The latter highlight scenes of 2013 came up on Yozakura Quartet: Hana No Uta, the famed penultimate installment of Ryo-Timo’s animator’s heaven. Hamaguchi was assigned to Episode 4 being likely brought on by fellow animators he worked with at the time like Tomohiro Kosaka and Yuuichi Nakazawa. While this is definitely the most mellow episode out of the series animation wise, Hamaguchi’s pool scene gives life to everything. Firstly great drawings



And the animation is perfection, the water is wet, and expressions and gestures feel so soulful.


This episode is best known for Juli’s strip

Fun stuff

Entering into 2014, Hamaguchi started to work more into fantasy and heavily focus on character acting. Tbf he did open the year with a fight scene on Witch Craft Works. We then get to see one of the most confident character acting scenes of Hamaguchi’s whole career up to this point on Encouragement of the Climb or Yama No Susume Season 2 Episode 13. With gracious pushing from AD Noriyuki Imaoka Hamaguchi flexes his expressiveness, and rawness through subtlety.






Even while following the character sheets some of Hamaguchi’s characteristics shine through, like clumpy hair and his toothy grins.

Next up was Fate Kaleid Liner Prisma Ilya’s second season.

kissing part Hamaguchi…….

His other minor contributions onto character acting came on Your Lie in April, contributing minor portions to the performance scenes with Hayate Nakamura on Episode 4

And did work with the baseball scenes on 6 doing some Takeuchi esque smear work.

Now we enter 2015, starting off the year strong with The Idolmaster: Cinderella Girls

With Kouno and Akai now playing the role of design works for characters, and the former also being a CAD for several episodes, the second Idolmaster A-1 Pictures show is equally performative, and glistening as the last season. Even Isao Hayashi got an episode directing credit. For Hamaguchi, this was a ripe time to get into more cute girl goodness. This is prevalent in episode 4 with Rikka’s instructional video. Just another prime example of Hamaguchi smearing the screen with his talent.

Once again look at the teeth, nearly vampiric
He was also presumed to appear on Episode 19, and look ma! no cgi or rotoscoped instrument performance.

Hamaguchi did a musical performance a few months later, animating portions on Saekano with “Cherish You”, helping out Tomoaki Takase

Hamaguchi definitely did the close up performance shots, whilst others could just be supplemental LO for whoever to finish

Months later Hamaguchi got back into action with Is it Wrong to Try and Pick up Girls in a Dungeon? or simply Dan Machi, with Bell fighting the Minotaur

Hamaguchi 0:59-1:14, solid flowy blocking on 2s, and even though his animation isn’t the weightiest, you feel the power through added camera shake and thick blood fx.

After that ordeal was done, Hamaguchi was assigned as a primary animator on Mari Okada and Tatsuyuki Nagai’s, The Anthem of the Heart

With CAD and CD by right hand man of Atsushi Nishigori, Masayoshi Tanaka this was the ripe time for Tanaka to assemble the best artists of A-1 Pictures and other artists beyond to do their thing. The man for the movie was Hamaguchi who was the top billed animator this whole film. The opening scene of the movie is a glorious showcase of run cycle animation, and cheeky acting. The emotional middle portion of the movie is where he really shines getting minute long sequences of “anime girl crying, and running away” trope. Hamaguchi was able to fully embrace more naturalistic expressions with Tanaka’s marshmallow soft designs, and playing around with frame modulation to get a calamitous performance. It was a pretty eager character study by Hamaguchi, and though by no means his greatest work it showcased his adaptability to different conditions of characters he draws.

After the melodrama of Anthem, we then get Hamaguchi veering back into comedy, solo animating an episode of Ooya san wa Shishunki. The entire ending scene of the episode is Hamaguchi doing what he does best.

Around the same time Hamaguchi, joined by Masayuki Nonaka and Hayate Nakamura, were asked by animation producer Shouta Umehara to help CAD Jun Yamazaki and director Yasuhiro Kimura on Three Leaves, Three Colors at Doga Kobo,

Hamaguchi 0:38-0:44
Kimura now a director came along way since Tsuritama, and now with a colorful palette, and fun set of characters, this was an ideal environment for Hamaguchi and company to explore. Episode 1 was a relay race of Nakamura and Hamaguchi, with the ladder handling the opening scene of the series. A full minute of uninterrupted rosy animation, Hamaguchi handles some impressive scenic layouts and one by one showing off the personalities of the characters. So much detail is poured into the scene, with the badminton court, extras running through the halls, and Futaba’s bouncy running, a typical feature of ‘Akapape’ KA.

