Director Spotlight: Takayuki Hirao

 

One of the most promising young anime directors that has come on the scene during the last decade is Takayuki Hirao [平尾隆之], who first came into my awareness with his work as episode director on certain Madhouse shows. As the picture on top of this entry (Animage 11/2008) indicates, he can be considered as part of the influential generation of directors in their 30s. That Animage article/discussion also featured two other talents of the same generation, namely Tetsuro Araki and Ryousuke Nakamura, and that not by accident. All three started their careers at Madhouse with Hirao and Araki even working on the same projects (such as ‘Jubei-chan’ and ‘Card Captor Sakura’ movie) as production assistants, so it’s not surprising that they became good friends in private life as well.

 

Originally – and like many other people in the anime industry as well – Hirao wanted to become a mangaka, but he eventually decided to pursue a career in the anime industry and entered Osaka designer vocational school. He spent about 2 years in Osaka and then went to Tokyo where he found employment at Madhouse when he was 20 years old. After acting as production assistant for many Madhouse anime in the early 2000s – including big ones such as ‘Millenium Actress’ – Hirao got the chance for his directorial debut on ‘TEXHNOLYZE’, where he directed the OP and storyboarded episode 8 and 14 as well as co-directed #21. In his early days as assistant director at Madhouse he studied the craft of directing under no one less than Satoshi Kon, who entrusted Hirao even with the important task of directing episode 1 of his first and only TV series, ‘Paranoia Agent’, besides letting him act as assistant director on a bunch of other episodes. After his work on ‘Paranoia Agent’, Hirao left Madhouse and joined the up-and-coming anime studio ufotable. His first task at ufotable was already a rather major one, namely acting as ‘chief director’ for the TV series ‘Futakoi Alternative’, which leaves no doubt that ufotable‘s company president Hikaru Kondo was quite aware of Hirao‘s talent. While Kondo himself acted as the general director and handled the organizational aspects of the show, he left most technical and many creative aspects of the production to Hirao (since Kondo himself isn’t that proficient with that kind of things). The first episode already featured most stylistic traits that have sort of become Hirao‘s trademark style over the last few years, namely very active and sometimes even crazy camerawork, using space very effectively and messing with the passage of time by using slow motions and such. He seems to be more conscious than most other anime directors about what you can do in animation by tightly controlling the flow of time and space to draw out the best of each scene. Although Hirao himself thinks that the main influence on his work has been Tetsuro Araki, I believe he owes his clever way of screen organization to Satoshi Kon as well. He brought his style to maturity with what I consider as one of the pinnacles of otaku anime, namely the fifth movie in the ‘Kara no Kyoukai’ movie series.

 

 

This movie is still one of the most gripping anime films I’ve watched to date. By changing the order of events of the novel and rearranging them in a clever way, the movie never lets you loose and the tension builds throughout the film until the spectacular climax. That movie had a lot of outstanding action as well, even apart from the scenes done by Tetsuya Takeuchi (he animated and storyboarded the part where Shiki is fighting the zombie horde in the tower). Probably most people remember the unusually intense and almost crazy camerawork in the final fight scene between Shiki and Araya, I liked how Hirao used the camera to add energy and excitement to the scene. Here’s the corresponding part of the storyboard book, which probably looks pretty confusing if you haven’t watched that scene before (click to enlarge):

 

 

ufotable used CG cameraworks and models to animate this scene, i.e. the animators used the CG models as reference for their frames (like KyoAni did for the crazy 360° camera rotation in the first K-ON!! OP). Two other rather memorable scenes with some typical Hirao storyboarding are below. The one on the left side is from ‘High School of the Dead’ #8 and the column of pictures on the right is from ‘Kurozuka’ #9, so both are from shows directed by Tetsuro Araki. Araki told the storyboarders on HSotD to do interesting things with breasts in their respective episodes, but the only one who really did something funny was clearly Hirao with his ‘Matrix breasts’. And Araki‘s order to ‘totally overdo’ the truck action in Kurozuka #9 was fulfilled by Hirao pretty well, too…

