Masayuki 摩砂雪 (real name: 山口 正幸 Yamaguchi Masayuki) · まさゆき

Biography

Masayuki, credited then and now under the single mononym, is Yamaguchi Masayuki (山口正幸), born 3 January 1961 in Nagano Prefecture. He attended Tokyo Designer Gakuin's animation course, where he was a classmate of fellow future Gainax pillar Shoichi Masuo and Naohito Takahashi. After graduating he joined Studio Giants. The Sakuga Wiki notes that he decided to become an animator after watching Hayao Miyazaki's Future Boy Conan in high school.

Inside Giants his speciality was extreme wide-angle perspective drawings (広角パース). He has admitted in interviews, quoted in the Gainax Interviews collection, that he originally wanted to do Miyazaki-style action animation, but TV-series time and frame budgets at Giants would not allow it. So he reverse-engineered an approach: "how do I rise in this industry without the time and frame counts?" The answer was the dynamic extreme-angle action style that Yoshinori Kanada was pioneering at Toei, and Masayuki became one of its leading practitioners.

PAC's opening team, supervised by Kubo, brought him in. The brief was the entire 75-second sequence: storyboard, key animation, the lot. The finished opening is roughly 1,750 TV frames at the standard 24fps. According to a later technical breakdown by the OP's production team, all of the cuts in the opening are Masayuki's key animation except the Mumm-Ra cuts and effects, which had corrections applied in post. The Sakuga Wiki note adds: "his work on the ThunderCats OP caused a minor sensation inside the industry."

He moved to Gainax shortly afterwards, working on Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise in 1987, the production where he befriended Hideaki Anno and, by his own account, sat down next to him and never really got up. The Sakuga Wiki has the story: Anno told animator Shinya Hasegawa during the production of Evangelion episode 9, in which Hasegawa was the animation director: "Masayuki's key animation, you either pass it through completely untouched, or redo all of it. Those are the only two options." Hasegawa's episode 9 went out largely untouched.

His Evangelion credits run continuously from 1995 to 2021: episode director and animator on the original TV series (including the iconic closing sequence); director on parts of Death & Rebirth and End of Evangelion (1997, where Anno made him 'Visual Water Artist' after he went to the beach instead of finishing his work); co-director, with Anno and Kazuya Tsurumaki, of all four Rebuild of Evangelion films through 2021's Evangelion 3.0+1.0.

Today he is 相談役 (sōdan-yaku, senior advisor) at Studio Khara, Anno's own studio. The ThunderCats opening was his first major credit.

Selected works around and after ThunderCats

• Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise 1987

  Animation work on Gainax's landmark debut feature. Met Anno on this production.

• Neon Genesis Evangelion 1995–96

  Episode director and animator. Animated the iconic series ending sequence.

• End of Evangelion / Death & Rebirth 1997

  Director credit on the Death portion; later listed as 'Visual Water Artist' on Air/Magokoro after going to the beach instead of finishing his work.

• GAMERA 1999 1999

  Co-directed the documentary on Gamera 3 with Anno.

• Re: Cutie Honey 2004

  Directed part 3 of the three-part OVA.

• Evangelion: 1.0 / 2.0 / 3.0 / 3.0+1.0 2007–2021

  Co-director, with Anno and Tsurumaki, of all four Rebuild of Evangelion films.