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FÖZZIE

The animation studio responsible for the production of the popular Japanese ElamenSTAR animated series. FÖZZIE was founded by animator Ichiban Sato in 1994 and after creating a series of animation shorts for a prominent Japanese ad agency, FÖZZIE began work on ElamenSTAR for Realmworlds Publishing.

Distributed by Big East and broadcast on the Japanese satellite television network WHOA-MAN, ElamenSTAR ran for five seasons and was quite popular. The appeal of the show was attributed largely to the contibutions of the enigmatic director of the series, Tomono Shuuan. Shuuan is credited with both building the studio to the height of its success and with virtually destroying it. High on the success of the series, Tomono is reported to have nearly bankrupted the studio with his reported excesses and extravagently unreasonable demands. By the end of the ElamenSTAR run in the beginning of 2001, the studio had laid off 85% of its work force and was deep in debt (reportedly to some less than reputable lenders).

After several lean years, falling back largely into to ad agency work, Sato began to rebuild his studio. Finally, funding came through for an ambitious CG ElamenSTAR movie. The film would ultimately be known as Advent ElamenSTAR, which would be released direct-to-video in late 2004 but for many fans it was too little too late.

The revenues were not what could have been hoped for from the movie, and Sato was forced to sell the studio to the Japanese branch of Multigame Corp, in their ongoing attempts to tighten their monopolistic grip on the franchise.

Soon after, Lord ElamenSTAR Q was hired and he soon became the driving force within FÖZZIE, responsible for the studios production of ElamenSTAR Shuffle, and largely running all day to day operations within the studio.