Shinji Higuchi

Shinji Higuchi (樋口 真嗣, Higuchi Shinji, born September 22, 1965 in Tokyo, Japan) is a storyboard artist, particularly in anime, and one of the top special effects supervisors in Japan, best known for his work on Shusuke Kaneko's Gamera trilogy in the 1990s. He works on both anime and tokusatsu projects.

Biography

As a teenage fan, he started out as one of the four founders of Daicon Films (now Gainax), along with Hideaki Anno, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and Takami Akai. A highly talented artist, he worked on many of their early anime and tokusatsu productions, doing storyboarding as well as special effects. Soon, he got to help out special effects director Teruyoshi Nakano as an uncredited assistant for The Return of Godzilla (1984). But his first major FX credit came with Daicon's 1985 low-budget daikaiju epic-comedy, The Eight-Headed Giant Serpent Strikes Back. He continued to be a storyboarder for anime such as Gunbuster (1988) and Otaku no Video (1991), and was the special effects director for Toho/Tsuburaya Productions' 1991 SF-thriller, Mikadoroid.