Animator Spotlight: Kazuchika Kise

All Gifs in Order
Patlabor: The Movie (1989)
Patlabor 2: The Movie (1993)
The End of Evangelion (1997)
Martian Succesor Nadesico: The Motion Picture (1998)
Sakura Taisen 4 (2002)
Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence (2004)
Tales From Earthsea (2006)
Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance (2009)
Sengoku Basara (2011)
Kuroko no Basketball (2012)
Mercedes Benz Commercial (2012)
Haikyuu!! (2014)
Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie (2015)
The Ancient Magus Bride (2018)
Fate/Grand Order Camelot Paladin Agateram (2021)
The Deer King (2021)

Happy Birthday Kazuchika Kise, Production IG’s quality control animator, and one of the longest running staff members in the studio’s timeline. While Kise isn’t exactly an amazing animator, his character design work and supervision is his where his strengths lie.

Kazuchika Kise had an interest in animation in high school drawing and animating with friends. Space Battleship Yamato he took a particular liking to. After high school, Kise enrolled enrolled into an animation arts school, but was shocked to learn how boring it was and quit shortly after. At studio Anime R around the mid 80, he would do in-between animation on Psycho Armor Govarian and then debut key animation on Captain Tsubasa.

Kise would continue to do key animation for Anime R for years. His animation during this 80s era would be particularly good, enough for him to get his first taste of animation direction on Akai Koudan Zillion, and would continue to fill that role on other projects. It wouldn’t be until Mamoru Oshii’s Patlabor: The Movie in 1989 Kise would finally strike a cord, and had an exclusive role as an AD on a big film.

(a correction he did for Patlabor, corrections are when the AD needs to keep a level of quality and correct the work of individual key animators to maintain consistency throughout an animated cut whether it be characters or effects)
Kise’s own key animation in the film would be pretty subtle, but it would sow the seeds for the genesis of his role in the position. After Patlabor, Kise would permanently join Production IG.

Kise’s animation throughout the 90s would be mostly serviceable, but some cuts would stand out more than others. Kise being a realist animator would primarily animate in the same realm of thought as a Hiroyuki Okiura though being inhibited by being an AD on a lot of IG projects he likely did not have enough time for certain cuts. Although on Patlabor 2 the superior film to the original, Kise would animate a fantastic cut of birds, being one of his specialties in the short lived and somewhat forgotten franchise.

Kise at 0:11-38 and later at 3:11-3:31

Kise would become a staple of the newly burgeoning Production I.G. Kise along with Hiroyuki Okiura, Toshiyuki Inoue, and Tetsuya Nishio would all work to become the main primary sources for some of the most amazing pieces of animation in the history of the studio. In 1995 Kise and company would work again under Oshii for Ghost in the Shell. Being the classic it is, it firmly established Production IG as an animation studio to keep an eye on in the future, and Kise’s role would be to provide the layouts, and keep an eye on the key frames as AD. Though it probably was an insane task considering the frame count courtesy of animators like Okiura and Inoue on the film, both who’s unrivaled ability to maintain photo realistic movement in characters blows people’s minds. Okiura would also serve as character designer, and Kise would help maintain the look of all characters featured.

More Kise corrections via his Art Book (original key frames could not be found)

Two years later, Kise would be personally requested to work on The End of Evangelion. Kise had served as AD on Episode 13, and 18. 18 in particular being some of the most tragic imagery on the show, and Kise could help create more of that in the movie. Kise was assigned as character animation director, and his drawings during this film can oscillate from sad stillness to depressing terror.

In 2000, Kise would serve as AD on Blood: The Last Vampire. The movie was conceived out of an idea by IG president Mitsuhisa Ishikawa who wanted a new project rather than an already existing anime or manga. Along with video game designer Katsuya Terada who was brought on due to a universality of his characters.


Kise would continue to work on the Blood franchise for a while and art made by Terada and him would be spectacular

After doing some minor work on shows and video game openings 2004 Kise would return back to some substantial key animation on Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Most of the original staff would be brought back on to work on the sequel nearly ten years later, and with new digital components that Production IG learned after Blood and a 97 Ghost video game cutscene it was finally time to resort to more advance digital animation with mixtures of cgi. Kise, Okiura, and Nishio (also known as ‘the three wolves of IG’) would helm the AD department, and all three would provide key animation. Kise would provide some of the creepiest key animation in the movie with a jittering robot begging Batou to save her

The second scene would be even more creepy with a series of mansion cuts delving into the psyche of Kim, an ex soldier turned into bizarre hacker
sakugabooru.com/data/c8195972149c6fa02c98f8a5cf6b218d.mp4
These cuts are among some of the best instances of using a looping walk cycle to create a disturbing sense of atmosphere and then by the end making reality all fall apart.

