Range Murata is an illustrator and character designer with substantial crossover into Western book and album cover work. His most-cited anime contribution is character design for Last Exile (2003) and the Blue Submarine No. 6 OVA (1998). Outside anime, his illustration work has been collected in the Robot and Futurhythm art-book series.
Career
Murata's earliest commercial illustration work was in the late 1980s and early 1990s for video-game packaging and fashion illustration. His Anime work is concentrated at GONZO in the late 1990s and early 2000s. His Robot art anthology, edited together with several other illustrators between 2004 and 2010, gave him an international gallery and book audience separate from anime.
Style
- Clean digital line over flat saturated colour blocks.
- Frequent industrial-design framing — characters posed alongside or inside machinery.
- Strong fashion-illustration influence: garments and accessories drawn with attention proportional to figure.
- Use of art-deco and 1930s-poster compositional structure.