Animator Kenichirō Katsura, who led Synduality: Noir, has died
Katsura was chief animation director on both seasons of Synduality: Noir and worked on Macross 7, the Grisaia series and this year's Gintama film.
The animator Kenichirō Katsura, who was chief animation director on both seasons of Synduality: Noir, has died aged 59. His wife, the animator Satoko Miyachi, announced the death on Monday, saying he died on 30 September while receiving treatment for an illness and that a private funeral had already been held with only close relatives present.
What his family and colleagues said
Miyachi posted a written notice to her X account on Monday, thanking the fans who loved Katsura's work, the studios that employed him and the staff who worked alongside him. The same day, the production committee behind the Knight's & Magic television anime published a statement of its own, noting that Katsura had been that series' character designer and chief animation director and offering condolences on behalf of the staff and everyone connected to the production.
A career that ran from 1989 to this year
Katsura's earliest listed credit is 1989, as a key animator on the original Ranma ½ television series. He went on to key animation on the first part of Mobile Suit SD Gundam Festival and on the Mobile Suit SD Gundam Mk V and Mobile Suit SD Gundam: SD Gundam Legend OVAs, before taking episode key animation work on Oishinbo, Noir, the 1995 Magic Knight Rayearth 2, Date A Live II, Encouragement of Climb and BLUE LOCK 2nd Season. He worked as a director as well as an animator, directing the Utawarerumono and Hi・Me・Go・To OVAs.
*Macross 7*, then a decade of chief animation roles
Katsura was an animation director on four episodes of Macross 7, episode director and animation director on the third episode of the Macross 7 Encore OAV, character designer for Macross 7 Plus, and character designer and animation character designer for Macross 7 the Movie: The Galaxy's Calling Me!. He later served as chief animation director on The Fruit of Grisaia, The Eden of Grisaia, the second season of Shy, How to keep a mummy and eight episodes of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.
The two films he finished this year
His most recent credits are both cinema releases from February. He was animation director on Gintama: The Movie 2026: Yoshiwara in Flames, which opened in Japan on 13 February, and a key animator on That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime the Movie: Tears of the Azure Sea, which opened a fortnight later on 27 February. Synduality: Noir, the Bandai Namco science-fiction series he led as chief animation director, ran for two seasons from 2023.
Our opinion
The job Katsura did for most of his career is the one an audience is least likely to see. A chief animation director sets the drawing standard a whole series has to meet, corrects the work of everyone else and absorbs the blame when a production runs short of time — and then the credit scrolls past in three seconds. That is why the tributes here came from colleagues rather than from studios: a production committee can mourn a name, but only the people who sat next to him know how much of what reached the screen was his correction. There is a particular kind of loss in a career like this one, which is that the evidence is spread across forty years of other people's work, in four episodes of Macross 7 and one episode of Noir at a time. The most useful response available to the industry is not a tribute but a habit: keep the correction sheets, and keep crediting the people who fill them in.