The Maverick Animator of Chaos
About Shinya Ohira. Plus: news.
Welcome! It’s time for a new Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. And here’s our slate:
1) On the animation of Shinya Ohira.
2) On the internationalization of the anime industry.
3) Newsbits.
With that, let’s go!
1 – Sheer power
If you’ve seen The Boy and the Heron, you know his work.
It’s there at the beginning. Tokyo is on fire. The lead character runs through its streets, and everything loses its shape — churning and thrashing. Bodies flicker like the flames around them. The wind looks strong enough to tear the screen to pieces.
This sequence has overwhelming energy — its images feel like they’re coming to life by themselves. In reality, they were the slow work of human hands. The team spent six months or more on some of these shots. And one animator took charge of the key frames. His name is Shinya Ohira, and he drew them by putting pencil to paper.1
We met Ohira at his hotel last month. He was in France with producer Jacob Ayres, showing his new film Black at Annecy. With Ayres kindly serving as interpreter, we asked Ohira about that sequence from The Boy and the Heron. He replied:
It was a challenge. To put it very, very simply, it was a challenge. Because it’s a scene with a lot of background characters as well, so there’s a lot going on. A lot of frames were needed, and it felt like not enough time, as is always the case with these very demanding shots.
In addition to that, I work analog, so in pencil lines. And this is not just the case with The Boy and the Heron, but everything needed to be transferred to a digital medium, and the digital medium struggles to recreate analog effects. I don’t want to speak badly of it — it was a fantastic scene — but I’m always quite protective of my original analog image.2
The Boy and the Heron was underway for seven years. Ohira joined early, and he had incredible time and freedom to do his work. Hayao Miyazaki wanted Ohira’s unique style here — only he could draw these things. One staffer felt that Miyazaki had, in fact, storyboarded the sequence with him in mind. “It was less like a job and more like I was being allowed to do the work for fun,” Ohira said a few years ago.3
But, for him, even all that time wasn’t quite enough. And even final images with that much power weren’t quite perfect.
Shinya Ohira is a slow, methodical worker. He admits it: his pace has cost him jobs before. And, at least these days, he charges for his time. Some studios have been shocked by his prices.4
Yet certain projects need Ohira. Without his style, there are moments that can’t happen. Only he can draw them.
Miyazaki’s called on Ohira since Porco Rosso (1992). Often, the animation he submits is so wild that Miyazaki revises it for consistency. There were fewer incidents during The Boy and the Heron, but not zero. “It’s still necessary to correct Ohira a bit to preserve the exact intent [Miyazaki’s] going for,” animator Toshiyuki Inoue said.5
Directors use Ohira’s ability as a tool. They know his specialties, and he knows that he’s there to fulfill a larger vision. “When working as an animator, you’re only given a small section of a wider piece of work,” he told us last month. “So, you have to be aware of the overall world that you’re animating within.”
When we asked what goes through his head as he animates, Ohira replied:
It’s the relatively standard things, like, “What is the project we’re working on? What is the director aiming for? Who’s the character that I’m drawing now? What are they like? What do they do? What are their habits? What are their little tics and their quirks? What expression will they be making at this point, and how do they act?”
So, first and foremost, “What is the world that this shot is taking place in, and how can I make sure it fits within that world?” But then, [although] I have a set action that I need to draw, [I also think,] “How do I make this interesting? How do I make this something that people are going to watch and engage with? How can I add to it?”
Ohira’s career is defined by his pursuit of those last things, the additions. He’s been a bit of a maverick since he began in the ‘80s. Even the young Ohira deviated from scripts and model sheets. He’s still known to make changes to scenes without asking.
Early on, the habit got him in trouble. Now, he’s respected in large part because of it. Ohira does listen to directors and aim to fit their projects, like he said — but he puts his own spin on the work. While his rule-breaking once caused him problems, it was important to do. As he’s said, “I think that’s why I am who I am today.”
