Episode 5 is rife with Imaishi AD and storyboarding. Not only does his AD work come through in spades, but the direction and visual gags in the first half are compilation worthy.





Then of course there are a lot of shots filled with Imaishi’s Kanada-esque foreshortening.

The middle half is filled with a fight between Haruko and Amarao’s agents and is all animated by Imaishi in one of his greatest sequences

Imaishi 0:18-End
Imaishi seems like he’s cheating animation in a way, as his illustrations really help carry the scene, and his jerky and weightless timing feels so unorthodox and strange. Even with the sudden bright flashes emphasizing the gunfire, you still see so much personality oozing in every second of this scene. An article from animetudes perfectly summarizes Imaishi’s impact here

“…Imaishi’s animation was not just a revival of Kanada’s animation. It was a complete reworking of it, and I venture to say, a more creative one. Indeed, it must be said that Kanada’s late work seems very repetitive and despite its undeniable power, it sometimes lacks creativity: perhaps left uninterested by the work he was adapting, Kanada often relied on motifs and techniques he had already used before. Imaishi brought some new blood and influences into this, and truly renovated the Kanada style. In that, one of the most original aspects of Neo-Kanada animation is that, especially in Imaishi’s case, it is first and foremost centered on character and action animation, in contrast with the work of the previous generation of Kanada’s followers, who focused more on mecha or effects. Because its influences are more diverse, the “Neo-Kanada” category also covers a wider range of animators: its most famous representative is Imaishi’s hyper-limited and expressive animation, but it also includes the rounder, more fluid work of people like Sushio and Yoshinari, who had less direct contact with Kanada.”

The latter half of the episode contains the long strung out battle between the trio and Medical Mechanica with Yoshinari, Imaishi, Nishio, and many others doing insane cuts sakugabooru.com/post/show/221912 sakugabooru.com/post/show/221910 sakugabooru.com/post/show/177540 sakugabooru.com/post/show/38311.

Episode 6, had some nice character acting, and was a great wrap up to the series sakugabooru.com/post/show/38183 sakugabooru.com/post/show/177528

The next three years would be pretty minor on Imaishi’s front as he’d do a ton of freelance work here and there. He’d do AD work Parappa, KA on Shaman King and another Lupin project. On Mahoromatic he did some nice long character acting and action cuts once again flexing his muscles sakugabooru.com/post/show/184584, and he’d do it only on this fourth episode. A very important episode, that welcomed the arrival of two new Gainax animators being Atsushi Nishigori, and Chikashi Kubota. Kubota is an essential Itano-ite, and Nishigori would soon become one of the best bishoujo artists of the 00s and 10s.

On Takeshi Koike’s Trava Fist Planet Koike was able to scoop up Imaishi, and Yoshinari to animate several cuts. This was Imaishi’s first exposure to Madhouse tier animation with Koike’s really warped character designs that are entirely defined by shading, and Peter Chung esque deformations sakugabooru.com/post/show/68306, sakugabooru.com/post/show/68303, sakugabooru.com/post/show/14010 though judging by these clips Koike let him go off the rails per usual.

Abenobashi had no KA involvement from Imaishi but his AD was super apparent especially on Episode 3, and 12.

Full Episodes here

Episode 12 is responsible for this joke

Imaishi did a lot of jokes for American cinema this episode sakugabooru.com/post/show/110766

2003 then had Imaishi working on a bunch of shows, Princess Yucie, Gad Guard and even Fullmetal Alchemist

In 2004, Imaishi struck a deal with Production IG to write and direct his first OVA full feature film Dead Leaves.

Perhaps the most extreme example of Imaishi’s style. Dead Leaves openly embraces Imaishi’s insanity and chaos and adds a sprinkle of Koike-isms and as a result is a wild ride, even being almost proto-Redline in a way. The story is of course involved with aliens, but I can’t give to much away as the mind numbingly weird plot is all a vehicle for insane animation. With character designs and inspiration for art direction by ImaiToonz (not an alias for Imaishi) it is a wild ride

