Hiromasa Ogura

Biography

Hiromasa Ogura (小倉宏昌), born 1954 in Tokyo, started working in animation at Kobayashi Production in 1977. He worked on Space Adventure Cobra (1982) under the art direction of Toshiharu Mizutani and painted backgrounds for Hayao Miyazaki’s Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979). In 1983 Ogura left Kobayashi Pro and set up Studio Fuga with Hiroshi Ono and Toshiharu Mizutani. During that time he also served as an art director on the Royal Space Force – The Wings of Honneamise (1987).

Ogura has worked closely with Mamoru Oshii since 1987. Their first collaboration was the film Twilight Q: Mystery File 538 (1987), on which Haruhiko Higami worked as well. In 1988 he contributed several background paintings to Akira. Ogura was the art director of Patlabor – The Movie (1988), Patlabor 2 – The Movie (1993) and Ghost in the Shell (1995). His special attention to signs of weathering on buildings is a good complement to Oshii's frequently dystopian urban visions. From 1995 to 2007 he was head of the art department at Production I.G. He was the art director for Jin-Roh – The Wolf Brigade (2000), FLCL (2000) and Last Exile (2003). He also worked on the background art of Innocence (2004) under the art direction of Shuichi Kusamori.

In 2007 Ogura founded his own studio Ogura Koubou. Since then he directed the art work of Ghost Hound (2007), Black Butler (2008), Strike Witches (2008) and Sora no Otoshimono (2009). In 2015 he supplied background art work for episode 19 of the TV series Shirobako. In this episode he is featured as himself, which underlines his importance in the anime industry.

In the following years, he has worked on multiple TV series with a dark tone, like 91 Days (2016) and the highly anticipated Junji Ito Collection (2018).

Although nowadays a younger generation uses computer animation in all areas of production, the most important tools for Hiromasa Ogura are still the layout table, paper, pencil and paintbrush. These photographs were taken at Ogura Koubo in 2021.