The remade Gall Force, Gall Force Revolution.

Despite the fact that the video subscribers had only started to receive their weekly mailed installments in September (and the laser disc enthusiasts would have to wait until the following March), the entire fourth series of LEGEND OF GALACTIC HEROES had already been animated, voiced, and completed by December. In fact, there are already discussions within Tokuma Shoten on creating a fifth (yes, fifth) series of LEGEND OF GALACTIC HEROES.
Dedicated GALACTIC HEROES fans will note that the fourth video series will end where the original novels' story ends, so the inevitable question is: "How can the story continue?" Ishiguro says the new series, if animated, would be an entirely separate story set later in the same storyline with a new cast. (As Scott half-jokingly described it, "LEGEND OF GALACTIC HEROES: THE NEXT GENERATION")
The original novelist will not directly inspire the story of this planned sequel, as he is currently writing a retelling of the SANGOKUSHI, or THE ROMANCE OF THREE KINGDOMS. (THE ROMANCE OF THREE KINGDOMS is a classical Chinese epic which argurably has had as much impact on Asian literature as Homer's ILIAD and ODYSSEY have had on European literature.) Will Tanaka's version of the classic tale ever be animated also? Ishiguro did not say it would be for certain, but...
Aside from the four LEGEND OF GALACTIC HEROES series which have all but consumed the resources of Artland in the past decade, Artland still contracts work for any number of video series or an occasional episode in a television series. Their most recent video series was GALLFORCE: THE REVOLUTION, of which Ishiguro showed a preview copy of its first episode to EX a week before its release.
When asked later, Ishiguro commented on his wish to return to the director's chair for a theatrical film. His last was 1993's LEGEND OF GALACTIC HEROES: PRELUDE OF A NEW WAR, and while he enjoys many of his past space science fiction works such as YAMATO and MACROSS, he also wishes to create in other genres with which he is not normally associated.

The night-owl workers at Artland.

By the end of the talk on GALACTIC HEROES and the viewing of GALLFORCE: THE REVOLUTION, more animators finally made their way into the studio for the long night ahead. With so much of the work being shipped offshore, the main work that remains domestic includes initial character and mecha design, key frame drawing, and cel checking. At the time of the visit, Artland was winding down from the fourth GALACTIC HEROES series and the GALLFORCE remake's first episode (and naturally, the completion parties and celebrations) and working on episodes of SABER MARIONETTE J
EX watched as Artland received a shipment of SABER MARIONETTE J cels from overseas studios to be checked for painting accuracy and fidelity. Cel checking is always a crucial concern, especially with the not-so-pristine working and shipping conditions in the countries where the animation is outsourced. (LEGEND OF GALACTIC HEROES and parts of MACROSS, for example, were 'tweened or inked in North Korea.)
Off to the side of the studio, racks of cel paint bottles are still stacked up, awaiting the need to be used for painting a key cel or touching up a bad outsourced cel. Even in a time when studios employ overseas labor and Toei Animation and Disney's studios in Japan experiment with computer-painting to slice labor costs further, cel paint racks may remain a venerable mainstay of Japanese anime studios.
At another table, an animator was penciling with painstaking accuracy new key drawings for a later SMJ episode. The individual tastes of each animator were much evident on each table with various Star Trek toys, live-action SFX characters, and crackers cartons arrayed all over. Liberal working environment (at least relative to a typical Japanese salaryman's), flexible hours, and a love of anime gives the animators reasons to endure the sleepless nights and the long monotonous stretches.
Even as EX left the studio in the early evening for other appointments, more animators were filing in. Despite these constrained times for the anime industry, there seems to be always work to be done at Artland.

[Special thanks to Takayuki Karahashi for initially contacting Artland and Scott Frazier for arranging and guiding the visit]