For executive roles Okiura made for several key figures in the movie, the film had such a high degree of drawings with no cgi to cut things down. Oshii stated something along the lines of, (and Im paraphrasing) “Okiura could have used 30,000 drawings with the use of CGI, but using traditional cels he opted for 80,000 I guess he’s just allergic to computers.” For unit director Kenji Kamiyama who’d become an important recurring director in Production IG history, on art work coming back from Ghost in the Shell Hiromasa Ogura, key animation supervisors were rotating with Ei Inoue and Shougo Furuya on assistant duty, with Hisaki Furukawa, Takashi Watabe on layout check. The chief AD’s of the film were Okiura, Toshiyuki Inoue, and newcomer Tetsuya Nishio. Nishio at this point was brand spanking new to Production IG. He previously had worked at Pierrot where he was the top regarded action animator on Yu Yu Hakusho. Kazuchika Kise served as the film’s weapon designer, and Tadashi Hiramatsu was in charge of vehicles.

As for key animators, there was a bout of luck acquiring three Ghibli one being Shinji Otsuka, who’d be in a few IG and Madhouse productions for the next several years, and Toshio Kawaguchi, both hailing from the TMS division way back on Akira, and a younger one being Hiroshi Shimizu. Yasunori Miyazawa a former Moomin animator was brought on who would start to work on bigger features, Takeshi Honda, Masahiro Ando, Hirofumi Suzuki, Tensai Okamura, future Bones animator Yoshiyuki Ito, Masashi Ishihama, and an animator who stands out most is Yoh Yoshinari. Yoshinari’s explosions are incredibly different from the other animators like Inoue, but retain a sense of the Iso-school of thought that Inoue employs. The entire movie is driven by these animators and they unequivocally follow Okiura’s ethos of realism through and through.

The highlight of KA has to immediately go to Inoue at the beginning. He is managing so many crowd cuts that it is unbelievable it was a near solo animation at the start, thankfully Miyazawa was able to support

Okiura himself animated the last scene of the movie, pretty much completely redrawing over everything, making it his animation

Okiura 0:39-1:21
This is essential Okiura, he doesn’t hesitate trying to get the full breadth of motion here, and I love how by the end all of that movement goes away. Fun fact the character playing the girl in the original Japanese dub, was Okiura’s wife.

Interview with Oshii, Okiura, Ogura, and composer Hajime Mizoguchi. Okiura was 33-34 years old at the time of this interview. It is super rare to see such a high level animator speak. We don’t have any footage of Kanada talking, or Inoue so vids like this are important at archiving the personality of an animator and seeing how that translates into their work, Okiura seems very stern and a bit grey.

Some tidbits I found interesting. Okiura thinks animation is more harder than directing, he had to go to his father for advice on the film, he talks about seeing Patlabor 1 and hating animation fan reactions to it, saying he’d “shoot them”. Oshii says the “Showa Era” (1955-1965) informed a lot of his work, and that back in the day there was more to fight for.

Right after Jin-Roh Okiura got back to being a normal animator. He did a split second cut on Escawflowne and a longer one on Blood: The Last Vampire the ground slide cut into the doors is really well captured with Okiura doing a complete body rotation on 1’s, all the while managing dozens of background characters.

Okiura then was hired as a KA on a lengthy scene on Rintaro’s Metropolis

Written by Katsuhiro Otomo, Produced by Masao Muruyama and ADed by Yasuhiro Nakura, along with Steamboy (which would release 3 years later) the film was one of the final holdouts of the 80s era heavy hitter directors to make their mark again, and this film shows incredible results. Based on Osamu Tezuka’s manga which incorporates elements of Fritz Lang’s story of the same name, the movie is a dingy and maximal approach on the material. Okiura was part of the character acting division where he was dealing with animators like Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Yoshinori Kanada, Shinji Hashimoto, Manabu Ohashi, and Kitaro Kousaka. You know? LEGENDS! Okiura dashed any doubt that his cut wouldn’t be memorable as its easily the strongest scene in the movie. In this scene Kenichi (a human boy) and Tima (an robot) flee from a violent Rock, a member of the anti-robot unit called the Marduks. Okiura’s crowd control in this scene is absolutely insane, the first couple of cuts have Tima swaying unnaturally back and fourth as she barely knows how to run. Okiura is doing a heavy degree of 1s in this scene as nearly every single frame is concise as always. The god’s eye shot, and shots of the city have a dizzying degree of layouts. Once the two fall into the tunnel Okiura has the the shadows of the sewer panels from above shade the two as they come up and break a set of stairs. It is perplexing how Okiura is able to keep up the smooth animation whilst having to deal with the harsh shadow casting as they move. There is so much attention done as they fall down the stairs and not to far after impressive junky debris, closing out a hell of a scene. He does a fifty second scene not too long after. There are nice little details with Tima imitating Kenichi, and even Okiura making a scene of Tima shaking a radio look compelling. Even with these weird Otomo proportions, Okiura still tries to make his characters have articulate human movement and expression.