The scripts is senselessly crude but its all a part of the joke. Its a writhing telling of anti-heroes who have to fight their way out of an oppressive force to overcome a struggle, and will set a common trend for many of Imaishi’s themes in his later works. On animation duty we once again have a combination of Gainax and Production IG crews. On Gainax, Nobutoshi Ogura, Shinji Suetomi, Keisuke Watabe, Chikashi Kubota, Yoh Yoshinari, Sushio, Yusuke Yoshigaki, and Imaishi himself. For IG there is Kyoji Asano, Minoru Ueda, Koji Komurakakata, and Fumi Morita. Now out of all the animators on the IG side none really stood out aside from Yasunori Miyazawa a former Moomin animator who had a bit of an out there and unorthodox style similar to Shinya Ohira’s but way more crude. His two minutes of animation at the end of the film are interesting sakugabooru.com/post/show/120926 sakugabooru.com/post/show/120927\. The movie even brings along some freelancers with Koike joining, Toei animator Futoshi Higadishe, freelancer Ikuo Kuwana, and for the first time ever Imaishi’s idol Masahito Yamashita joins the fray, and shows off his years of experience sakugabooru.com/post/show/120921\. All of the animators handle a majority of car chases, shootouts, and balls to the wall action and character acting.

Speaking of insanity, after Dead Leaves, Imaishi was allowed to storyboard a quick scene on Episode 8 of Samurai Champloo. A weed driven stupor, where warped wizard Masaaki Yuasa made everything trippy and bonkers

Yuasa
1:00-End
Notice how they don’t even fight

Shortly after Dead Leaves Imaishi hopped on to the OVA Re: Cutey Honey

An animated three episode OVA directed by Hideaki Anno and each episode directed by a different person, with Imaishi on the first, Naoyuki Ito on the second, and Masayuki on the last. A wonderful animated recreation of the manga originally written by Go Nagai, it is fun and quick and came out two months after a live action film as a complimentary piece. Firstly Imaishi directed the OP.

Lots of lewd and crazy fan service throughout, with typical Lupin style shootouts bright and colorful backgrounds, and Imaishi’s eye catching editing,
Imaishi episode has a lot of fun moments

Once again a skilled cast featuring Yoshinari sakugabooru.com/post/show/234661, Watabe sakugabooru.com/post/show/234656, two freelancers with Hideki Hamasu, and Hiroyuki Aoyama sakugabooru.com/post/show/234648, even Toei animator Ken Otsuka shows up sakugabooru.com/post/show/234585\. Imaishi did Honey’s transformation sakugabooru.com/post/show/234641

Imaishi made a name for himself on the fight between Honey and Black Claw

A creative charade of Kanada school animation, that goes beyond in a few ways. Yes we have a lot of the strong Kanada based posing, and spark effects but there are even more little things that Imaishi adds to make the fight look even more special. Imaishi has said that one of his inspirations were 60s animator Daizo Takeuchi where some of the more weirder deformation such as Cutie turning into a noodle at 0:13, seems inspired by Takeuchi’s more out there works.

After Cutey Honey it was time to move on to bigger things, intergalactic things on Gunbuster 2 or Diebuster

Kind of a final outcry, for character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, and one of Anno’s last contributions to Gainax (as well as a chunk of the early 90s crew), Tsurumaki is able to do this big space opera in incredibly well. Running from 2004-2006, this OVA allowed the crew to take their time and plan. This is one of the first animes where Sushio started to come into his own capitulating some of the best action scenes on the series sakugabooru.com/post/show/224482 sakugabooru.com/post/show/224510 sakugabooru.com/post/show/226145\. This was also a good time to note Atsushi Nishigori’s incredible CAD, as Episode 2 and 5 have a lot of his cute and shy expressiveness sakugabooru.com/post/show/224487\. Then of course Yoshinari had been blowing the staff out of the water making every cut look like pure art sakugabooru.com/post/show/224490\.
Imaishi managed to standout amongst the animators as his style was held against the more flow-imbued styles of animation on the series. This was true of Episode 1, with the Lightning Kick

Imaishi 1:23-1:40, 1:42-1:51



just amazing stuff, this is the only Episode where his animation was identifiable.

The next year Imaishi would join Sushio and Kubota, as the two lent their character designs and AD to Mamoru Hosoda’s One Piece Baron Omatsuri and The Secret Island

A triumphant first effort for Sushio and Kubota, proving the two’s talent. The entire final act of this movie was handled by a majority of Gainax animators as well as Toei staff. This provoking change in character design methodology was a logical step for Hosoda, as his Digimon film’s proved shadeless designs can prove for stellar animation. With a whole fleet of Gainaxing on the latter half of the film, Imaishi’s scene surprisingly doesn’t draw attention as much his usual output, but seeing him be more clerical and smooth is refreshing sakugabooru.com/post/show/180809.