Hirofumi Okita and Nakamura were coming close to being just as good as Hamaguchi, but he has too much soul
On Episode 8, Hamaguchi was a joint AD. That title was a formality as his KA sceneon the EP seemed relatively untouched. So much blob face at the end. And on the last episode, Okita, Nakamura, and Hamaguchi were in a scramble to outdo episode 1 with Hamaguchi once again coming out on top with 2 minutes of KA.

The coming months had Hamaguchi once again doing a significantly broad range of shows. On Episode 10 of Mob Psycho 100 Hamaguchi did some insanely zany and bulbous freak out animation, even animating impact frames, which is not something he normally adds into his character acting or action scenes.

Food Wars, Occultic Nine, and Flip Flappers were all other shows Hamaguchi contributed to this year, but one of my favorites is the 4th episode of Pokemon: Generations

Hamaguchi 3:42-3:52
Joined by a surprising amount of Shaft affiliated animators, with Ryo Imamura and Kou Yoshinari coming off of Kizumonogatari, this meeting of minds would come back to Hamaguchi later. His cut in the episode was a quick swagger driven action scene of Dragonite just tearing s*** up

2017 was a relatively un-busy year for Hamaguchi, as his cuts on Pokemon and Dragon Dentist are the only decent editions.

2018, things get switched up a bit opening the year with Darling in The Franxx

Made with a combined mixture of CloverWorks, Trigger, and A-1 Pictures producing, this was a blockbuster sized effort by director Goripon and Toshifumi Akai.
By this point most of the A-1 staff had migrated to the newly formed CloverWorks, with a new generation brewing at A-1. Megumi Kouno makes up a majority of the KA scenes throughout the series and serving as an assistant mechanical AD, with a majority of highlights done by Hayashi, Nakamura, Keisuke Kobayashi, and a brunt of the Trigger staff with Kai Karashi, Takafumi Hori, and Sushio being scene stealers. Hamaguchi came on strong with insane creature animation on Episode 1, matched with amazing smoke and his soft, dainty running animation. The former scene of the klaxosaur awakening also has insanely smooth volumetric animation.

15:48-16:14 (shots of Klaxosaur), 16:46-17:15
Hamaguchi then went on to work on Episode 3 with Kouno on some of the “lewd pilot scenes” and later followed up with distraught character acting on 5. The highlight of his character acting in the series presumably comes out in Episode 9. For almost two minutes Hamaguchi shows off the tangibility of water and people in a delicate scene with strong drawings.

During the airing of Darling, Hamaguchi also helped out his friend Kimura on Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Vento Aureo

Hamaguchi Gun cut at 0:58

Later in 2018 we got UzaMaid reuniting Hamaguchi with Jun Yamazaki. His only cut was on the first episode, delivering some interesting fish eye perspectives, and funny wobbly acting, Hamaguchi was also the animation director.

2019, and 2020 were relatively un-busy for Hamaguchi aside for some cuts on Mob Psycho 100’s second season and Sing “Yesterday”, For Me where he took on extensive emotional scenes through a majority of the show.

For 2021, Hamaguchi was hired as a primary key animator by Ryo Imamura and Kazutaka Sugiyama on Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation

One of the more popular shows of that year, the newly formed Studio Bind wasn’t planning on having such a smash hit. With Shingo Fujii and Toshiyuki Sato (two of the premium digital animators in the industry) helming the PV and ex-Shaft animator Imamura assigned as assistant CAD, the show was in great hands. While the series would originally produced at White Fox, producer Nobuhiro Oosawa was asked by the company president to form his own company with Bind. The connections Oosawa had was numerous reaching out to so many anime creatives and making the show what it is. Imamura and Hamaguchi are in the first scene of Episode 1 depicting the car crash with gorgeous compositing. Episode 3 is the first solo scene from Hamaguchi highlighting his extreme skill with effects with Roxy. Everything afterwards is subtle character cuts from him, with the exception of Dezaki’s cut on Episode 12 which lead to a week delay in production for her main scene due to “waifu wars” that eventually went over to 3 minutes of Sato. Hamaguchi’s best acting comes from Eris on 15 the tiny hand smears feel very reminiscent of Nonaka’s work.

