Portfolio. Animation Staff
Shigeo Koshi 越 シゲオ · こし しげお
From ThunderCats to Doraemon, Utena and Samurai Pizza Cats
PAC animator on the ThunderCats. Ho! era. Spent the next two decades as a senior director on the back catalogue of Japanese children's television.
- Born
- Ōta, Tokyo, Japan
- Role on ThunderCats
- Animation Staff (Season 2, except eps 067 & 068)
- Season involvement
- Season 2, the ThunderCats. Ho! era of the show.
Biography
Shigeo Koshi was born in Ōta, Tokyo. He joined Pacific Animation's ThunderCats team for Season 2, the season that opens with the five-part ThunderCats. Ho! arc and introduces Lynx-O, Pumyra and Bengali. He is credited on Season 2 animation staff (except the special-credit episodes 067 and 068 which have an outlying credit structure).
After ThunderCats, Koshi spent the bulk of his career on long-running children's and family-anime properties. He worked on Doraemon, the cornerstone children's anime franchise of Japan, and was credited as director on Doraemon: The New Record of Nobita's Spaceblazer.
His broader credit list includes Dream Fighter Wingman, The Bots Master, Rurouni Kenshin, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and Samurai Pizza Cats, a range of work that spans late-night seinen anime (Utena) to American-co-production children's shows (Samurai Pizza Cats) to mainstream family programming (Doraemon).
On ThunderCats
Animation across Season 2, including the multi-part ThunderCats. Ho! arc that expanded the team and shifted the show's tone.
Selected works around and after ThunderCats
- Dream Fighter Wingman 1984
Episode work.
- The Bots Master 1993
Animation contribution to the French-Japanese-US co-production.
- Samurai Pizza Cats 1990-91
Director and storyboard credits.
- Revolutionary Girl Utena 1997
Episode director.
- Rurouni Kenshin 1996-98
Storyboard and episode-director credits.
- Doraemon: The New Record of Nobita's Spaceblazer 2009
Film director credit.
- Doraemon (2005 TV series) 2005-present
Long-running episode and storyboard work.
Why this credit matters
Koshi is the example of the PAC alumnus who went back into the Japanese TV-anime mainstream and stayed there. A four-decade career across some of the most-watched anime properties in Japan, all of it post-ThunderCats.
Sources
Cover artwork and portrait images here are reproduced under fair use for editorial commentary. Image sources: Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons (work cover art); Rick Goldschmidt, "Masaki Iizuka remembered" (2020) for the Iizuka portrait; Z&G Animelab (zganimelabo.co.jp) for the Akiyama 2024 photographs. Japanese-language biographical sources cited per page above.