The same year Okiura was hired onto Cowboy Bebop: The Movie

Director Shinichiro Watanabe had wanted an intro setting of a cultural melting pot of the future, with realistic faces of differing ethnicities, and the everyday portrait sized glimpses of an unnamed city(ies). He established a crew to visit several locations, and ultimately left the direction of the opening titles in the hands of Hiroyuki Okiura

Okiura start-1:02, Nishio 1:03-1:05, 1:08-10, 1:21-22, rest is Okiura
Once again Okiura astonishes. The varying degrees of personalities in this opening is so filled to the brim with life, that it doesn’t even represent the dark and futuristic world the show normally depicts. This piece merely feels like self-contained encapsulation of American street life, a-la New York or LA, where so many cultures thrive and coexist. The only thing breaking up the immersion is Spike at the end, where Okiura masterfully captures his character without him even gesturing or speaking. Nishio was involved in a few cuts, and his involvement feels like Okiura was testing his skill to see if he could get on his level.

The next couple of years Okiura was merely on KA duty and AD working on a secret project. He’d reappear on animation doing a scene on Episode 8 of Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent. An insane assembly of talents as episode director Satoru Utsunomiya had made an episode separate from the rest of the show’s characters just to show off his designs, bringing in legions like Toshiyuki Inoue, Norio Matsumoto, Tetsuya Nishio, Takeshi Honda, and Kouichi Arai. Okiura tackled a scene that apparently none of the other animators wanted to handle. Probably the cut from the episode most people remember, it is disturbing to think about every time the viewer rewatches. Okiura is noticeably different in these cuts as he’s working on mostly 3s, and occasionally 2s.

On Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, the Three Wolves of IG made their debut as a team

corny English trailer

Kise, Okiura, and Nishio totally dominated Oshii’s incredibly polarizing sequel. This movie is not the first. It doesn’t define anime, it doesn’t blow your mind, or do something that changes the game, all the movie wants to do is let you think. Its a spiritual-foe-philosophical leaning movie that takes its time with the viewer, its not for everyone. Most of the original crew is back Oshii on writing and direction, composer Kenji Kawaii* returned, Okiura on character designs with Nishio being a secondary designer (he did the dolls), and the only new edition is art director Shuichi Hirata. That art director change is significant as it marks a film almost entirely decorated in 3D backgrounds. CGI backgrounds can be a little infuriating for an anime watcher, but it gives the layout artists so little to worry about in a scene and also allows for collaboration between the CG and 2D departments, and while this film didn’t start that at the time, it certainly did it the best.

Once again the movie has the usuals Okiura, Nishio, and Kise all on animation duty. Toshiyuki Inoue, Toyoaki Emura, Kouichi Arai, and Atsushi Takeuchi are the among the returning staff. With new members including Satoru Utsunomiya, Shinya Ohira, Shinji Hashimoto, Takeshi Honda, Tadashi Hiramatsu, Kyoji Asano, Hidetsugu Ito, Yoshiyuki Ito, Masahito Yamashita, Ghibli animators Masashi Ando and Kenichi Konishi, and Nobutake Ito are all new.

The opening scene of the film is a complete solo animated sequence by Kise. While Kise is pretty liberal for an animator, his art style is incredibly gratifying as he knows these designs through and through.

The earlier portions of the film are handled by a number of staff with some animation divided up Hiramatsu, Ito, and Nishio handling the Yakuza scenes sakugabooru.com/post/show/106483 sakugabooru.com/post/show/106485\. In fact Nishio handles a good portion of this early section of the movie even leading to the store hack scene.

Weird usage of cgi cans and bottles tossed around.

A cute and moment of levity in the film comes from Toshiyuki Inoue. Unlike on the last film where he was mostly an action and effects animator its nice to him touch a scene that is a great study into how to feed your dog.

The middle portion of the film very dominated by CGI,

just after this scene Kise was left in charge of the nightmare world of Kim, a hacker playing with reality.

Then comes the final stretch of the film where most of the animators put on a show

Okiura himself had done a scene earlier in the film, doing some nice weighty character acting, but its his cut at the end that is the true show stopper.

