Yoshiko Okuda

Yoshiko Okuda (Japanese: 奥田佳子) is a Japanese animator and anime director. Her record is a textbook example of how a career is built inside a Japanese animation studio: she has around seventy-four credits, and they move steadily up the ladder rather than starting at the top.

She began as a key animator, the person who draws the defining frames of a shot, and stayed in that role for most of two decades. Her key animation credits run from 2001 onward and read like a survey of the period: Naruto (2002), Chobits (2002), Samurai Champloo (2004), Trinity Blood (2005), Noein: To Your Other Self (2005), Black Lagoon (2006), Macross Frontier (2008), Black Butler (2008), Haikyu!! (2014), Your Lie in April (2014), Joker Game (2016), Spy x Family (2022) and Makoto Shinkai’s film Suzume (2022). She has more than forty key animation credits in all.

From the mid-2000s she began taking animation director roles as well, supervising the drawing on an episode rather than drawing it, starting with Noein in 2005 and continuing through Black Lagoon, Your Lie in April and Saekano. She has eleven of those credits.

Direction came later. She has seven director credits and six as a storyboard artist, including episodes of Horimiya in 2021, where she also worked as a key animator and storyboard artist, and Blue Box in 2024.

She is credited as series director on the Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?! anime, which is the top of that ladder: the person responsible for the whole production rather than a single episode.