Toshio Ishizaki

Toshio Ishizaki, who signs the work SUSHiO, was born in Saitama Prefecture in 1976. Tokyo’s Yoyogi Animation Academy sent him to Studio Gainax in the late 1990s, where the first job was inbetweening on Neon Genesis Evangelion, episode 21: filling the drawings between other people’s poses. By 2001 he was animation director on Mahoromatic, episode 4: sharp faces, movement that already wanted more room than the cut allowed. That credit is animation director, not a grander title invented later.

One Piece films and Ojamajo Doremi followed. On One Piece: Clockwork Island Adventure (2001) he drifted from the television look hard enough to cause friction. The argument was about how far a drawing could leave the house style before someone called it a problem. Mamoru Hosoda later insisted on him for Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island (2005), praising a “raw, unfiltered love for the source material.” The fight, in other words, had been about care.

In 2011 he followed Hiroyuki Imaishi and joined Studio Trigger at its founding. He is a linchpin there, not a founder. Kill la Kill (2013) made him lead character designer: exaggerated, precise, built for fights that read as drawings first. He has named Yoh Yoshinari as an influence and learned kinetic storytelling from Imaishi, including the older Micro-Man work that first made movement interesting to him. Early on, he has said, movement held little interest until those cuts arrived. On Gurren Lagann (2007–08) he storyboarded key character deaths and picked up the wry label “animator of demise.”

The other desk is fandom. Momoiro Clover Z and BiSH get fan art; WACK has worn his merchandise. The Twitter handle SUSHiO GUMI Company is not a brand exercise. It is a grown animator still drawing the groups he likes, the same way a teenager would, except the hand now knows how a sleeve wrinkles in a fight. Childhood Akira sketches were so many that his mother joked about banning the film. The joke stuck because the pile was real.

The Gainax years were the school. Evangelion episode 21 was inbetweening; Mahoromatic episode 4 was the first time he directed the faces. One Piece and Doremi were the franchise jobs; Clockwork Island was the argument; Baron Omatsuri was the director who wanted that argument in the room. Trigger, in 2011, was Imaishi’s new shop, not a founding credit with Ishizaki’s name on the papers.

Kill la Kill asked for a body that could read as a drawing in a fight. Gurren Lagann asked for a death that could read as a storyboard. Momoiro Clover Z, BiSH, and WACK asked for a fan who could still draw like one. The Akira pile in the childhood house is the earliest version of all of that: too many sketches, a mother joking about a ban, a kid who would not stop. Watch a Kill la Kill turn, then a quiet death in Gurren Lagann. The same hand is doing both jobs: making the body move, then making the movement cost something. Action and effects are what colleagues name first. The deaths are what stay in the room after the episode ends. Start with the inbetween on Evangelion. Then notice the later cuts still remember how a body gets from one drawing to the next.