Once upon a time, Z-Note was younger and didn’t know nearly so much about anime or anime production. He simply put on what he thought was cool. Life was good. After watching both Clannad and Clannad: After Story and deciding that it was the greatest piece of fiction ever fictioned (opinion since revised), he kept watching anime. Then, when in search of something to watch on Crunchyroll’s site before it became a laughingstock of a platform, he came across Angel Beats! He remembered how glowingly some of his friends talked about it. So, taking their cue, Z-Note proceeded to watch it, but noticed that it wasn’t quite resonating as well as he hoped it would. A thought occurred to him: “…hadn’t I watched something very similar to this, called Clannad?” Naturally, he knew that they weren’t the same shows, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the two materials were, on some spiritual level, similar. What could explain this?
Little did Z-Note know that there were two solutions to his question, neither of which he took. The first was to spend hours upon hours playing both games and argue about how to get more people to read Umineko or Fate/stay night. There was, however, a second option, and one which would have been less time-consuming and simpler. It’s called “looking up the stafflist.” But at the time, he didn’t have a MAL account, and AniList as a platform had only been around a short while. He also didn’t care to spend time decoding or reading the Japanese text during the OPs and EDs. How could he when another episode or series was waiting to be watched? So, Angel Beats! faded into the recesses of his mind, occasionally coming up in discussion. Many years have passed, and though Z-Note’s knowledge and understanding of anime has grown, his feelings for Angel Beats! have not changed even after rewatching it twice.
The End.
…okay, so there’s a little more to it than that.
It’s been about 10 years since I ran into this Clannad / Angel Beats! situation. Looking back, it’s easy to kick myself for not satiating my curiosity by finding an actual answer to my question. But I began with this anecdote because I think it’s indicative of many younger anime fans’ experiences as they move out of their infancy. We watch something, we feel a vague sense of continuity or similarity to other things, yet we don’t follow up on that feeling. It’s easier to label something as a knock-off / ripoff / inferior version of X anime rather than take another step further. Given also how daunting anime’s history can get, and the fear of missing out on something newly airing, I can’t fault anyone for wanting to simply consume and leave it there. It’s not from being foundationally incurious, but rather from being caught in the whirlwind of wanting to see the next thing on our watchlists. That’s its own form of curiosity, after all.
But taking that first step into the world of “who makes anime” is not only shockingly easier than ever; it’s also nourishing in a way that I couldn’t have anticipated. The moment of reckoning for me came when I had finished watching Sonny Boy as it aired back in 2021. Even in my limited understanding of anime at the time, it felt like a work that screamed authorial / auteurist convictions in its very lifeblood. So, I decided to take a peek at who made this thing I found so fascinating, even if I couldn’t quite say that I liked it (opinion since revised). And there flashed the name Natsume Shingo, the show’s writer-director and chief storyboarder. From then on, I made a point of looking at the stafflist of any show that I thought was, on some level, interesting. If I loved character designs, I wanted to know the character designer (Mai Yoneyama, Sadamoto Yoshiyuki, etc.). If I loved the overall direction, I wanted to know who directed it (Ikuhara Kunihiko, Yamada Naoko, Dezaki Osamu, etc.). Looking up staff evolved beyond just being “for things I liked” as time progressed, and became something I started doing second-nature. That began its own rabbit hole of learning about anime history and production. In my own server when we do weekly groupwatches of movies and OVAs / ONAs, one of the first questions asked by those who come is some variant of “Who made this? What else have they worked on?” after it’s finished.
When MagicalStage’s own dear blu3fl0w wrote about how anime creates community, I recognized that enthusiasm. Looking up stafflists and coming out of my own shell in AniTube wasn’t THE way I created my own sense of anime community at first, but it’s inextricably bound to it now. The baptismal font is overflowing, and I am relishing both drinking from it and sharing its water with others!
Why do I find this so important? Like any other medium, anime is made by and of both people and continuities. Things are not created in a vacuum, nor are they simply willed into existence. Every single creation that you love, and even those you abhor, is the culmination of years upon years of experience working within the medium and what influenced it. It was in watching Rintarou’s film adaptation of CLAMP’s X from 1996 that I first became truly conscious of Kanada Yoshinori, arguably the most important animator of the 1970s. Kanada’s famous dragon sequence was burned into my memory. Seeing Rintarou’s (yes, he’s THAT good a director!) Genma Taisen / Harmageddon from 1983 compelled me to learn about Nakamura Takashi, which started its own rabbit hole of studying anime realism. And wouldn’t you know it: Kanada worked on that film and animated a dragon in it, too (his first, in fact)! Then, when watching Bobby’s Girl / Bobby’s in Deep, I watched for the purposes of seeing Nakamura’s animation in action again, which opened me up to Morimoto Kouji, an animator and director whose work I froth over. Morimoto’s bed of work often involved MVs and shorts. It not only drove me to see those types of anime more regularly, but it also led me to find “Dimension Bomb” probably the best anime short film ever made that isn’t called DAICON IV. Anime realism study also led me to gaining newfound admiration for Kigami Yoshiji, one of the foundational mentors and production juggernauts for Kyoto Animation (especially his Noroi no One Piece).
Even if staff connections are not quite so overt as “X person worked on Y and Z,” the potency of anime’s timeline runs throughout both in past works and present works. Anno Hideaki has mentioned that Neon Genesis Evangelion was as if you combined Tomino Yoshiyuki’s Space Runaway Ideon with Go Nagai’s Devilman. Indeed, seeing all three works makes the influence plainer to see. Does Neon Genesis Evangelion lose of its mystique by knowing what Anno was inspired by, that it was perhaps not as “original” as we believed? Not for me, it doesn’t. If anything, it speaks to the timelessness of the themes within all three of those works. Regardless of the context or technique that went into their making, each one informed the other. I grew to respect and love them for their specific contributions and for reinventing a wheel that constantly spins.