For around a year, Hamaguchi did sudden appearances being on Pretty Boy Detective Club’s, My Dress Up Darling, Encouragement of the Climb. And other miscellaneous shows.

One of the most unexpected hit shows of 2022 that Hamaguchi would be brought on to, was Keiichiro Saito’s Bocchi the Rock!

Hamaguchi presumed 0:50-0:55
With high tier creatives like Kiyouki Rikuta aka Kerorira on CAD and CD, and Umehara on animation production, this show had some of the biggest assortment of animation talent you could find. Firstly lets talk about Kerorira and Saito, thanks to their cadre of freelancers, they were able to push themselves into flexing the s*** out of their coordination and placement of certain animators such as Yuki Ito, Myoun, Norifumi Kugai, Jin Oyama, and more. The Umehara side allowed for a combined effort of Nakamura, Nonaka, and Hamaguchi to appear on at least 1 or 2 episodes. And of course CloverWorks staff was heavily involved with Toshifumi Akai and other mainstays like Futoshi Suzuki and Isao Hayashi helping out. Between Nakamura, and Hamaguchi those two were credited the most behind Kerorira who brute forced the whole show doing KA on almost every single episode while still handling CAD priorities. Much like Three Leaves, Three Colors Hamaguchi and Nakamura were in a contest to outdo one another.

Hamaguchi was on a total of six episodes, being Umehara’s golden child, and being prime time to show off his comedic genius. On Episode 1 Hamaguchi is in peak form, doing some careful character acting under Kerorira’s direction, likely with specific reference notes attached to how to draw the instruments.

Hamaguchi start to 0:18, 0:34-0:51
Once again we get Akapape’s famous hand smears, and the shaking chibi cuts and guitar man is very cute. In fact most of the guitar man cuts are Hamaguchi.

Episode 3 is filled to the brim with Hamaguchi covering Ikuyo’s scenes. He will never turn down a maid scene. Mind you this is the Episode where the entire first half of the episode was solo KA’d by Nakamura.

Episode 4 has Hamaguchi’s most famous cut of the whole show, with Bocchi putting herself in the position of an extrovert

Whole scene Hamaguchi, full scene with family
This scene is not only great just cause of Hamaguchi, but the compositing and coloring combined with Kerorira’s boards have so much energy.

Episode 6 has Bocchi killing guitar man after a day dream. Episode 8 has a weird bar scene, 9 has a beach scene, and 11 has an adorable Ikuyo scene

This scene was originally Nonaka’s, but got cleaned up by Hamaguchi extensively

After the success of Bocchi 2023 was fairly quiet for Hamaguchi until the fall season, when Hamaguchi joined Hakuyu Go, and Itsuki Tsuchigami’s legion of 60 plus key animators on Episode 17 on Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2.
Hamaguchi and Nakamura were a pretty unprecedented guest coming on to this episode, maybe due to some extensive involvement from friends like Hironori Tanaka asking for a favor. This entire episode was completely unfinished upon release, with loads of unfinished LO left to the way side of poor production management. It wasn’t until the Blu Ray, Hamaguchi’s entire cut was finished.

Extremely unlikely he will return to the franchise

Most recently Hamaguchi worked on an After the Rain MV called Tokyo Clone, with Shun Miyakawa on direction

Hamaguchi sick pencil animation at 1:27-1:35

Unknown what’s in store for Hamaguchi, but a very recently announced project involving Umehara production called The Elusive Samurai looks like Nonaka, Nakamura, and company will no doubt be involved.

super unfinished trailer lol, the show comes out in Fall

Well that’s Akapape aka Akira Hamaguchi. If you’re currently into CloverWorks animes, or go through A-1 Pictures and Doga Kobo's backlogs he’s a name you’ll likely see under Umehara’s duress and on his own is a powerful freelancer. Much like Toshiyuki Sato, you’ll never find another animator with such a diverse repertoire of scenes, from action to comedy, Hamaguchi has simply done it all. While in his early days he seemed like a disciple of Numata, Tanaka, and Kouno he quickly started taking form of his own showcasing incredibly flow and bountiful animation all with that key ‘wobble’ the aforementioned animators had mastered. The adaptability of Hamaguchi’s ouvre is the defining aspect of his work, he seems to have nearly zero limitations as an animator, and shows supreme confidence and swagger in any scene he’s in. An underrated legend.

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