Kenji Okafor

Kenji Okafor's introduction to anime was a Saturday morning accident. He was nine, flipping channels looking for cartoons in Chicago, and landed on the Toonami block mid-episode of *Mobile Suit Gundam Wing* in 1999. The image of a giant humanoid machine moving with weight and intention through space — not the weightless, rubbery physics of American cartoons — rearranged something in his understanding of what animation could be. He has been chasing that feeling across mecha and science fiction anime ever since.

He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which turned out to be less useful for his career than the three hundred hours he spent arguing about *Evangelion* on forums during his sophomore year. His MyAnimeList sits at 490 entries, and his specialty is the intersection of mecha design and narrative function — how a machine's visual design communicates a pilot's psychology, a faction's ideology, or a series' thematic preoccupations. He writes at length about Yutaka Izubuchi, Hajime Katoki, and the design philosophies that separate Sunrise's Universal Century from its Alternate Universe productions.

Before Otakiva, Kenji spent six years as a contributor to the now-archived *MechaEvo* blog, and ran the English-language Twitter account @GundamDissected, which accumulated 22,000 followers before he handed it off in 2022.

His personal top five: *Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam*, *Neon Genesis Evangelion*, *Gurren Lagann*, *Macross Frontier*, and *Patlabor: The Movie*.

Based in Logan Square, Chicago. Contact: [email protected].