That's not quite an accurate summation, in my opinion, either of his career or whether those jobs are creative or not.

His earliest professional work in animation was as a director, then assistant series director or series director, which includes arc/season plotting, character creation and introduction, and many other things, but he was also plotter/co-writer of specific episodes of Sailor Moon, and an unofficial consultant on several anime being handled by friends of his. He was participating as a writer and artist in doujinshi circles, and has some stuff in at least one of Kenichi Sonoda's doujin/fanzine books.

He wasn't really ever a suit. He's never been, say, an accountant. He didn't start as a producer or a technical advisor. He didn't start out filing papers and suddenly become a series director on Sailor Moon. He started as a assistant director and writer, professionally, under Junichi Sato, on several projects, mostly doing storyboards or sound coordination. (IMDB is supremely lacking in proper attribution of directing or other credits.) He the moved to directing and being Junchi Sato's default second, so they went onto Sailor Moon together, with Ikuhara directing the first of the theatrical movies and co-writing the other two theatrical Sailor Moon movies to different degrees, as well as plotting arcs, working on character development, and directing episodes.

With BePapas, he was actively a producer, as well as everything else, but you can't say he wasn't creatively involved at all. Or that he was just coordinating things.

Atropos wrote:

And I never meant to imply that Ikuhara wasn't a creative force behind SKU—but he was never really involved with individual episodes aside from doing storyboards for the first episode. Hence why some of us are sick of people attributing everything that was memorable about SKU to him.

It was an easy mistake to make at one point, but it's a little less forgivable now that there are tons of resources with input from other people who worked on the show. Alot of very psychedelic, super silly stuff is his fault. I've seen other works with part of that team and without him there's no exploding curry.

Atropos, I'm increasingly curious, as time goes by, why you thought this was the case with Ikuhara. Do you mind talking about that? Elaborating, maybe, where the ideas came from that he hadn't had a career as a creative professional or that he wasn't involved with individual SKU episodes? (He even drew for at least one episode, that was way past deadline, didn't he?)

Decrescent Daytripper wrote:

Atropos, I'm increasingly curious, as time goes by, why you thought this was the case with Ikuhara. Do you mind talking about that? Elaborating, maybe, where the ideas came from that he hadn't had a career as a creative professional or that he wasn't involved with individual SKU episodes? (He even drew for at least one episode, that was way past deadline, didn't he?)

I don't mean to speak on Atropos' behalf, but they could have been getting it from a discussion that began here, where in the process of crediting the people who worked on the Utena game, I mentioned that Shingo KANEKO and Toru TAKAHASHI were the game's co-directors, and that they had also directed episodes 38 and 39, respectively. Satyreyes expressed surprise that Ikuhara did not direct those episodes, and briefly wondered how much direct control he really had over the show. I clarified that "series director" and "episode director" are usually separate jobs, and that while Ikuhara was series director from start to finish, he was not the episode director for any individual episodes.

That might make it sound like Ikuhara "was never really involved with individual episodes aside from doing storyboards for the first episode," as Atropos said, but I think that's completely unfounded. There is, however, a tendency to think of him as an auteur and therefore downplay the series as a product of group effort, which is what I was trying to combat in the aforementioned thread.


For the record, here's the list of episode-by-episode credits in Japanese.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B0%91 … 9.E3.83.88

Last edited by Dallbun (08-24-2016 08:12:16 AM)

I find it to be in games that people get over-credited more than shows; a lot of people seem to think that game dev Suda51 makes every decision for every game he's involved in when in reality he hasn't directed a single game since 2009. Contrarily, I've never really seen anybody attribute something distinctly not-Ikuni to Ikuni. But I guess it's probably happened.

Well, I guess there was people forgetting about the women involved with Yuri Kuma Arashi, but that was mostly to disparage Ikuni anyway.