Shirō Sagisu

Shirō Sagisu is a Japanese composer, arranger, and music producer whose career spans anime, television drama, film, and recording projects. Born in Tokyo on August 29, 1957, he is especially identified with director Hideaki Anno’s works. Sagisu composed the music for Gainax’s 1990 television series Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and later became a central musical collaborator on Neon Genesis Evangelion, first broadcast in 1995. Evangelion’s score combined orchestral writing, choral material, electronic textures, jazz-inflected cues, and reworkings of familiar melodies. Its releases included arrangements of “Fly Me to the Moon” used as ending themes in the original television run, alongside songs performed by singers including Yoko Takahashi. Sagisu returned for Anno’s Rebuild of Evangelion film series: Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo, and Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time. These films reused, revised, and expanded musical ideas from the 1995 series while adding new cues. He also provided music for Anno’s 2016 live-action film Shin Godzilla. The soundtrack credits identify Sagisu as composer, with music associated with Akira Ifukube’s earlier Godzilla themes also present in the film. Outside Evangelion, Sagisu is widely known for composing the score to the anime adaptation of Tite Kubo’s Bleach. His Bleach music employed recurring rock, hip-hop, Latin, orchestral, and vocal elements, and was issued across multiple soundtrack albums. He composed for the television anime His and Her Circumstances, directed in part by Anno, and for Sore ga Seiyuu!, among other productions. His screen work also includes music for the 2015 film Attack on Titan and its sequel Attack on Titan: End of the World. Before and alongside screen scoring, Sagisu worked as an arranger and producer in Japanese popular music. He has collaborated with singers and musicians in Japan and abroad, and recordings credited to him often feature substantial studio ensembles, solo vocalists, and orchestral players. His professional identity is therefore not limited to a single franchise: his catalog connects television animation, theatrical features, and commercial music production. Nevertheless, Evangelion remains the project most closely associated with his name, particularly for the dramatic scale and stylistic range of its music. Across its versions, his contribution helped give Anno’s apocalyptic drama an immediately recognizable sonic character. He also scored the 2013 television anime Magi: The Kingdom of Magic, following his music for Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic, which premiered in 2012 in Japan.