Biography
Yuuki Kinoshita, born October 15, 1949 [1], took an unusual road into animation: he trained as a chef in Kyoto before a screening of Disney's Fantasia sent him to Tokyo around 1970 to chase a career in animation, reportedly after spotting a recruitment ad at Shibuya Station [2]. He worked his way up through the subcontracting studios Taka Production and Studio Mates before founding his own outfit, Anime ToroToro, and later Studio Graffiti, of which he remained representative director [1][2]. He mentored a number of animators who went on to prominent careers, including Yutaka Nakamura and Tomohiro Furukawa [2]. He is best known, somewhat unwillingly, as the director of Gun-dou Musashi (2006), a series whose animation collapsed so badly under a rushed overseas outsourcing schedule that it became a byword in anime fandom for production disaster [1][3]. In a 2006 interview conducted while the show was still airing, he was blunt about what he had seen, saying it would not be strange to see another show end up like Musashi, and pointing to industry-wide overproduction rather than any single studio's failure [4]. Kinoshita continued directing into his seventies; his final credit was an episode of Love After World Domination (2022), and he died that year from COVID-19 complications [2].
It wouldn't be strange to see another show end up like Musashi.