Nobuyuki Takeuchi

is a Japanese animator, director, character designer and production designer. His work with directors Akiyuki Shinbo (and more broadly studio Shaft) and Kunihiko Ikuhara have gained noteworthy fame since the late 1990s and especially through the mid-2000s. Career Takeuchi was originally from sub-contracting animation studio Dragon Production, which he belonged to sometime during the mid-1980s. His tenure at the company was relatively short-lived as he transferred to Studio Lions, the in-between division to Studio Giants, soon thereafter; and eventually, he became a part of the larger Studio Giants entity. In the early 1990s, however, Takeuchi went freelance. Around 1994, he was offered a seat as a freelancer at Shaft and started to work on a number of their outsource works and eventually made his debut as an animation director on the studio's first original televised work, Juuni Senshi Bakuretsu Eto Ranger (1995). In 1997, Takeuchi worked as the animation director for Shaft's outsourced episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara. Takeuchi's work on the series gained particular interest from Ikuhara, who invited him to work on the succeeding movie as an animation director. Also that year, Takeuchi participated as a character designer for Shaft's Sakura Diaries OVA series. The following year, in 1998, studio Radix was set to produce an adaptation of Silent Möbius, but the production ended up being outsourced to Shaft. Chief director Hideki Tonokatsu worked at Shaft, and Shaft became the main production site and also the company responsible for finding the series' staff; and finding interest in Takeuchi's work, saying that Takeuchi had a clear vision and direction, he was given the role of series "animation director" (not referring to the correction of drawings). Takeuchi's work from the series garnered interest from then-managing director of Shaft Mitsutoshi Kubota, who felt that Takeuchi would be a central figure in Shaft's succeeding productions. For the next several years, Takeuchi continued to freelance as a key animator and animation director across several studios, even doing work for Studio Ghibli, but he gained prominence in 2004 when Shaft teamed up with Akiyuki Shinbo to produce Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase, the start of Shinbo and Shaft's long collaborative history.