Incomprehensible Legend Toshiki Inoue – This Week in Anime

Chris


Coop, Jyuo Mujin Dandivine is out this season, and readers oughta know we’re excited about it mostly because it lets us discuss a topic near and dear to our hearts.

Mecha anime? Not this time. Transforming robot toys? We would never tempt fate (Lynzee) like that again.

Nah, it’s only time at last for us to talk the man, the myth, the often incomprehensible legend: Toshiki Inoue.

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.

its always a good time to post this

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— doro (@dorothree.bsky.social) November 17, 2025 at 6:52 AM

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.

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…

Akiko Inoue also contributed to Kamen Rider Gotchard, and has shown up on anime including One Piece! So she’s already well on track to have as eclectic a career as her father.

But lest we get too far into family subplots (lord knows Toshiki Inoue has written a few of those too) or surreptitiously turn this into a total tokusatsu column, it is important to round back to how well-rounded Inoue’s work is. His anime work trends toward adaptations, but he’s also collaborated on original works (like Dandivine) and even taken a stab at being a manga-ka in partnership with Keita Amemiya on Sword Gai, which got its own Netflix anime years back.

Oh yeah, this is probably the anime most mainstream viewers would be familiar with Inoue from. And it’s honestly a good one, since the treatment of the original manga, so tonally different from the more procedural presentation of the pages, stands out as an example of the power of adaptation in general and Inoue’s sensibilities specifically.

Of course, he’s going to revel in a story about characters intentionally sowing misunderstandings among each other. Inoue really dials up the camp in Death Note in a way that rings familiar if you’ve seen so many of his toku treatments.

That and the homoeroticism. Of course this guy would come up with the galaxy-brain idea of writing in a whole new L/Light foot-massage scene into a climactic episode.

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.

And speaking of, still riding the high of the similarly toy-dismissive Donbrothers was the main reason I was excited to see Inoue’s name attached to the itself toy-propelled Dandivine. And of course, right out the gate he’s showing that he’s gonna have some takes on this topic.

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.

As I said, it can take time to click with some people, hence the reappraisal that came around on something like Kamen Rider 555. But I also think Dandivine has enough interest points with respect to the baseline genre that pique things up anyway, like the aforementioned toy-market metacommentary or the inherent humor in a support crew that’s been on standby for 20 years, like some sort of mecha Maytag Man.

But then I also heard what felt like nothing but cold takes on Sword Gai for years, and it turns out that show actually kinda whips, so maybe I am just a sucker for Inoue’s stuff, specifically.

Not to get too into the fandom history weeds, but I also remember that feeling of too-cool reading of Inoue’s more out-there work. Sure there are genuine duds like the last section of Kamen Rider Hibiki (even if that wasn’t necessarily his fault), but regardless, you don’t get all the work you do in this industry without noticeably putting in the effort. Even something as shaggy-dog-y as Kamen Rider Kabuto‘s infamous “Dark Kitchen” arc, when boiled down to its pure ingredients, tells a story about the otherwise God-like Tendou reckoning with learning about an obstacle in the world he has to work to surmount.

Maybe it comes from being a writer myself, but I’ve come to most appreciate works where I can feel the writer and their personal idiosyncrasies behind the work. Inoue’s writing, especially as it’s gone on and interfaced with so many of the similar mediums and stories, has a lot of that striving personal stamp felt in it.

God, talk about too much of this guy’s work not being officially available. He was behind the anime treatment of the original Yu-Gi-Oh! anime—the Toei-animated take on the early manga stories that fans termed “Season 0”!

It does speak to the sheer size of Inoue’s body of work that’s out there, and how crisscrossed across genres he can be. He contributed to the GARO tokusatsu series (there’s Keita Amemiya again) and then got to head off one of its anime spin-off seasons in Garo: Crimson Moon.

The previous season of the GARO anime was helmed by Inoue’s similarly steeped colleague Yasuko Kobayashi (god we could do a whole column on her if we wanted to). Inoue is dense into this sphere!

I think that’s a good point about how easy it is to throw a dart and hit something he touched. Virtually anybody in the weebisphere for the past forty years has almost certainly had contact with something Inoue wrote on, even if they weren’t aware of it. And it makes for a good case to go and check out other options from his catalog even if something like Dandivine isn’t hitting for you (though to be fair, as of this writing, there’s only one episode of it).

It’s fun to sample the sheer amount of flavors available from a storied creator of tales that’s been active as long as he has. And spot some of the parallels along the way.