After Dead Leaves success, IG had Imaishi do an 8 minute OVA called Oval x Over, one again ImaiToonz returned for character designs

This short was initially commissioned for the Indy Racing League, and goes to show him still developing a lot of techniques that came to favor him

For the next year Imaishi did a number of key animation. His animation on Paradise Kiss was a standout for it being more experimental sakugabooru.com/post/show/56201 somewhat inline with Yuasa’s style. He did a more motion oriented fight on Street Fighter sakugabooru.com/post/show/187470, and then he got to work on Gaiking at Toei sakugabooru.com/post/show/12674 this was anime was one of the last Yoshinori Kanada would touch before his sudden death in 2009.

The next show Imaishi directed would be an entire love letter to Kanada’s style and one of, if not his most successful pieces of work, I am of course talking about Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

“Believe in the me that believes in you” A labor of love into the mecha genre, Imaishi’s debut 27 episode series is essential anime. Not only is the series catapulted by phenomenal action, but its style openly embraces the fun and enduring hope of humanity that is incredibly powerful and awe-inspiring. Announced in 2006, Gainax president Hiroyuki Yamaga had stated that the series was in planning stages for a while. A story that follows Simon and his brother Kamina, on a journey to the surface world where inhuman monsters live. The goal? To fight against the evil Lordgenome and save humanity from the beast men, although the story becomes not as simple as you think. For the story Imaishi assigned Re: Cutey writer Kazuki Nakashima as Imaishi felt he was ultimately a right choice. Imaishi stated

“Regarding the pre-production for Gurren Lagann, I actually changed that around a bit once I became the director. So when I said I wasn't around during the early planning, the planning wasn't complete when I joined and that meant I could change things. In that sense, with the Getter Robo references when I joined this hadn't been part of the planning up until that point. Specifically, the Getter Robo aspects were down to the writer Kazuki Nakashima, as he wanted to refer to that.
“These references to the past were something intentionally done. Starting from Mazinger Z, Getter Robo. So the references to anime from the 70s, were down to Nakashima as he is an expert about that. For the 80s though, that was my expertise. So the mixture of both our expertise makes the basis for the series.
“The fact it is set in the desert and they all work on a big ship together was referencing Xabungle and that was my input.”

On the animation front, the new blood of Gainax was finally able to take full reigns of control for a major series. First off character designs were assigned to Atsushi Nishigori, who had only been with the studio for six years at this point. Where designers Sadamoto and Hiramatsu took on a more traditional 90s inspired bishoujo kind of look Nishigori had gone into a much softer direction. Long gone are the angular and kind of gritty demeanor, instead everything feels more rounded and warm, but maintaining a sense of that Gainax heroism

The designs of the mechas, envisioned in large part by Nakashima and Imaishi with the idea of spiral and drills, were designed by Yoh Yoshinari. Yoshinari had already done mecha designs before, assisting with some on FLCL taking his Mike Mignola influence in shading and defined shadows, and applying it here.




IMHO these are some of the best designs in mecha ever

For actual animation, once again mostly everything was about prioritizing new talent. One animator that rose to prominence after in-betweening on Diebuster was Akira Amemiya. Amemiya’s animation is Kanada stooped but more pronounced in a Masahito Yamashita or Masami Obari type of language. He has the most number of cuts on the series, and its easy to see why with his easy going and practical approach sakugabooru.com/post/show/112523 sakugabooru.com/post/show/62533 sakugabooru.com/post/show/40309\. He was also an AD for three episodes. Character animation was handled by a large number of people with Tadashi Hiramatsu being the chief standout, and others like Takashi Mukouda, Satoshi Yamaguchi, and Nishigori. Hiramatsu chiefly having some of my favorite cuts

There is then a star studded list of guest KA’s including Gosei Oda and Yoshiyuki Ito from Bones, Takeshi Morita, Tetsuya Nishio, Yasunori Miyazawa, Yoshihiko Umakoshi, Norio Matsumoto, Soichiro Matsuda, Shoujo Saeki, the new fleet of webgen animators including Ryo-Timo, Shingo Yamashita, and their chieftain Kenichi Kustuna. Kiyotaka Oshiyama, Ken Otsuka, Jun Arai, Hisashi Mori, Genichirou Abe, Akemi Hayashi, Shingo Natsume, Ryoma Ebota, Shingo Abe and many many more. The show also welcomed newcomer/freelancer Toshiyuki Sato who would become a regular on future Imaishi projects.

