This Week in Anime

The Dynamic Direction of Mamoru Hatakeyama

Steve
As a pair of professional anime snobs, we've accumulated bags full of directors, artists, animators, and all kinds of creators who contribute to the medium and deserve tons more recognition. It's the fate of nerds who care about stuff. But let's ignore the larger media environment: some people have managed to break into mainstream success within the comfortable confines of the anime sphere, yet may not be as well known or renowned as they should be amongst our fellow weebs. Hatakeyama has risen from obscurity to deliver some stone-cold stunners as of late, so I think he fits the bill quite nicely. Plus, this gives me another chance to talk about how good Undead Murder Farce is.

He's become a showrunner who can sell me on an anime by his presence alone. Doesn't necessarily mean I'll stick with it (as we'll get into), but it's enough to guarantee I'll give it a shot, irrespective of anything else. While I can only speak for myself, of course, that's a pretty exclusive club to be in!

SHAFT is the guiding star of his current style and the road to its formation, but I'd be remiss if we didn't at least mention his other handful of credits in the mid-'90s through the turn of the century. And yes, most were hentai OVAs he's credited as an animation producer on. It's a perfectly cromulent way to start a career! Take a gander at the resumes of the most renowned and respected artists, and you'll find porno.

Yeah, it's a darn shame most of these new-fangled streaming sites seem so averse to hosting hentai on their servers. Just goes to show how little they care about preserving art for future generations. Weirdly enough, though, we do have a review for one of the OVAs he worked on, Office Affairs, here at ANN. It's so old it doesn't even have a byline.

Office Affairs Sounds kind of interesting! How much of that interest we can chalk up to Omata's involvement, who knows? But every narrative needs a little mystery.

Another mystery is that his credits dropped off around 2001, and only returned in 2009 when he began storyboarding for SHAFT. This is why I'd love to interview him. What did he do during that gap? Was he disillusioned with the job? Did he work under a third unknown alias? Are we wrong and that was a different Shinichi Omata who worked on the low-budget porno tapes?

There's a story there.

I do think it's worth emphasizing that he began the current leg of his career storyboarding, and that's remained constant ever since. You hardly see any animation credits out of him, but he storyboards multiple episodes on every series he directs—sometimes over half! It's his forte, and he's damn good at it. The man is a storyboarder among storyboarders. SHAFT's "house style," with its emphasis on pop art, referential humor, hard match cuts, and environmental geometry, among other idiosyncrasies, was a fitting place to hone his distinctive style. Like, you can trace Hidamari Sketch's weirdness through to Kaguya-sama's.

Lest we peg the man too forcefully to one studio, while his roots are important, his growth after SHAFT, like you mentioned previously, proves him to be no one-trick pony. Whether it was deserved or not, Studio Deen became the butt of a lot of jokes around the early 2010s. But then Hatakeyama showed up with a new name and something to prove. And you can feel that passion in the first MINUTE of his (non-porn) directorial debut, Sankarea.

He finally got our asses. I only had time to watch the premiere, but there are enough stunning scenes packed into that one episode to fill a normal anime season. The shapes. The layouts. The emotions. The red stain from Shaun of the Dead. It's all here, and it's all so good.

Horror and comedy are surprisingly similar genres, so little wonder that someone as talented as Hatakeyama can translate proficiency with one into the other. He also has quite the flair for the theatrical, both in the descriptive and literal senses. And both of those senses helped a lot when he tackled Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju.

Rakugo is about as minimalist as theater can get: one seated performer, like two props, and a standard set of stories where the appeal is what each individual brings to their interpretation. Doesn't sound like the kind of thing that would make for a visually exciting anime, does it? And Rakugo Shinju's presentation is indeed muted compared to the rest of Hatakeyama's oeuvre, but appropriately so. It feels like a mature production that matches the more somber and inquisitive tone of the plot and characters.

I also love to see Hatakeyama get more baroque outside the performances, as we see these characters deal with their personal dramas. Take this one scene from the second season, where we see an older Yakumo evolve from a humorously reluctant caregiver to a sad yet willing caregiver, to a pathetic old man begging for death. His body language, the brief departure into ghostly symbolism, and then that final suffocating close-up on his face all communicate these emotional turns and foreshadow what his arc for the season will be.

It's one of my favorite anime of the past decade. If you only hopped on the Hatakeyama train at Kaguya-sama or Undead Murder Farce, I highly suggest you go back and give Rakugo Shinju a whirl. Compared to severed heads and lovesick teens, it might seem more boring—because it is—but it's a good, enrapturing, and heart-rending kind of boring.

While prepping for this column, I was shocked to discover I already had a folder full of screencaps for this series. I was then even more shocked to find out I had watched SEVEN EPISODES of this back in 2018 and had co-written an entire dang TWIA about it. That should tell you how much of an impact this anime had on me. Not even Hatakeyama could make my brain retain whatever the hell a Grancrest is. But you can see that, even here, he was cooking.

Should also mention that he did a reboot(?) of Rozen Maiden in between Sankarea and Rakugo Shinju, but I still haven't taken the Rozen Maiden plunge, so I can't speak directly on that. It's probably good. Seems like a weird story about living dolls would be up his alley.

And a hearty helping of that aplomb certainly went to Kaguya-sama, which is his most mainstream hit, his longest commitment to a single series to date, and also in the running for funniest anime comedy of all time. He applies every single lesson from SHAFT about presenting and editing your comedies as ostentatiously as possible, and the results are glorious. A smorgasbord of styles and laughs.

It's one of the exceedingly rare comedies that only gets funnier as it progresses, and I'd chalk some of that up to Hatakeyama and his team getting bolder and wilder with each cours. Hell, the third season had an ED spoofing Starship Troopers and a rap battle that Hatakeyama himself storyboarded. That's not even a joke anymore. That's art.

Yeah, if we're talking about his strengths specifically as a series director, I think he can pull everyone else into his madness. Doing the lion's share of the storyboarding work certainly helps establish an anime's tone and identity, but he seems to be very good at getting people—and getting the right people—to engage in his brand of chicanery. And Undead Murder Farce is turning into yet another great example of that. With so many questions. Why did he want to recreate a shitty chroma-key effect in a medium that can completely sidestep it?

Did he tell people to try to do a split diopter shot even though it looks jank as heck in a cartoon?

I don't know, but I love that he's getting even weirder and uglier with it. It feels like he's stretching out, testing the limits, going beyond even SHAFT's heaviest indulgences. Godspeed.

Selling him on directing this had to be the easiest job ever. And it's so eye-popping fun to watch. You could almost call it a victory lap, but I don't foresee Hatakeyama slowing down, let alone stopping anytime soon.

One cool thing about Murder Farce is that its production at Lapin Track has had him working with Ikuhara collaborators like Nobuyuki Takeuchi (also another SHAFT alum) and Shingo Kaneko. It's easy to imagine Hatakeyama going full arthouse and doing an Ikuhara-esque anime as divisive as it is unforgettable. But he also certainly seems comfortable with his avant-garde approach to adaptations. As long as his storyboarding eye never dulls, I think our brief survey here supports his ability to apply his talents pretty much anywhere. He's a mountain of a figure in this art form, and a beacon to the two of us—and, I hope, to more of you now.