Next year Kise would be character designer for XxxHolic, a Clamp series. Kise did promotional art too, and in the previous year would work on the film Xxxholic: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The themes of the macabre and super natural would be conjured in the movie thanks to a stacked animation cast.

Kise’s corrections wouldn't be too visible, though he did correct fellow wolf Okiura, and I can’t tell if Okiura was too expressive.


Yellow is Kise’s correction (edit: now looking at it, Okiura did f*** up the lanky proportions the character has, although he probably was trying to flex his fabric animation and teeth drawings. The expression looks unrecognizable from how the character actually looks normally)

Final result

For many years Kise would provide key an AD work to several titles including: Tales from Earthsea, Solid State Society, Dennou Coil, Sky Crawlers, Evangelion 2.0, Tales of Vesperia, and A Letter To Momo. Kise would also serve as opening animator on Kuroko No Basketball and Haikyuu!! two of Production IG’s sport’s anime. But it was 2013 where Kise would get his first taste of directing on Ghost in the Shell Arise - Border 1: Ghost Pain. The first release would spur a film series, recompiled and reassembled in different versions and releases.

With an overhaul of character designs done by Kise himself he would now be overseeing all of production. Kise’s first directorial work was on Tasunwarashi, but doing four film OVA’s in the span of two years is a whole other beast entirely. Each episode of the Arise series was overseen by Kise, but a director would be assigned from one episode to the next. Naruto director Masahiko Murata would be assigned to the Border 1, layout animator from Innocence Atsushi Takeuchi would handle Border 2, Kise himself for Border 3, and Mardock Scramble director Susumu Kudou on the last installment of Border 4. Kise elaborates on the process

‘For Arise I would have 60+-minute scripts written, and then we would block it all out with storyboards, then edit it to heighten the pace. For the episode I directed, I didn’t even storyboard the parts I felt were superfluous. We wanted it to feel like we’d crammed 50 minutes of content in there’

Source: animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2017-11-06/exclusive-ghost-in-the-shell-director-roundtable/.123661 sidenote in the interview Kise mentions he hasn’t seen Innocence as of the release of that magazine being 2017

Kise left as a policy to forget his work after completing, but how do the Arise films hold up? They’re okay, nothing crazy or out of this world compared to the rest of the Ghost in The Shell series. There are some stand out sequences in the movies unfortunately diluted by some of the philosophical story beats and overtly long monologues. One thing that stands out is Kise’s character designs which stand in pretty stark contrast to Okiura’s originals.

A decision to give Kusanagi bangs was spurred from Kise seeing a girl with bangs on a train, and even when approached by manga creator Masamune Shirow who gave Kise model sheets of a young Mokoto he stated “don’t kill yourself trying to copy this” and then he went forward with it anyways.

Kise would direct the follow up the Arise series with Ghost In The Shell: The New Movie in 2015.

In this film there’s a lot to be liked. There is great action, great fusing of cgi with 2d animation, an interesting look into Major Kusanagi’s past, but the end result is similar to Arise and just ends up being somewhat mediocre. This could be due to a lackluster script, but in any case the film just didn’t hit the highs it needed to as this would be around the time the Major, Batou, and company were getting to know each other. In any case Kise can’t be knocked for the effort he put into this movie. Some of the storyboards of the young Major are nice to look at, and Kise would animate small portions of the past sequences himself.

The following years, Kise would return to serving as character designer on several shows, two major standouts would be Made In Abyss in 2017

and the two Fate/ Grand Order: Divine Realm Of The Round Table films in 2020 and 2021 respectively.

Kazuchika Kise among the three wolves of IG (Okiura, Nishio) is probably the least skilled in overall animation talent, but is one of the best in terms of keeping consistent character models throughout a production. The role of an AD or character designer can only be marred so much by overly annoying corrections, or just a bad style inconsistent with the designs from the source, and Kise has none of that. Kise is super talented in his simple and more toned down approach to designs, and never seems to hamper the quality, when in fact he is the quality. While direction has been a little rocky for him, his mentality of moving on to the next thing and forgetting the rest is admirable, and I look forward to see what he does next.

Kise recently served as supervising animation director on The Fire Hunter.

The Three Wolves all have had different takes on The Major

Okiura's original

Nishio's from his Art Book

Kise's

Yeah its obvious for most Manga. That’s why Gotoubun was special.

takumi worse than griffith

Little Bloodborne playthrough?

Probably my favorite game in the souls series

When Gherman joins the hunt

Oh okay I'll give that manga a shot for that reason alone