More on Murakami's new animation studio

"The company has leased a building on North Highland Avenue, to be adapted to the studio's needs. With 6,220 square feet of space on the first floor and 2,760 square feet on the second level, the facility is expected to accommodate about 30 employees, said Daniel Rappaport of Management 360, Kaikai Kiki's talent management firm in Los Angeles.

The studio's first project will be a feature-length animated film based on "Planting the Seeds," the shorts that premiered at Murakami's mid-career retrospective at MOCA, Rappaport said. It also created the Kanye West video for "Good Morning." The shorts also appeared last spring at the Brooklyn Museum's version of the exhibition and, more recently, at the 2008 CineVegas Film Festival in Las Vegas. The digitally animated works feature Kaikai and Kiki, the company's cartoon-character namesakes, traveling the world in a spaceship and learning to grow watermelons with the help of fertilizer, or "poop" as they gleefully call it."

via latimes.