It didn’t take long for Ohira to get noticed. Japan’s top animation magazine, Animage, featured him in 1987. He was just 20 — but he was known for flashy work that used tons of frames. Some of his fascinations were already in place. “I just have a strange love of things that collapse or send fragments flying everywhere,” he told Animage.6
Ohira was regularly on effects duty back then: explosions, lasers, clouds. When he worked on Akira (1988), that kind of thing was his focus. But he was still evolving — he wasn’t a settled artist. He grew fixated on realistic animation after Akira. And he found a new way to move characters in projects like the pilot for Junkers Come Here (1995), whose believability stunned parts of the industry.7
His evolution continued from there. Toshiyuki Inoue once said, “I don’t know anyone else who’s changed their animation style that much.”8
By the 2000s, Ohira was deep into a form of “expressionistic realism” that focuses on “the visceral power of animation,” to quote the anime critic Ben Ettinger. In his mature work, each character’s body began to be “animated as a special effect.”9
That’s his signature now. Ohira’s shots usually break the style of a project. Directors use him to animate dreams (Tekkonkinkreet), frenzied action (Kid’s Story), morphing creatures (Mary and the Witch’s Flower). Sometimes, he’s asked to do quick shots for a wider sequence — raw, visceral accents. Even if they’re short, they add to the overall feeling, because they give a special energy to seconds that need a special energy.
There are trade-offs: Ohira’s unique, jittery pencil drawings challenge cleanup artists. And his most unfiltered work doesn’t suit every director’s goals for every sequence. “When Ohira’s scenes take place in more normal settings, there might be no other choice than to correct him,” Inoue said, discussing Miyazaki’s relationship with him.10
Once in a while, though, Ohira directs his own films in this animation style. That’s when it completely takes over. His dream is to do a long film using his approach. “It doesn’t need a story … I just want to draw something that keeps moving,” he said.11
His latest, Black, isn’t long. But that’s the kind of film it is.
Black was a little polarizing at Annecy, but the people who loved it really loved it. The film comes from the third Star Wars: Visions season, out in the fall. Ohira calls it a piece “for fans of animation by fans of animation.”12 And it says a lot about the impact that his style has had — even though this film wasn’t meant to.
Black is an explosion of Ohira-esque flourishes. It’s nonstop camera movement, special effects, warping figures. Jazz plays over a blur of warfare and mental breakdowns. In our conversation, Ohira said he shot for a “feeling of mismatch” by pairing “the quite upbeat music and the very dark, sort of madness-induced visuals.”
Here, story takes a firm back seat to animation. Yet the animation didn’t go exactly as he planned. Like Ohira told us:
… when I originally started the project, my idea was not to use my standard, sort of organic style with lots of flowing lines, but to go for a far more mechanical, straight-edged, sharper style. But I think a lot of people got excited about the idea of working with me and my style, so it ended up looking slightly different from my original intention.
Ohira personally touched “about 20%” of Black’s animation, mostly by correcting layouts and key frames. The rest was delegated to his team. “I was expecting quite orthodox animation to be submitted,” he said to us, “but it ended up something a bit more avant-garde, a bit more abstract.”13
A number of foreigners animated on Black, including young fans of Ohira’s. Although he remains a maverick in the business, his work has a hardcore following in many, many countries. He’s no longer a 20-year-old upstart. Now in his late 50s, Ohira is something like an institution — and people want to be him.
Not all of Black’s staffers were familiar with the workings of the Japanese industry. Ohira recalled artists “drawing every frame” because they didn’t keep in mind that “an in-between artist would be doing everything that they didn’t.”14 There were communication problems, and the production had bumps. Ohira said he was “80% happy” with the result. (Which, given his standards, is pretty good.)15
One of the biggest highlights for him, though, was the time spent with the younger animators. When we asked about his favorite shot in Black, he redirected the question to the joy of collaborating with this team. Ohira told us:
… some of the animators that we worked with really surprised me. Obviously, you’ve got the true veterans — people like [Toshiyuki] Inoue-san and others — who you know are going to knock it out of the park. They submit it, you’re like, “Yeah, this is exactly what you’d expect from them. Absolutely fantastic.”
But something that I particularly liked about this project were the people who are still very new to animation. They’re still students, and you can see that they’re going to improve — it’s not a perfect animation yet [that they’re submitting] — but you can see the amount of enthusiasm and the sheer power they have. That rawness to the shots was something I really enjoyed seeing.
… [T]here were two animators we worked with, in particular, whose work really, really impressed me.
One is a Chinese student. Another is a Russian guy. The sequences they animated impressed me so much that I’m keeping in contact with them now. I want to work with them in future projects and am actively trying to get them involved in projects I’m working on.
