This Week in Anime - Incomprehensible Legend Toshiki Inoue
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Come meet the man behind L and Light's homoerotic foot massage scene.
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It feels like his name being attached to Dandivine was the big thing that made a lot of people in our circle sit up and take notice of the project (well, and God Brave Studios on the mecha designs, for the toyheads adjacent to us). And it's funny, because I can see some weebs out there less aware, thinking they aren't as familiar with his work, to which I say: yes, you are.
That is, while tokusatsu fans feel more familiar with Inoue, his anime credits run deep, including on hit adaptations like Ranma 1/2 and Death Note. Hell, he got his anime start on Dr. Slump. And of course he's contributed to a ton of original projects. Anyone remember Galaxy Angel? He wrote Galaxy Angel.
And as an even bigger "hell yeah," Inoue penned the iconic "Trans Rights" episode of Dirty Pair.
Guy has been on the ball since the mid-80s, even if he's occasionally tripped and fallen into a river like his many Kamen Rider protagonists.
Inoue and Toku heroes in rivers, name a more iconic duo.
Speaking of duos, that Dirty Pair episode is a good examination of Inoue's efforts through eras and those eccentricities that he's always deployed. We post that scene all the time, because it's awesome, but have people actually watched episode 7 of Dirty Pair TV? It's a madcap mishmash of bunny boys, burger subterfuge, and time-travel tourism.
Its own kind of absurd awesome all the way down.
More episodic romps like Dirty Pair, City Hunter, and Dr. Slump are a great place to see Inoue's writing instincts in action, even if he was just starting at the time. As I said waaaay back in 2023 when we ran down all the Kamen Rider series officially available at the time (and before I worked on like almost of all of the Showa-era entries), Inoue's all about ensuring that viewer has a great time while watching his work, even if certain elements fall apart under closer scrutiny.
Allegedly inspired by Twin Peaks (another series that falls into that "great time even if it has issues" bucket), Kamen Rider Agito opens up with a horrifying mystery for our amnesiac hero and the police to solve. However, when we get closer to the conclusion, one tends to notice how the material is being stretched and messaged to carry a whole year's run on the air—an issue every Kamen Rider and Super Sentai series has brushed up against. But what makes Inoue's writing even more compelling is that he's not afraid to take wild swings at the very end either. Just ask your nearest tokusatsu fan about Jetman's Gai.
By the way, I'm so glad we live in a world in which Agito has proper English subtitles now...even if they're set to evaporate at the end of the month.
We've come so far.
Having announcements for Agito and Kabuto (which we'll probably also bring up) is another bittersweet tie-in to this Inoue incident. And it's a reminder that his Rider work is only part of the tokusatsu story. The guy cut his teeth on a ton of episodes of that franchise's sister series, Super Sentai, before hitting the head writer gig with 1991's aforementioned Jetman.
And like, there's a reason Jetman is one of the most popular Sentai entries, including one of my all-time favorites! Inoue really cut loose with his interest in the inherent friction and misunderstandings between people to deliver a team of heroes that was dysfunctional in a way that hadn't really been done before in this franchise! You mentioned Gai's shocking end, but just having a character like that, a real reprehensible criminal of a character, as a main-team Ranger would be unheard of, and his arc worked through that. Though even with him, I can't lie, my actual favorite part of this show is Ako.
Inoue would hone that dysfunctional group dynamic for a ton of his other projects, but it's frustrating that it's not easier to stream Jetman (or any other original Sentai) to see how he got there before. At least I've got my DVDs...
"Dysfunctional," you say?
But before I keep my eyes on the next Faiz, tokusatsu runs in the blood for Inoue. His father, Masaru Igami, was a key writer on the original Kamen Rider television series, so that has some obvious influence. That's not all; his daughter went on to the final Super Sentai series, No. 1 Sentai Gozyuger (which has quite the dysfunctional cast of its own). They've got something of a family affair going on with their heroes.
I'll admit, that made my brain zoom straight into Donbrothers—a series I know only for how much it doesn't care about Sentai convention and the slow-burn romance these two have.
It might be all the Yuri!!! on Ice and Heated Rivalry I watched over the weekend talking.
No, as someone who watched all of Donbrothers, I can confirm you're right. Momoi and Sonoi's romantic rivalry is so passionate it even comes with its own theme song.
It has a lot more going on than that too, of course. Donbrothers is absolutely an ur-Inoue work, as he throws down a lot of ideas and a lot of feelings about weekly children's superhero series—both watching and writing them. It's got a lot of his typical tropes, including heroes who are eccentric freaks of some sort, and of course plenty of weird food stuff. But it's ultimately about how spending time with others, even in the format of stretching out episodes over a year of television, can make an impact and change people.
Those are the broad strokes, of course. What was really neat about Donbrothers was how it, in all its effective eccentricities, endeared a lot of people to Inoue in this unleashed state and even got them to reappraise some of his previously uneven works that employed many of these same tropes, like the aforementioned Kamen Rider 555.
Including, but not limited to, throwing the mid-season power-up at your hero out of nowhere simply because you don't care about toy sales, but you still gotta promote the new one.
Yeah, there's an irony to the fact that Dandivine's presentation is pretty tepid by toy-advert mecha standards, and I miss a new entry in the genre not having as much sauce as, say, Bang Brave Bravern. But in this case it means I just hone in on that writing more, and I think Inoue's juices are already flowing.
I mentioned that Inoue's lead characters can trend toward eccentric weirdos defined by their extremes, so it absolutely works to see him put forward a main character who is so normal and so average that it...leads to him being perceived as an eccentric weirdo. And its own piss-take on cookie-cutter protags in modern anime entries.
Plus, he's got someone being an absolute freak about food.
You could say that his heart was in the cards before they were even drawn...
In the meantime, he'll be fanning the flames of his next wild ride.
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