Popular anime director Yamakan (full name Yutaka Yamamato) recently announced that he will no longer be working in the anime industry after he finishes his last project, a film titled Hakubo. This surprising announcement was posted last week on his personal blog and shared a follow-up post on Monday which unveils more details about this decision.
Yamakan is no stranger to the anime industry as he was the director of several episodes of the anime adaptation of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya at Kyoto Animation. He also worked in the Lucky Star anime as its series director from episode 1 to 4, then been replaced by Yasuhiro Takemoto. Kyoto Animation released a statement on its official website saying that he [Yamakan] “did not have the skills yet to be a director.”
In the case of his announcement of leaving and quitting, this isn’t the first time he’s done these. Apparently, this is his fifth. His recent announcement was back in January this year where he threatened to leave the anime industry. In 2016, he also announced that he is taking an “indefinite leave” from working to recover from “unreasonable circumstances”. He then returned a few months later to work on a project, which was revealed to be Hakubo.
Going back to his latest announcement, he started off his blog post placing a 2016 video of his talk titled “Anime is dead”, which he discusses how he dislikes the modern anime that is being shown lately. One of the anime series he mentioned was the 2009 anime series K-ON! and expressed that the anime series “gave him the chills” and it got him to realize that he has lost his place in the anime industry.
This motivated him to just get back on track and work on his 2011 film titled Fractale. In the film’s official website, he wrote that he was willing to put his career on the line for this film and he would leave the anime industry if the film flopped. He later retracted these statements on his Twitter account (now suspended).
While he was notable due to the anime that he worked with, he was quite infamous on social media since he used it as a tool to ironically criticize the industry that he was in:
“However, I was naive to believe that after 10 years, something would change,” he declared. “This industry hasn’t changed at all. I thought that the one thing that could finally turn it around was the will of the people, but now even the management of social media services are interfering with me, so [being on social media] isn’t working at all. It was the ultimate backstabbing move.”
Yamakan said in this blog post:
“What I felt then was not a mistake. But at my company there were friends from my Kyoto Animation days. I had no choice but to come back. But by then, it was already… I can’t go into details, but to cut a long story short, going back was a mistake.”
He closed it with the following statement:
“It was all fruitless, but I did all I could in these 10 years. I wasn’t able to change things with my own hands after all. After seeing it all play out in full and grasping the situation almost perfectly, it’s frustrating to feel so helpless. But, whatever. I give up. This is where it ends.”
Source: Yamakan’s blog, ANN