Full scene the feeling of weight and motion Okiura is able to convey in every cut is overwhelming. In such a slow paced film with a lot of harrowing held shots, Okiura’s animation stands out so much against his peers. That final shot of the Major falling is so peak

Right after Innocence ended, Okiura was just a simple KA man yet again. He joined Kise the next year on xxxHolic: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A part of the famous Clamp universe, Production IG ventured into the area of the macabre on this movie, which hadn’t yet been explored yet with so many of their film’s and shows having a sci-fi adjacent leaning. Okiura was placed on the battle scene at the end where the main heroes have to fight the villain of the movie called the Collector.

Shinya Ohira and an unknown animator take up the rabbit fight while Okiura animates Ichihara encountering the Collector from 0:35-1:16. Pay close attention to just how good the hair animation is in this scene. Okiura is dead set on making The Collector looked shocked as ever that she’s resisting attacks.

Kise had really corrected Okiura’s scene, with his initial drawings being somewhat too expressive.


Yellow is Kise’s correction

Okiura also did a very different comedic scene from earlier in the film

The next year Okiura worked on two episodes of Immortal Grand Prix or IGPX

Okiura’s work on Episode 1 is some of his best.

Just look in awe of how much control Okiura has over realistic movement, great fabric animation, and subtleties in body language. WAY better quality. We also get to see Okiura do more comedic character acting in this scene, which isn’t very usual of him. The second episode he did also had remarkable KA

Okiura then did just one cut on Paprika. It’s such a shame Okiura couldn’t work on more Satoshi Kon film’s with his commitments at IG ruining his chances, this scene from the film is just another insane display of size, with a large heaving body looking like a kaiju over the city.

The next five years Okiura was scrapping together his feature film debut, eventually getting a release in 2011 at Toronto International Film Festival, A Letter to Momo

From one of the creators of the 1995 cyberpunk classic Ghost in the Shell, comes a lighthearted Ghibli adjacent flick. Directed, written, storyboarded, and animated by Hiroyuki Okiura. This film took a long time to make as it was the conception of script he had put together over seven years. Okiura needed a reliable team he could assemble to make the movie work, firstly Masashi Ando on character designs. Ando had already been a wunderkind all the way back in the 90s getting his first AD job on a Hayao Miyazaki music video, and he progressed further from there. His designs are Ghibli coated, but with Okiura’s direction takes on a much more intensely realistic flair. This was also the case with Ando on Chief Animation Direction with Akira Honma Ei Inoue, and Takeshi Honda being secondary supervisors.

The KA staff had Okiura’s friends all joining him to help. Toshiyuki Inoue is the most dominant animator doing hundreds of cuts, with Honma, Shinji Suetomi, and Honda coming behind him. Others included Kouichi Arai, Hideki Hamasu, Tetsuya Nishio, Shinya Ohira Atsushi Takeuchi, Hiroyuki Morita, Kazuchika Kise, Hiroyuki Aoyama, Katsuya Yamada, Yoh Yoshinari, and Hiroshi Shimizu helping. Inoue personally brought on a bulk of newer animators like Honma and Kiyotaka Oshiyama. 4C animators Tatsuzou Nishita and Ayako Hata showed up. The movie also introduced a lot of the younger or newer animators at Production IG to more standard drama affair movies including Takuya Saito, and Arifumi Imai. Also former Gainax animator Chikashi Kubota was present, as well as freelancer Tomohiro Shinoda.

This film is all over the place with Okiura’s animation direction. There is much attention to voluminous animation brought to life especially by Inoue his cuts are invaluable. The two closest to Okiura and Inoue of course are Nishio and Honda, who both do astounding cuts. The only exemption from Okiura and Ando’s thumb was Shinya Ohira. Ohira’s warped and distorted style is always out of sorts with whatever he’s working on but given the labor and darkly enchanting nature of his animation he is usually given a pass in every instance, even on a super realistic film like Momo it’s no different.

Without giving too much of the story away, its a moving and simple narrative, and while it doesn’t warrant a seven year laborious approach, Okiura should be really proud of it, and he should direct more.

Okiura would then be recruited by the Studio 4C staff to assist with a DLC of Asura’s Wrath

Okiura 0:14-0:34, fantastic weighty movement with a subtle rotation on the face

While Momo was being developed the team agreed they would also take part on Hideaki Anno’s third installment of the Rebuild of Evangelion franchise

Takeshi Honda’s sweeping tour de force, this film had some of the highest quality of animation across the Rebuild franchise. Since Honda had already raised the bar on Momo it was only right for him to bring over a good chunk of animators from that movie. Okiura, Inoue, Nishio, Honma, Shinoda, Takeuchi, Ando, were all brought over to 3.0. Inoue, Nishio, Takeuchi, and Shinoda all handled action while Ando, Honma, and Okiura were on character duties. This gave way to Okiura’s scene, which was Kaworu’s death scene.