Likewise, knowing that Furukawa Tomohiro created Revue Starlight after their mentoring with Ikuhara Kunihiko on Mawaru Penguindrum establishes its own timeline lineage. Try watching Revue Starlight after watching Revolutionary Girl Utena, and then tell me that there are no similarities in their inherent theatricality, uniformed characters battling with swords against a strange fate and power, and dynamic battle music. Ikuhara himself was inspired heavily by Ikeda Ryouko’s gestalt-changing Rose of Versailles manga in the process of making Revolutionary Girl Utena. Oscar François de Jarjayes in their androgynous and gender nonconformity helped codify these kinds of traits within otaku canon, but even then, they were a continuation of what Tezuka Osamu did with his own Princess Knight. Some of these incarnations are more feminine-coded than others, or wear tomboyishness more readily. But each is a new creation of the same general aesthetic sandbox, molded into new forms as the story demands.
(as a fun trivia bit, Hatta Yoko, the current vice-present of Kyoto Animation, worked on the anime adaptation of Princess Knight as a painter / shiage artist – so there’s another connection for you!)
While I alluded to it before, it’s worth saying more openly: amid studying the who and what in anime, it spurned the curiosity to see these older properties. And in so doing, my implicit bias against older anime was obliterated (bias against old anime is a topic for another time). I obviously can only speak for myself, but it seems that watching older anime seems to be a thing that gets increasingly disincentivized as time marches on. The discussions of the day are always “of the day,” rarely of the past. Why spend more time talking about Attack No. 1 from 1969 when you can catch the newest season of [Oshi no Ko] instead? The latter lights up the forums, the former doesn’t. Even then, you’ll often see comments calling something “peak” or a “W episode.” Talking about the anime of the day satiates the immediate appetite, that’s true. But with a whole buffet at your fingertips, how is curiosity to be nourished if we only look to the present and the future?
Studying stafflists and tracking lineages works against this relentless push forward. It forces us as viewers to stop—a rare thing in this modern age that constantly demands our attention—and take stock of what we have. It requires a glimpse through a different lens for how we consume anime, to consider the “there” rather than the “here.” And in doing so, the “there” INFORMS the “here,” putting things being made now into fresh contexts. Every anime that’s created has an “origin,” as it were. Those origins aren’t simply the original source material that an adaptation may have come from, but also from which stories inspired the creation of the new story. Yes, it’s a seemingly Sisyphean task. However, the act of eternally rolling the boulder up the hill never seemed so enticing. As the famous phrase goes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
It’s naturally not all sunshine and daises. Stafflist discussion may illuminate harsher realities of the industry. Just to isolate one specific example, a glimpse at the stafflist for Kyoto Animation’s Lucky Star will note that after episode 4, the initial series director Yamamoto Yutaka / Yamakan was removed from his position. Takemoto Yasuhiro, who himself worked with Shinbou Akiyuki on The SoulTaker from 2001 (and that’s its own “who worked on what” that’s fascinating in its own right), completed the run. The official statement from the studio was that there were “performance issues” with Yamakan. It led to him eventually being fired, taking some of the studio’s staff with him to create studio Ordet, and helping supervise the genuinely great Black Rock Shooter OVA. And then those staff gradually left in the ensuing years because Yamakan is SUCH a colossal asshole, including being racist and telling Shinkai Makoto to “just shut up” after he expressed condolences after the Kyoto Animation arson attack (there’s more drudge if you’re willing to look for it). Other mass exoduses of staff include studio White Fox and Shaft for their own reasons.
Obviously, learning about all of this isn’t something that can be gleaned by looking at stafflists alone. But even if we can’t glimpse all the secrets of otaku media by doing so, it’s a simple step that goes a long way. Is there something that you really liked? Look up who made it! Then, take the time to see what else they did. As you do, you’ll start amassing a web of connections in your head both through personnel and artistic endeavors. When you see something that vaguely reminds you of something else, you’ll have a better point of orientation for feeling why that is. And there’s few things more thrilling as an anime fan than seeing a trailer or studio announcement that names a creator you love as being on staff with their new project.
Now, as for recognizing animators by their sakuga? That’s another level of intensity! Maybe one day…
For those of you who want to get your grounding on reliable stafflists, there are some resources to help! AniDB, though with a highly outdated UI and small text, is massive in its scope and is mostly accurate. If you need information about something obscure, the chance is more than likely that you can find it there. But one project worth highlighting is the KeyFrame Staff Lists page. Community-based and with a rigorous checking system, it is perhaps as complete as we will get in our lifetime, at least in the English-speaking world. Aside from including alternate names for contributors (pseudonyms, etc.), they also sort all credits by episode number and OP / ED contributions. 5,000 stafflists exist and / or are in-progress, and it’s still building and growing. Some notable gaps exist, mostly because the site itself is so recent—to regrettably bring back Yamakan for a moment, his Hakubo and Fractale are not listed on the site at the time of this writing—but if the initial result is anything to go by, the site’s future only looks bright!
And as a final piece of advice, don’t worry if you don’t get a grasp on things right away with stafflists and their connections. Like any endeavor, it takes time and patience; you won’t become an anime staff savant overnight. The good news is that some of the results start manifesting almost unconsciously. By the time you realize it, you’ll start thinking, “Huh…I recognize the name Nakamura Ryuutarou from serial experiments lain. Wait, he directed two episodes of Mobile Police Patlabor, too!? I gotta see that!”
There’s plenty of information out there waiting for you, and plenty of anime to see with it. Go find them!