 

 

Besides his work on the fifth ‘Kara no Kyoukai’ movie, he was also involved in the seventh film. The director of that movie, Shinsuke Takizawa (瀧沢進介), is actually a joint pen name for Ei Aoki (chapter 1), Takuya Nonaka (chapter 2), Mitsuru Obunai (chapter 3), Takayuki Hirao (chapter 5) and ufotable company president Kondo, so Hirao did parts of the storyboard and processing of some scenes, my guess is that he was responsible for the fight between Shiki and Lio in the warehouse (among other things). After Hirao‘s involvement in the ‘Kara no Kyoukai’ series, ufotable put him in charge of the ‘God Eater’ anime pilot movie and opening. Here’s the OP:

 

 

Director / Storyboard: Takayuki Hirao
Character Design / Animation Director: Tetsuya Takeuchi
Key Animation: Tetsuya Takeuchi, Shinpei Tomooka, Dai Fukuyama, Takeyoshi Omagari, Shinsuke Yasuda, Saburou Mochizuki, Toshiyuki Shirai, Hiroshi Yakou, Masato Morinaga, Masashi Sugita, Takashi Suhara

 

The promotion video itself was written, directed and storyboarded by Hirao, so it’s a good place to start if you want to check out his style. There’s some rather well directed action in the PV with his typical camerawork and manipulation of the flow of time. It’s interesting to complement the viewing with the storyboard to get a better understanding of what he intented with which shot, so here’s the storyboard for the action parts (uploaded in very high resolution so zooming in very closely is no problem):

 

 

As for upcoming work: Hirao is directing the OVA ‘Gyo’ as well as ufotable’s latest original project, ‘Sakura no Ondo’. Hirao himself mentioned that he’s a fan of the author of ‘Gyo’, so maybe that’s why the running time was stretched from 30 minutes to over an hour. He did such a good job with the atmosphere in ‘Kara no Kyoukai’ so I have little doubt that this will be a worthwhile OVA. The screenshots look promising at any rate. I’m a bit less confident about his other upcoming project, instead of a romance I’d rather like him to do something with action. Since Tetsuya Takeuchi is probably the character designer (judging by the looks of it), I’m still looking forward to it, if only to see what they can do with this genre. Apart from that, I’m pretty sure that he’ll either help out Tetsuro Araki on his upcoming noitaminA series ‘Guilty Crown’ (at least as storyboarder) or that he’s in charge of one or more ‘Fate/Zero’ episodes as director (hopefully teamed up with Takeuchi to do some stunning action once again).

 

 

List of work:

♦ TEXHNOLYZE (2003): Storyboard #8 #14 / Ep Director #21 (coop)

♦ Paranoia Agent (2004): Ep Director #1 / Ass. Ep Director #7 #9 #10 #11 #12 #13

♦ Futakoi Alternative (2005): Chief Director / Storyboard OP #1 #3 #7 #13 / Ep Director #1 #3 #7 #13 / Key Animation #3

♦ Coyote Ragtime Show (2006): Storyboard #10 (coop) / Ep Director #12 (coop)

♦ Death Note (2006-2007): Ep Director #36

♦ Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight! (2007): Technical Director / Storyboard OP #2-#9 #11-#12 / Ep Director OP #1 (coop) #2 #4 (coop) #5 #11 / Key Animation #1-#3 #5

♦ Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight! OVA (2007): Storyboard (coop)

♦ Bokurano (2007): Storyboard #16

♦ Shigurui (2007): Storyboard #7

♦ Kara no Kyoukai Chapter 5 (2008): Director / Storyboard

♦ Kurozuka (2008): Storyboard #9 / Ep Director #9

♦ Kara no Kyoukai Chapter 7 (2009): Director (coop)

♦ God Eater PV / OP (2010): Director / Storyboard / Script

♦ High School of the Dead (2010): Storyboard #8

♦ Gyo (2011): Director

♦ Sakura no Ondo (201x): Director