Okiura 0:25 to end full scene
A scene that etches itself into your brain, and has also been memed to death. Okiura is a goddamn legend, he is able to transform these really essential and powerful boards by Anno and company, and make it pretty much his own. In between the tastefully dramatic cuts of Shinji, is the Eva doing these grand stabbing motions unto itself (Okiura’s first mecha animation in 12 years), and I love how split second the cuts of blood aren’t interrupted by Kaworu’s final monologue.

Then we get that final, horrifying shot

After Evangelion Okiura did more solo key animation ventures first popping up on Kise’s directorial debut Ghost in the Shell: Arise a prequel to the original. He animated a fight between Mokoto and a heavily modified hacker named Raizo

Okiura 1:28-1:58
His first time in a while doing a fight scene, its hard to tell if Okiura’s animation is too weighty to keep up with the pace of the scene, or its too good. Some of Mokoto’s facial expressions as she’s struggling to hold down Raizo are really funny, you can really see how Okiura likes to apply the laws of facial squinting to an anime character and it looks so bizarre.

The next year Okiura got his very first work at Ghibli working on When Marnie Was There

Brought on by AD Masashi Ando, Okiura’s first scene stands out completely from the rest of the Ghibli animators, as his studied scientific Production IG approach to realism contrasts heavily with their more soft and contemplative take on the movement

Okiura then worked on two shorts for the animator expo arranged by Hideaki Anno. The first was Mahiro Maeda’s and Takeshi Honda’s Nishi Ogikubo where he animated scenes alongside Inoue, Ohira, Hashimoto Honda, and Honma.

Okiura 4:06-4:41, the scene after a combo of Inoue and Okiura, 4:57 is definitely him with the giant man.

The second would be Okiura’s original, Robot on the Road

A weird and perverted glimpse into a h**** robot, and that’s it. If you enjoy funny silly perv scenes in anime, this is the short for you. The animation makes it better right? Okiura handled the designs of the short, with his flat oeuvre


Okiura’s scenes are amazing. Judging from outside of the story he’s technically proficient at drawing female anatomy sakugabooru.com/post/show/44801\. Other animators like Honda, and Akihiko Yamashita also do a great job portraying that. Yamashita’s scene was heavily corrected by Okiura, as well as other animators as evidenced by the production sheets.

Okiura would return to another big movie next year to work on Your Name

Another case of Masashi Ando bringing Okiura on. He was responsible for the running scene near the end where Mitsuha is running for her life to warn her father who is the town mayor of the impending asteroid. I’ve seen this scene get a fair bit of criticism with the way Mitsuha is running, her flailing arms are a bit off putting, and her fall is a bit overdramatic. Those opinions are completely valid, but she had been running nonstop and your body would start to give way at that point. It’s a phenomenal scene though, as I particularly find the slow mo cut really inspiring.

Next year Okiura was asked to be apart of the legacy animators team joined by Kouichi Arai, Shinya Ohira, Shinji Hashimoto, and Tatsuyuki Tanaka on Blade Runner 2022: Black Out

Okiura 9:23-9:54
A quick 30 second action scene, unlike his Arise cut Okiura feels much more fast paced here as he lets his movement guide the gun shots, while he can then get out some insane choreography. He looks practically untouched by any AD.

After a few years of side quests, Okiura returned to the Gundam franchise after 27 years on Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash released in 2021

Directed by Shukou Murase and partially storyboarded Shinichiro Watanabe who he had previously worked with on Black Out, this film is a stunning new entry into the Gundam franchise. It’s surprising that not many of staff are vetted, as Murase makes up one of the only older animators on the film with the exception being Sunrise legend Hirotoshi Takaya and Okiura himself. Okiura was in charge of the underwater sequence after an epically botched battle with the Penelope Gundam being defeated. Its a slow scene as Lane knew he lost. Once again there is always fantastic volumetric animation by Okiura through and through, my only complaint is that the scene is painfully dark and its hard to make out Okiura's great animation with such dimly lit compositing

After Hathaway wrapped, the team took some venture between the development of the next films to work on a few episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam The Witch From Mercury

The team was asked to join Episode 11, where Okiura does a great hallway scene, and his first bit of tv animation in 11 years.

Okiura 0:09-0:30
Even in zero gravity Okiura is a beast. He also did more zero gravity scenes in Episode 23, and on a Reconguista in G film which was being developed around the same time.

Presently Okiura has only been announced as a storyboard artist for the up and coming Pluto anime, directed by Toshio Kawaguchi, and the debut anime for Studio M2

It isn’t known if he’s animating or doing layouts.