After four months without news, the Kickstarter project page for Under the Dog (UTD) announced the sci-fi anime will be changing producers. Hiroaki Yusa, along with his company Creative Intelligence Arts (CIA), have departed the project; production will now be managed by the animation studio, Kinema Citrus, and headed by Kouji Morimoto.
While no specifics have been given on why CIA has left, Hiroaki Yusa said the change was made "in order to comply with certain requests from members of the UTD creative team, and to deliver an unhindered product to our backers." He further said, "We leave UTD in Jiro Ishii (original author), Muneki Ogasawara (CEO of Kinema Citrus) and Kouji Morimoto (replacement producer)'s capable hands and trust that they will carry on where we left off with such an excellent pedigree of artists to back them up every step of the way." The full press release can be found on the anime's Kickstarter page.
In an interview with Crunchyroll in September, Hiroaki Yusa stated he and CIA had spearheaded the Kickstarter funding to avoid politics and allow for creative independence from production committees whom are often averse to risk. It was further written on UTD's Kickstarter page that they hoped the crowd-funded anime would be "a wake-up call to investors and production committees." Prior to UTD, CIA successfully crowd-funded a Japanese RPG titled Project Phoenix in September 2013; the game is set to release in June of this year.
Source: Kickstarter
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