Uru in Blue

Uru in Blue (Japanese: 蒼きウル, Hepburn: Aoki Uru), also known as Blue Uru, is a cancelled Japanese animated science fiction film project by Gainax intended as a sequel to their 1987 film Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise. Aoki Uru was originally planned to be directed by Hideaki Anno and scripted by Hiroyuki Yamaga, with Yoshiyuki Sadamoto serving as its chief animation director and character designer. During 1992–93, the Aoki Uru creative team produced a complete storyboard, a partial script, and a large collection of designs and pre-production art for the film; however, the project had been initiated without a secured budget, and its development occurred within a period of personal, financial, and managerial crises at Gainax that contributed to the indefinite suspension of work on Aoki Uru in July 1993.

Aoki Uru co-producer Yasuhiro Takeda has argued that the themes and circumstances surrounding the film project influenced the creation of Anno's TV anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, the planning for which began in the same month that Aoki Uru was put on hold. In the years following 1993, Gainax has made occasional announcements regarding a revival of the Aoki Uru concept, this time to be directed by Yamaga, with Sadamoto remaining attached to the project, including a multimedia proposal in the late 1990s, and the formal announcement of an English name for the film, Uru in Blue, at the 2013 Tokyo Anime Fair. In 2018, the Uru in Blue project was transferred from Gainax to Gaina, a different corporate entity and subsidiary of the Kinoshita Group, with the aim of a worldwide release of the film in 2022; an essay published at the end of 2022 described Yamaga as currently working on the project. In 2025 as part of the bankruptcy proceedings for Gainax the rights along with Gunbuster 3 and There's a Reason Behind Yawning were transferred to Studio Khara, killing all three projects.

Aoki Uru, a film proposal envisioned as a sequel to Royal Space Force, was first developed during a difficult period of transition for Gainax between 1991's Otaku no Video and the debut of Neon Genesis Evangelion in 1995; Hideaki Anno described this time in his life as being that of "a broken man who could do nothing for four years; a man who ran away for four years, one who was simply not dead." Although original company president Toshio Okada's involvement with his studio's creators stretched back more than a decade, as co-founder of both Gainax and its associated merchandising company General Products, as well as having personally provided the startup funding for Gainax predecessor Daicon Film, Yasuhiro Takeda described him as by 1991 having become a "hindrance" to Gainax creating "new and better anime." Okada had suggested that Gainax stop making anime in favor of its profitable PC games, whereas Takami Akai argued that it was Gainax's involvement with anime that gave it its foothold in the gaming industry. Takeda related an occurrence where Hiroyuki Yamaga had stormed out of a planning session on the studio's future after Okada arrived at the meeting to announce he would not resign, saying, "I can't even talk with him in the same room."

In a 1995 interview, Okada recalled having discussed with Yamaga a different sequel concept from Aoki Uru while attending the 1987 Star Quest event in Los Angeles; the idea involved a starship from the world of Royal Space Force—indicated by Okada to be in the Alpha Centauri system—that makes a journey to present-day Earth 100 years after the events of the first film. Gainax's next main anime projects, however, were Gunbuster (1988–89), Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990–91), and Otaku no Video (1991); storyboarding work on the Aoki Uru concept did not commence until March 1992, the same month Okada, under continuing internal pressure, departed Gainax. Yamaga replaced Okada in his previous role within Gainax's co-presidency, now to be exercised between Yamaga and Takeshi Sawamura; in his memoir, Takeda characterized Yamaga's position as being the public face of the studio, while actual day-to-day operations were run by Sawamura, with final approval of projects controlled by Akai, whose Princess Maker had proved a major source of income for the company. Takeda noted the leadership conflict during this period continued even after Okada's departure, but now between Sawamura and Akai; Akai himself would resign in September 1994, a little over a year before the debut of Evangelion, although he would return to Gainax's board of directors in 2001.

Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, whose role on Aoki Uru was to be both character designer and chief animation director, commented that the 1992 origins of the sequel project followed the collapse of plans for Olympia, an anime Takeda describes as a "phantom project" for which Akai was the main creator, with Hideaki Anno slated as director. Yamaga felt that the difficulties the staff had found in drawing together around Olympia necessitated a return to the world of the original project for which the studio had been founded, in order to rediscover in it the qualities they wished to carry forward into a new generation of Gainax anime. Aoki Uru was to be set 50 years after Royal Space Force, on the reasoning that avoiding recurring characters or storylines from the original film would make the pitch easier for investors to understand. In a description by Sadamoto of the plot published in 1993, "Uru" was to be the name of the anime's protagonist, a former military pilot who had abandoned the armed forces and gone into hiding. Once the lover of a princess of Honnêamise's royal family, her abduction leads him to join a rescue team of four other elite pilots, each equipped with VTOL fighter jets and with their own individual reasons for taking on the mission. Sadamoto related that the anime would attempt to emphasize a visual experience of speed and intense aerial action scenes.

Aoki Uru was to be directed by Anno and written by Yamaga, who had completed the first of the planned four acts in the script; its primary mecha designs were drawn by Shirow Masamune, creator of Ghost in the Shell, and Kazutaka Miyatake of Studio Nue; although well known for his work on Macross, Miyatake had also designed several of the space battleships in Gunbuster. Aoki Uru was to use the same team of art directors as Gunbuster, Masanori Kikuchi and Hiroshi Sasaki; the later Aoki Uru Frozen Designs Collection contained a listing of staff who had been confirmed to work on Aoki Uru as of the end of 1992, including Kazuya Tsurumaki and Takeshi Honda as animation directors working under Sadamoto, while Aoki Uru's four technical directors included two of the three assistant directors of Royal Space Force (Shoichi Masuo and Shinji Higuchi), Otaku no Video director Takeshi Mori, and manga artist and illustrator Kenji Tsuruta, who would later make the character designs for Yamaga's 2002 Gainax TV series Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. The task of drawing settei (design models) to guide the animators was to be assigned to Satoshi Kon, whose first work in the anime industry had been two years before as a background designer on 1991's Roujin-Z, directed by Royal Space Force veteran Hiroyuki Kitakubo; Kon had also served as background and layout artist on Mamoru Oshii's 1993 Patlabor 2. Following Patlabor 2, Kon had been sketching out a manga project, but to help meet his living expenses decided to join Gainax, who paid him a special retainer to reserve his services part-time to work on Aoki Uru. Kon recalled in 1999 that he had been told by those around him that he would be most unsuited to working at Gainax, but remarked that to his surprise he enjoyed working there.

The 1998 CD-ROM release of the designs from the 1992–93 Aoki Uru project affirmed Takeda's later statement that work began before the script was completed. The storyboard was created through a process that involved all the main staff going on a training retreat, where, in a series of meetings, they worked out a sequence of scenes for the entire film, from which Sadamoto then drew the complete storyboard. The exception to the process were the film's aerial action scenes, which were choreographed and then drawn for the storyboard by Anno. "Full-scale production work" on Aoki Uru was described as having begun in January 1993; by the end of the next six months Gainax had created over a thousand pieces of design art. In addition to the 338 images made for the film's storyboard, 50 pages of drawings were produced for the film's characters, 120 on its mecha, 30 on its "props" (small devices), 90 on its "art settings" (line drawings of an anime's "set designs" from which the actual background paintings are made), 21 "image boards" of concept art, and 370 "color boards," paintings representing concepts for how scenes should be colored. The CD-ROM introduction noted that the 370 color board total included two choices for each scene, one from each of Aoki Uru's two art directors, Kikuchi and Sasaki, who approached the task as a competition between themselves.

Takeda and Yamaga were listed as co-producers for Aoki Uru; however, Yamaga would later state that it was his intention to begin the project, then "hand it over to Anno to direct and Yasuhiro Takeda to produce." "I didn't know how to act, and to tell the truth, Aoki Uru had become something of a burden. I lacked motivation..." Takeda recalled. "I was just doing as I was told. Overall, I think I found producing Aoki Uru to be more of a chore than anything." The lack of progress on the project led Akai to threaten Takeda with severing "all ties with me, public and private," which led to a burst of effort toward satsfying Akai that Takeda compared to a mother and her grade school child "who'd barely finished his summer homework on the very last day of vacation." Takeda characterized a fundamental problem in that Aoki Uru was intended as a feature film on which Gainax had begun work without having yet secured the financing to actually finish it; even as they attempted to raise capital, Takeda was himself obliged to "take out a few poor man's loans" in order to cover staff salaries: "I went to I don't know how many loan sharks, and ended up securing some 8 million yen. As a result of borrowing money, however, my day-to-day existence would end up becoming rather pathetic..."