Japanese director: Hideyuki Tanaka

He grew up devoted to manga characters and later became partial to Gremlins. Now he just seems to love everything – gaming, VJ-ing, creating big-budget, celeb-filled spots, iPhone apps, short films, anime TV series, and, lately, sci-fi dramas. Isobel Roberts meets an animated man.

For nearly every kid in Japan, spending a portion of your youth obsessed by certain manga characters is a rite of passage. Few, however, get to take that passion and transform it into a successful career. But that’s what Hideyuki Tanaka, one of Japan’s veteran commercial directors, has been lucky – and talented – enough to achieve. “My direct line of influence was more from comics and cartoons than films, as when I was a kid I was really into manga and cartoons,” says the director, sitting in his Tokyo workshop, “and so I became interested in illustration and started off drawing in a cartoon style.”

Raised in the Shizuoka Prefecture, to the southwest of the capital, Tanaka moved to the neon lights of Tokyo to study graphic design at Tama Art University and after graduation joined the national television broadcaster NHK. Having already developed a desire to bring his characters to life, his work as an art director in the computer graphics department helped him learn the trade until, when another broadcaster approached him with an idea for a kids TV show, he set sail and launched his own company, Frame Graphics, in 1992.

“When I first established Frame Graphics, the purpose wasn’t to become a film director as such but to work across different media,” recalls Tanaka. “For example, art directing CD covers for bands, plus I worked in fashion – doing the graphic design for t-shirts or art direction related to a campaign.”

But it was his connection with the music world that led him down the road of directing in 1998. After kicking off with a few animated promos, he received requests to take on live action jobs too, and began combining the two styles. And as the popularity of his music videos grew, so did the attention from the advertising world, with creatives and production companies alike knocking on the door. And since his first commercial collaboration, there’s been no looking back. Now one of the most prominent directors in Japan, Tanaka is known for his skills in animation, art direction and post production.

“I always really liked special effect movies from Japan in the 70s and 80s and Hollywood films such as Gremlins,” he elaborates, “and so my inspiration grew out of that and my interest in blending and compositing from post production and character design in animation.” In a rare case for most directors, he’s also trusted with pure live action and even Hollywood royalty, directing portions of the infamous SoftBank ads featuring stars such as Brad Pitt and Cameron Diaz.

His talents extend beyond the camera however: “I do lots of different types of projects,” he continues, “so rather than considering myself a full-time director, the core of what I do is more based around art direction skills.” As well as continuing his design work in fashion – his brother is founder of the kitsch label Super Lovers – other skills Tanaka has mastered include creating short films, gaming, VJ-ing, developing iPhone apps, plus concepting and crafting two full length TV series.

His first anime series Super Milk Chan, featuring a petulant five-year-old superhero Milk, her robot maid and alcoholic pet slug, was a labour of love. The show took three years to develop, and after airing in Japan at the end of the 90s it later became popular in the US and was screened on Cartoon Network. “When Japanese TV started, the original TV anime series – such as Chibi Maruko-chan – were family-based,” says Tanaka, musing on the show’s beginnings. “I was motivated by watching them as a kid – that combination of animation and soap-opera style story was what I wanted to tap into.”

Tanaka’s new show, still in the making, again takes inspiration from the original anime series, but set 100 years in the future, it also combines another of his interests – science fiction. “Rather than set the drama in contemporary times I thought it would be more interesting and I could come up with fresher ideas if it was in the future,” he explains. “I wanted to address contemporary issues, but by putting them in the context of the futuristic drama you can adjust the angle and interpretation on it and cloak it in a different form in a sense. Anything you feel cynical about now you can put it into that drama, as the best of science fiction does.”

Casting his eyes to the international scene, Tanaka also completed his first job for a European agency earlier this year, working with Hungry Man and WCRS on the commercial to launch Sky HD in the UK, an experience he’d like to repeat. And with his depth and breadth of skills, we imagine this jack (and master) of all trades won’t be finding himself short of opportunities.