One of the reasons I like them so much is that they’re sort of unpolished gems. They’re not quite at the height that they’re going to reach yet, but seeing them improve, and seeing how they’re going to evolve, is one of the reasons I particularly enjoy working with them. Those are the sorts of animators I love.16
Ohira’s stretches of The Boy and the Heron might be the culmination of his swirling, rule-breaking, realistic-yet-not style. Miyazaki played to Ohira’s strengths. Even at Ghibli, people reportedly cried when they saw the footage played back.
With Black, though, he’s clearly in a different role. He’s no longer only a specialist whose style other directors try to harness — a slow master craftsman who’s still using 6B and 10B pencils on paper in the 2020s. He’s now, also, a mentor to apprentices.
Having spent so long as a standout original, Ohira’s inspired a lot of people. He had a big impact on Masaaki Yuasa (Ping-Pong); his work on Junkers Come Here influenced Toshiyuki Inoue.17 Today, maybe especially abroad, a small army of fans-turned-animators want to draw like him. And that’s how you get Black.
The “rawness” and “enthusiasm” and “sheer power” that Ohira felt in the work of Black’s younger artists — those are the feelings he’s chased in his own drawings. The sense that they’re still evolving is also him, as the animator who’s changed more than most. He’s in a position to guide and elevate the people in this informal, international school of animation.
Ohira has said that he wanted to be an exception in his youth — an animator who didn’t quite do what he was supposed to do in the anime industry. “I thought it would be interesting if there were one or two guys like that out of 100,” he once noted. In the future, his devotees might make up 98 or 99 out of 100 animators.
2 – Animation news worldwide
Internationalizing anime
The anime industry is bigger than Japan — and that isn’t new. Japanese studios were outsourcing to Korea by the ‘70s.18 Still, at this point, it’s impossible to miss the industry’s international side. Even key animation credits include people from everywhere. Black is just one example.
Along the way, changes have happened in the relationship between Japanese companies and American ones. In the DuckTales era, many execs saw Japan simply as an outsourcing site. Now, not so much. Even Disney, with projects like Visions, is letting Japanese artists call their own shots.
A producer for the new Visions season — its co-executive producer, to be specific — is Justin Leach. He’s an American, but his ties to the industry run back decades: he animated on the second Ghost in the Shell movie. Right now, he’s making shows in Japan with his studio Qubic, based in Tokyo and New York. Their latest, Leviathan for Netflix, is due in a few days.
We asked Leach by email about these collaborations. As he told us, his earlier series Eden (2021) used “a more traditional service model.” Backgrounds went to Nice Boat in China; Taiwan’s CGCG worked on animation. But Qubic tried to go “beyond traditional outsourcing” by hiring “a core team” of Japanese artists to make many of the creative decisions.
With Leviathan, Leach wrote that his goal is “a true co-production model.” In his words:
… I was technically the main producer hired by Netflix, [but] I made a deliberate choice to bring in Studio Orange as an equal creative partner. I wanted them to have real ownership over the process, not just execute a plan.
Among other things, that led to a “cross-cultural writers’ room, something not typical in Japan.” Team members from Japan and abroad (like the French director Christophe Ferreira) hashed out Leviathan together. Meanwhile, Joe Hisaishi is involved in the music.
Leach and Qubic helped to make Visions happen in the first place, with the first season. They’ve got the same job on season three. Projects like Black wouldn’t be possible without the legwork done by people like them — people who deal closely with both the anime industry and Hollywood (Disney’s Lucasfilm branch, in this case). As Leach said in a recent interview:
… we get an email in, we have to translate it into English, and then send that English email to Lucasfilm, translated, and then they might have some comments on something. So we have to translate that back into Japanese and send the email back.
It’s the new world created by the industry’s success. Leach argued in the same interview that Leviathan “is authentically anime” — even though so many of the people involved came from outside Japan.
Newsbits
In America, Amid Amidi stepped away from Cartoon Brew after 21 years. Its new owner and operator is Jamie Lang, formerly with Variety.
Nezha 2 finally left theaters in China, where it’s screened since January. The film tallied 324 million admissions (and around $2.13 billion) in its home country alone.
Donations are keeping The Tiny Chef Show alive in America, but it’s too soon to call it “saved,” according to its creators. “Because of your help we are able to keep Cheffy on socials for the time being,” they wrote, “but we are still working behind the scenes on saving his cooking show.”
In France, Aardman is getting ready to pitch a series called The Adventures of Robin Robin at Cartoon Forum in September. (Also at the show: Natu Natu by Cartoon Saloon.)
Fliiip Book is a free American site designed for animating — with the “quick, expressive energy of early 2000s Flash tools,” per Cartoon Brew.
