“My style is to have no fixed style. Other people would accuse me of having a style, though. It may be that I understand myself the least.” – Shingo Natsume

I’ll admit, I got off on the wrong foot with Shingo Natsume. My formal introduction to his work was One Punch Man, a show that seemed to me an embodiment of anime’s increasing artlessness and lack of narrative ambition, the growing divide between animated aesthetic form and meaningful narrative, emotional, or thematic content. It was simply “man punches hard” animated as beautifully as possible, and “man punches hard” is a story anime has told countless times, a story perhaps only outnumbered in its evocations by “me horny.” And as the years have gone by, it seems this divide between form and content has only widened, with modern animator troves like Jobless Reincarnation offering nothing of substance, while sequels and indistinguishable light novel adaptations dominate the wider landscape.

And yet, even as the medium as a whole seems to have become more insular and less interested in either new forms of expression or meaningful human stories, Natsume has proven himself a champion of these virtues time and again. It was frankly my mistake for doubting him, given his actual directorial debut was Space Dandy, which was designed from the ground up as a playground and showcase for the most ambitious, creative directors and animators in the business. Though Shinichiro Watanabe’s name was undoubtedly what got this improbable project greenlit (“I’m making a new Cowboy Bebop! Except it’s not Cowboy Bebop, and it’s also not me making it”), it was Natsume who served as the project’s hands-on director, demonstrating both his talent and, even more crucially, his restless ambition.

Since then, Natsume has consistently proven himself one of the most creative, ambitious, and mature directors working in animation. Any given year of anime productions is likely to reap between two and five works I’d recommend to general art enthusiasts, i.e. people who aren’t either engaged by the medium’s standard genre work or vaccinated against its otaku indulgences. And like Watanabe or Naoko Yamada, if Natsume helmed a production in that year, his work will almost certainly be among them. He reaches beyond the commercial ouroboros of increasing indulgence paid for in artistic significance, creating works that at their best challenge and expand, but which are at the very least unique in form and content, and which respect or even challenge their audience rather than flatter their existing preferences. Natsume directs like he’s expecting the audience to keep up, thereby demonstrating his faith in anime and its audience’s potential.

Natsume is uniquely well-suited to serve as the bearer of this torch, and carry the medium’s ambitions forward into a new era. He sits at a particularly fortuitous crossroads of influences, having strong personal ties to both the medium’s older cinema-minded masters (Watanabe, Masaaki Yuasa), as well as its young and increasingly global web generation. From the sturdy foundations provided by directors like Watanabe and Yuasa, Natsume has inherited an understanding of global cinematic form, as well as an interest in expressing through animation stories and styles that haven’t already been fully explored. At the same time, his collaboration with so many up-and-coming animators ensures his work never feels nostalgic, and instead embodies the cutting edge of digital animation and post-processing integration.

Also, and perhaps most crucially for me, he tends to prefer creating stories that adults can also enjoy. Anime at large is consumed by a myopic haze of adolescence, with the vast majority of its output centered primarily or exclusively on the concerns of children and teenagers. This is not surprising; the audience for anime slants overwhelmingly young, and the pipeline of adaptation further encourages a focus on specific age-bracketed media that appeals to adolescent sensibilities. Even when shows focus on adult characters, their authorial perspective often trends towards the juvenile and bombastic, offering little that seems honestly reflective of mature experience. For Natsume, the opposite is true; even in a show like Sonny Boy that’s actually focused on teenagers, his perspective is untethered from adolescent blinders, perhaps even to a fault (while Sonny Boy may star a young cast, they still speak like old souls).

In a medium where even the grand masterpieces are largely concerned with the perils of adolescence, Natsume dares to imagine that anime could offer a robust adult lane, where measured character dramas, thrillers, or works of aesthetic experimentation might thrive. We all know how powerful animation can be as a vehicle for human drama – why should that drama be limited to the narrow confines of childhood? Each of his works feels like a new answer to what anime could be regularly providing: atmospheric political thrillers like ACCA, inheritors of Lain and Texhnolyze’s psychological gothica like Boogiepop, or adaptations of genuinely accomplished, perfectly animation-suited stories like Tatami Time Machine Blues. Each new Natsume work is a window into what the medium could be, if it were not so calcified into its existing form.

Alongside their diversity of genre and perspective, Natsume’s works consistently demonstrate how he is a creator who has something to say, who possesses manifold new thoughts about both animation and the general world we inhabit. In a sea of productions designed principally to validate and comfort, Natsume is never afraid to question or challenge, thereby creating something both honest in its perspective and genuinely new. Drawing on the brightest spots of anime history and collaborating with new animators across the globe, his work offers a reason to hope that global co-productions might offer more than yet another vibrant artistic tradition dedicating itself to Star Wars and Batman. He chases the same dream Ghibli and Gainax once chased, the impossible hope that anime might truly be for everyone.

Because it is true that nothing else is like animation, and nothing else is like anime in particular, with its attendant histories and odd quirks of commercial circumstance.  Having watched shows and films from across anime’s history, I’ve come to appreciate that the medium’s development is not a straight line, but a wandering labyrinth, with bright spots like the World Masterpiece Theater or the filmography of Satoshi Kon occasionally rising from a sea of unremarkable work-for-hire. No commercial instinct demanded Tomino invest so much of himself in his sprawling space operas, or that Ikuhara and Enokido dig so deeply into identity with Revolutionary Girl Utena. Anime has always been great in spite of its commercial limitations, because its greatest creators are simply so determined to make meaningful art.

Shingo Natsume follows directly in the lineage of such maverick creators, constantly pushing the boundaries of anime, and thereby creating the works he, I, and (if I can dare to hope) millions of other would-be animation enthusiasts would love to see. Whether he’s collaborating with living legends and fellow bearers of the torch, or striking off on his own and making something as poignant and personal as Sonny Boy, Natsume is forever restless, forever ambitious, forever unwilling to settle. Untethered from any single genre or design sensibility, he is wide-ranging in his approach, embracing variable tools and aesthetics in pursuit of persistently novel works of art.

As such, even at his relatively young age, he has amassed a collection of productions that should be the envy of any director. While other directors too ambitious for this medium’s current commercial bent have either abandoned it (Rie Matsumoto, Sayo Yamamoto, Kenji Nakamura) or relegated themselves to franchise work, Natsume has continued to swim against the current, making directors like him and Naoko Yamada no less than the hope for anime’s artistic future. The best anime has always been created by lunatics reaching beyond what currently is, conjuring greatness into being amidst a largely hostile commercial climate. Natsume stands among the best of our current lunatics, and I hope he continues to surprise me for decades to come.

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