GhibliWorld.com is reporting that Studio Ghibli has announced on its Website that art director Kazuo Oga will release his first film as a director this summer on July 7th.  The new Ghibli film is Night of the Taneyamagahara, which is based on a play by Kenji Miyazawa, which he wrote for his students in 1924 as a 28-year-old teacher.  While it has not been officially announced, the folks at Ghibli World believe that it is likely that Oga's new film will be released as a double feature with Goro Miyazaki's Gedo Senki, an adaptation of Ursula K. Leguin's Wizard of Earthsea (see 'The Next Ghibli Film').

Although this will mark Kazuo Oga's first directorial effort, he has a wealth of experience as an art director.  Oga specialized in creating the elaborate and beautifully detailed backgrounds for such Ghibli films as My Neighbor Totoro, PomPoko, and Princess Mononoke.  While manga often eschews highly detailed backgrounds in favor of cinematic panel-to-panel action, superb background art has long been a staple of anime, lending a richness of texture and color to anime productions that has few parallels in western animation outside of the classic Disney features from the 1930s and 1940s.