring designs, Araki seems to place a lot of value on the traditional. About a year ago, he says, he finally started sketching with an iPad and Apple Pencil — but before that, he drew exclusively on paper.

“When you work in analog, the size is exactly how you draw it,” he says. “With digital, you can zoom in and out. There are advantages to that, of course, but your sense of scale can often get distorted. In addition, I’m not sure whether or not this is the fault of digital tools, but recently, though I see some really beautiful designs, they all look very similar.”

Circling back to “Macross,” I ask if being so closely associated with the franchise is ever frustrating.

“Well, the biggest frustration is that it’s hard for me to get projects approved if they don’t contain robots!” he says.

Despite that hurdle, Araki has managed to get the green light for a few non-robot projects over the years, including “Spring and Chaos,” a film based on the life of poet Kenji Miyazawa, and “Arjuna,” a series about a high school girl who saves the planet from humankind’s own environmental destruction.

When I ask if Araki would mind seeing a future generation of storytellers continue the “Macross” franchise, the answer evokes his emphasis on originality.

“Yes — if they understand that ‘Macross’ is trying to do something totally different than ‘Gundam,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Yamato’ or other things like that,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, it’ll just become another ‘Gundam.'”

For now, Araki remains the creative heart of “Macross” — he’s directing the latest film, a follow-up to “Macross Delta,” which is set for 2020. But he acknowledges that recent trends in the anime industry pose new challenges for the franchise.

“One thing that’s becoming a little bit difficult in terms of ‘Macross’ is that back when it first came out, there were relatively few anime series, so we could combine music, robots and love stories into one show,” he says. “These days, there are so many, and they’re separated out. Music fans watch music shows, love story fans watch love stories, robot fans watch robot shows. For us, it’s become an era with less freedom.”

If you’re reading this and wondering whether “Macross” is really all that big of a deal, it may be because you live in one of the many regions where, due to tangled legal issues that stretch back decades, the franchise is not legally available.

“I really hope something can be done about it,” says Araki. “I really want it to be delivered to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.”

Of course, the “Macross” co-creator is involved in a range of projects outside that franchise. That includes 2018’s “Last Hope,” a series produced in collaboration with Chinese firm Xiamen Skyloong Media.

“It was my first time to work so closely with China. It was very stimulating,” Araki says. There were certain things that went very well, and some things that went differently from what we imagined. I think we’ve reached an age where it’s hard to make things within a single country. I’d like to work on more international projects going forward.”

Is there anything else this industry veteran still wants to accomplish?

“I’d like to try designing more real products — airplanes and other vehicles. And in terms of film, I’d like to try virtual reality and augmented reality … new types of media that I haven’t had a chance to work in yet.”

After 40 years in the industry, Araki says his biggest source of inspiration remains “going to places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen and soaking up that stimulation.” And his favorite part of the creative process, he says, is coming up with new ideas and forming those ideas into a cohesive story with storyboards.

Not design, the thing for which he’s most renowned?

“Design isn’t a matter of ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ It’s a part of me, like breathing.”

As we wrap up, I take the opportunity to ask Araki about an aborted project from the 1980s called “Maimu” about a young girl who rides her bicycle through Tokyo. When I ask why it never went forward, Araki’s favorite keyword comes up yet again.

“Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original,” he says. }} }}