Hiroyuki Imaishi

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Hiroyuki Imaishi was born in 1971, in Tokyo. He joined studio Gainax after graduating from Tama University of Arts. Imaishi later left the studio to establish his own studio, Trigger, where he still works to this day.

Imaishi made a name for himself on Hideaki Anno's Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou. He did key animation and storyboards for several episodes, with episode 19 being a standout for its unorthodox paper cutout animation. His presence injected some stylized levity into Anno's shoujo drama.

Imaishi started as an animator heavily influenced by Masahito Yamashita and Yoshinori Kanada. He draws with a similar warping of perspective and with characters snapping into discrete poses, mixed with cartoony devices reminiscent of A Pro's work on Dokonjo Gaeru, of which Imaishi is a fan. He also tends to draw his characters enveloped in speedlines, with strongly defined eyes and eyebrows, rectangular jawlines, and gummy, gritted teeth. His cuts are willfully limited, eliminating transitions between poses and using fast looping for comedic effect.

Imaishi became one of Gainax' premier directors after Kare Kano. His directorial aesthetic is heavily informed by his animation. Elisions of graphic space become elisions of cinematic space and time.The interplay of moving and still planes, forceful use of text, and extreme variations in size are other major components of his direction. His shot compositions are usually very busy due to crunching in as much of his characters into the frame as possible, and he has no problem reducing action scenes to pure visual abstraction, like rendering clashing figures as a few pencil lines. He is known to employ Osamu Dezaki-esque tricks like triple takes and postcard shots in his work. His storyboards are rough, improvised, and lacking in detail. He's a fan of American director Robert Rodriguez and John Woo, and loves referencing classic anime and film in his works.

His first solo directorial effort was the Production I.G. OVA Dead Leaves which would set the stage for Imaishi's later works: crude, anarchic, and heterogeneous characters positioned against a homogenizing totalitarian force. Dead Leaves uses pillarboxing and text in a manner recalling stylized comic books. Imaishi served as character designer and animation director on the OVA so the animation is steeped in his neo-Kamada idiom more than any of his other works.

Imaishi left Gainax and formed studio Trigger with Masahiko Otsuka in 2011, bringing over several major animators to the new studio. His debut TV work with Trigger was 2013's Kill la Kill, that similarly to Gurren Lagann, freely and extensively referenced anime history. Despite being a broadly popular series overseas, it is Imaishi's most controversial work to date, not only for its extreme levels of fanservice, but also because it suffered damaging production problems: rewrites of the script, cost cutting animation shortcuts, and a restrictive schedule.

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