Director Hiroshi Ishida Passes Away

Anime director Shinpei Nagai announced on X (formerly Twitter) that director Hiroshi Ishida (石田 博) has passed away. No further details about Ishida’s death were given.

Hiroshi Ishida and Shinpei Nagai started their careers together at Shin-Ei Animation in the mid-to-late 1990s as production assistants. Later, they moved together to Studio Junio, and Ishida ended up working for Shin-Ei Animation’s subsidiary studio, SynergySP, where he started taking on directing work. Soon after, he became associated with Toei Animation as both a production assistant and director where he was most notably the assistant director for Osamu Dezaki’s Air (2005).

Nagai reminisced that Ishida was one of his friends who was present when he proposed to his wife.

Note: There is another Hiroshi Ishida (石田 博) in the industry. He is a former producer at studio Daume and recently has been working with WIT Studio and its IG Port affiliates as a production manager. Both Ishida started working as production assistants at their respective studios around the same time, which caused confusion. I would like to thank Nagai-san for speaking with me and helping to correctly attribute both individuals‘ work. Director Ishida differentiated himself from his contemporary by commonly crediting himself in either Katakana (イシダ ヒロシ) or partial Hiragana (石田 ひろし) in the 2000s.

Featured image: Air: The Motion Picture, © VisualArt’s / Key / Toei Animation / Frontier Works