Japanese designer and maker of puppets, a director, writer and animator of independently-made stop motion films and president of the Japan Animation Association since 1989 (until his death in August 2010), succeeding Osamu Tezuka. Previously an illustrator and doll maker, he has collaborated with Tadasu Iizawa and trained under Tadahito Mochinaga and, later, Jiří Trnka. His most famous creations in his native Japan are the puppets he designed and made for a long-running TV series adaptation of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms; internationally he is better known for his own short films. Most of these are model animation; Tabi and Shijin no Shōgai are cutout animation and the French-language Farce anthropo-cynique is mixed media.