The real stars of the show are of course the big three, Yoshinari, Imaishi, and Sushio. Sushio firstly is able to get insane leverage out of his scenes, though I consider him the wild card because of his values in realism and effects animation he still is able to go the extra mile to get the mechas to move with Kanada infused mechanics and Yoshinari-esque effects sakugabooru.com/post/show/178752 sakugabooru.com/post/show/190000 sakugabooru.com/post/show/202852\.

As the director of the series, Imaishi had the least amount work of the three but he was able to animate upon some key scenes. The most important and saddest scene of the series comes in Kamina’s death on Episode 8 sakugabooru.com/post/show/112381\. Such a pivotal scene in the series could literally not be handled by anyone else, as his connection and understanding of the characters ran the deepest. sakugabooru.com/post/show/112654 sakugabooru.com/post/show/202853

The almighty showstopper of the three was of course Yoshinari. From the course of Evangelion all the way to Diebuster, he had truly shown what being a true savant in animation is as his understanding of the spiral powers, flow movements of the mechs, and proportionally pleasing effects I’m sure had the rest of the staff scratching their hands at the sheer number of frames he was able to make into the series.

Also until I forget Chikashi Kubota who has the only Itano-ite on the team his missile sequences were pretty essential

She wrote a novel brah

As for controversies, Gurren Lagann gets a bit of flack for its fourth episode, where Beck director Osamu Kobayashi stepped in as storyboard artist. Kobayashi has a very different style as opposed to the usual look of the actual show. The episode has been attributed to a lot of unflattering and off model shots of the characters that are really only shown in quick screen caps. The episode doesn’t have a s***ty quality just a jarring change in art style as their actually is a really good portion of character animation and great action spearheaded by Kutsuna and Hisashi Mori sakugabooru.com/post/show/164267\. Nonetheless the episode got a fairly negative reception, and animation producer Takashi Akai one of the co-founders of Gainax itself tried to clear up the change in direction on text board channels, mainly responding to criticisms and insulting them along with employee Keiko Mimori joining the s*** fest. This only made things worse as Akai said “it was like putting your face next to an anus and breathing deeply”. This ultimately left him no choice but to leave the studio he helped create, once the company became aware of what he did.

Episode 6 was also extremely provocative. Though the homages to Daicon and Gainax’s past in heavy fan service and nudity are warranted, airing the episode in a child friendly time slot was not super welcome, and so a censored version of the episode had to be made.

Dam. She put her foot into it like fr fr

After the end of the series Yamaga had the idea of retelling the story of Gurren Lagann into a movie and that lead to the release of Gurren Lagann: Childhood’s End or Gurren-Hen

poster by Yoshinari
A retelling of the first arc or pre-time skip era of the story, Imaishi was able to add subtle changes into the script to add an allotted amount of new animation mostly in action. Great new scenes by Amemiya, sakugabooru.com/post/show/191043 sakugabooru.com/post/show/191042, Mukouda sakugabooru.com/post/show/191109, Hiramatsu sakugabooru.com/post/show/191115, Watabe sakugabooru.com/post/show/191129\. And of course Yoh Yoshinari animating the mecha cut of the century with Lagann’s “Super Giga Drill Break” sakugabooru.com/post/show/191124\. The finest piece of animation ever made. The rest of the movie had added levels of compositing, and more bright and vidid colors to distinguish itself from the original series.

In-between the next film, Imaishi did some work on a more concerning piece of Gainax history on Corpse Princess a series that felt like the beginning of the end for Gainax as it did not generate nearly as much attention as Gurren Lagann to middling viewership, as it was Gainax’s first adaptation of content without a more idosyncratic director at the helm. Imaishi worked on the OP

Gurren Lagann: The Lights in the Sky are Stars or Lagann-Hen was the second installment of the film series

poster by Yoshinari
This time around Imaishi was keen on going bigger than the original finale, and with the Anti-Spirals meaning to go more balls to the wall with action. One addition that Imaishi and co were keen on was the addition of new mechas for the final battle, and Yoshinari of course was assigned this task.



The movie is just another feat of accomplishments for the big three, and others with so many highlights. Amemiya sakugabooru.com/post/show/193684, Yamaguchi sakugabooru.com/post/show/193687\. A very special and new addition would be legendary trailblazer Hironori Tanaka who manages some insane cuts in the latter half sakugabooru.com/post/show/202857\. A veteran followed suit, Ghibli adjacent and Gundam animator Kenichi Yoshida who did a lot of scenes with Nia’s mech sakugabooru.com/post/show/202859 sakugabooru.com/post/show/202860\. Of course Yoshinari is an obvious standout.