Akira Amemiya

Akira Amemiya is an animator and up-and-coming director best known for directing SSSS.GRIDMAN and being Studio Trigger founder Hiroyuki Imaishi's protege. Amemiya's animation and directing is very similar to Imaishi's yet is less chaotic and contains more 'retro' devices like impact frames and multi-tonal shading, drawing a lot of inspiration from Masami Obari. For these reasons he was frequently typecasted for old school pose-heavy mecha combat.

Amemiya is a nerdy director whose anime often heavily references other series and artists he loves, sometimes even replicating Obari's animation sequences and layouts, Transformer's color designs, and Hideaki Anno's establishing shots as well as long-lingering framing. Amemiya called Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion his favorite series before. Between his ode-heavy artistry he interjects personality with subtle details, visual gags, and repurposing tonally contrasting homages into a different context.

Amemiya graduated from Tokyo University of Technology and was part of the university's anime research society. During his time there he became heavily influenced by Osaka University's anime research club Group CAS. At the time Toshiyuki Satou was part of the group, while Ikehata Hiroshi visited regularly. After a bit of indie work Amemiya joined studio Gainax and climbed up the hierarchy: from clean-up to animation direction, onto storyboarding and episode directing, until after joining studio Trigger and co-directing Kill la Kill finally having the credentials to debut with his own series.

He is married to animator Megumi Kouno.