A student from a design school, one day he had the opportunity to visit studio Tôei, and that’s where he met Takuo Noda, leader of Studio N☁, one of Tôei’s main subcontractors on mecha shows.
From animator to directorīefore discussing those two figures, let’s start at the beginning, that is in 1976, with a 20 year old Hirano. Its two most important figures are some of the most important animators since Kanada himself: Shin’ya Ohira and Masami Obari. He was not just the director of some of the most iconic OVAs of the period and a key figure from the boom’s most important studio, AIC it was also partly thanks to him that emerged what I call the “second-generation Kanada school”, the one that developed in the second half of the 80’s, influenced more by Masahito Yamashita than Kanada, but that also took in the contributions of Ichirô Itano and Takashi Nakamura. Among the many people that contributed to these two epoch-making shows was Toshihiro (or Toshiki) Hirano, a central figure of 80’s animation. It appears that the two most important places where all these people met and first exchanged their ideas were Urusei Yatsura, starting in 1981, and Macross, in 1982.
This article is part of the History of the Kanada school seriesĪs I mentioned in the previous article about Graviton, the OVA boom was very much carried by small structures and the overlapping nets of connections made by their members. Cover image: a Dangaiô lillustration by Toshihiro Hirano
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