The husband-and-wife creative team known as UrumaDelvi has been cranking out quirky, quasi-psychedelic illustrations, animated shorts and music videos for over 20 years. They met in design school in 1988. Deciding that their married surname, Kobayashi, was too common in Japan to be memorable, they took the names of two of the wife's early sketches — of a boy named Uruma and a girl named Delvi — as their own, and rebranded their art.
The duo started creating characters through collaborative daily doodling sessions and began uploading them to a website called The Daily Cartoon in 1995. Since then, they have created over 4,000 characters (a number they plan to submit to Guinness World Records), a Top 10 hit single and viral video about a bug that bites derrieres, a best-selling children's book series about shape-shifting spirits, a software program that enables children to animate their own drawings, a music video with Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Byrne to help the children of Tohoku — and a live-action television series about an office lady who is in fact a pudgy panda with its abdominal fur colored in the shape of a thong. Now, after a career of defying categorization by tantalizing children and adults in Japan, the couple want to make it in America.
They first visited the United States five years ago to learn about the entertainment and media businesses, stopping in Los Angeles to meet with staff at The Walt Disney Company, New York to explore American media empires, and San Francisco to dip into Silicon Valley.