Mamoru Hosoda and Takayuki Hirao, Pompo the Cinephile and One Piece Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island: two of the most brilliant anime filmmakers used their personal misfortunes to fuel very entertaining movies, processing their darker feelings through lively animation.
Toshimasa Ishii’s direction on 86: Eighty Six elevated a war drama with a keen political outlook, but despite his team’s many successes, they always faced an uphill battle because mismanagement from above dealt them an unfair hand. This is the reality even for anime’s most brilliant directors.
Creators tend to have their range of expression limited when working on big franchises, and that’s precisely why Fate/Grand Order – Divine Realm of the Round Table: Camelot is such an interesting case. This is how a young team amidst a huge mess challenged anime production standards to create something spectacular.
Anime’s production schedules, the wellbeing of its creators, and the quality of their work are deeply interconnected. It’s a complex balance fraught with misunderstandings, and even lies by exploitative companies protecting the marketability of their products.
Sonny Boy is an anomaly in commercial media, let alone as a TV anime: a fascinating creator given a blank cheque that he cashed in to explore his philosophical views, mixing cultural touchstones and personal musings into a unique sci-fi story, and tweaking animation production norms to illustrate a singular worldview with unmatched cohesion.
The upcoming Stone Ocean adaptation marks the return of one of the most brilliant Jojo directors, so there has been no better time for a long retrospective of the show’s production, with a special emphasis on the directorial team that truly makes it a bizarre adventure.
SK8 The Infinity and Wonder Egg Priority are two original passion projects, both also being high-profile productions that have been in the works for a long time. Despite being exactly what anime needs on paper, they have crashed to the point where only extreme crunch might allow them to make it to the goal by the intended date. Understanding their distinct issues will help you grasp the nuance of TV anime’s structural problems.
Tomomi Mochizuki’s seamless, all-encompassing approach to animated storytelling made him one of anime’s most brilliant directors in the 80s and 90s, setting him on a path he’s still walking through nowadays. Time for a primer on this terrific yet overlooked director!
Ojamajo Doremi became a formative experience for a whole generation. An impossibly daring team with a perfect overlap of young and veteran talent at Toei accompanied kids across topics no other anime would tackle with such maturity. 20 years later, they still do.
Studio Ufotable recently hit their 20th anniversary, which they celebrated with their most successful title to date. Their history up till this point has been marked by consistent ideology, but they’ve still gone through very distinct eras—including some of the craziest experimentation seen in commercial Japanese animation. Theirs is a tale of wild but meticulous growth.