In America, the industry vet Woody Yocum made an animated tribute to a Woody Guthrie song, with charming stop-motion puppets. He notes that “there has never been a more important time to listen to its message.” Its lyrics were written to be subversive in the ‘40s, and they feel increasingly that way again.
The American critic Nick Spake is doing a multi-volume book series on the history of animation awards: Bright & Shiny. It’s built on a ton of interviews with folks like Don Bluth, Chris Sanders, Emily Hubley and Floyd Norman.
The Irish short Retirement Plan won the top prize at Palm Springs ShortFest — yet another victory for that great film. It feels like it could have a shot at the Oscars.
Last of all: we looked into the promising Crocodile Dance — a feature in development, with roots in South Africa and Nigeria.
Until next time!
For details about this sequence, see this archived Studio Ghibli tweet and the interview with Takeshi Honda conducted by Matteo Watzky and Ludovic Joyet — both sources were used a few times.
These answers have been edited for length and clarity. Our thanks to Ayres for his help and Ohira for his time, and to Matteo Watzky for giving us the contact information that made this interview happen.
The quote and other details come from Ohira’s interview in The Art of The Boy and the Heron. The other staffer was Toshiyuki Inoue, who made the point during an interview with Watzky and Dimitri Seraki — another valuable source.
Ohira made most of these points during a 2022 talk whose details were published by Gigazine. A very important source today. He mentioned in a 2001 interview with Anime Style (also used a lot) that he got kicked off the Junkers project for his slowness.
From the Seraki and Watzky interview.
See Animage (April 1987), via the Anim’Archive.
Inoue was floored by the Junkers pilot — it had a big impact on his thinking as an animator. See his interview for Anime Style #1 (April 2000).
See this Anime Style interview with Inoue.
From Ettinger’s archived site.
From the Seraki and Watzky interview.
From the Ohira interview by Watzky, Joyet and Seraki.
Ohira and Ayres discussed Black in a short video for Annecy, which we used a few times.
Black is a giant flex for its animators. “There are nine scenes to the short in total, and, in principle, one animator was allocated to each scene,” Ohira said in the Annecy video, with Ayres interpreting. During our conversation, we asked about the most challenging shot, and Ohira told us:
Pretty much all of the shots were difficult, if I’m being honest. So, which single shot was the most difficult is a hard question to answer, especially as a lot of the shots are quite long.
For example, you have shots that go on for a minute-plus. And the big challenge was, “Where do you place the inflection points of the action, so that it feels well paced in those long shots?” I think that was probably one of the most challenging things — but that’s true of many of the shots, rather than one specific [shot].
Ohira told Watzky, Joyet and Seraki that he tends to work like this: “I do all the animation myself most of the time.” Foreigners trying the same thing intrigued him, even though it was caused by a miscommunication. As Ohira told us:
… that was actually quite interesting as well. Because I was specifically requesting traditional Japanese styles of animation, but I think a lot of people wanted to try something more experimental because they were working with me. And, because they were drawing all the frames, they felt like they could get away [with it], without relying on a third party to do the in-betweens.
Regarding the film’s problems, Ohira said, “Specifically, there were several shots that had to be removed for time, or because animators were unable to finish, or for other reasons.”
The names of the Chinese and Russian animators have been omitted because, as of this writing, Disney hasn’t announced the full credits list.
Yuasa spoke about this influence here. It’s worth noting that Ohira was once a fan and follower himself. In the ‘80s, he fell in love with the work of an animator named Masahito Yamashita, and grew as an artist while borrowing.
Nizo Yamamoto (Grave of the Fireflies) actually got started as an art director by supervising a Korean outsource team.
Anothe great one—I love starting my Mondays with your articles. This struck me: "Shinya Ohira is a slow, methodical worker. He admits it: his pace has cost him jobs before. And, at least these days, he charges for his time. Some studios have been shocked by his prices." I personally am shocked by the shock. It's so strange, the delta between what people think art and the labor is worth, paying millions for a piece at e.g., an auction, collecting...and somehow completely discounting it on the ground (before or even after fame, while the artist is alive).
Thank you so much for putting this together.
It has been one of my biggest laments, looking at certain moments in japanese animation and not having a way of knowing who did the work, even with things like google image search, often the name of the artist is not associated.
The start of the boy and the heron was outstanding and I am now looking forward to delving onto more of Shinya Ohira's work.