Yuki Yase

Yuki Yase is a Japanese animation director whose credits connect him strongly with Shaft and David Production. He worked in episode direction on Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011), the Shaft television series created by Magica Quartet. Yase directed episode five, “There’s No Way I’d Ever Regret It,” an important Sayaka Miki episode in which her growing involvement with Kyubey and the magical-girl system becomes central. This credit placed him on one of Shaft’s most internationally recognized productions, a series directed by Akiyuki Shinbo and Yukihiro Miyamoto and written by Gen Urobuchi. Its television broadcast ran for twelve episodes in 2011. Yase made his television series directing debut with Hidamari Sketch × Honeycomb in 2012. It is the fourth televised installment of the Hidamari Sketch anime franchise, adapted from Ume Aoki’s four-panel manga. The gently paced story concerns students at the Yamabuki Art High School who live at the Hidamari Apartments, especially Yuno. Directing this season meant working within a property already deeply identified with Shaft, whose earlier entries had been directed by Akiyuki Shinbo. In 2014, Yase directed Mekakucity Actors, another Shaft television production. The series adapts Jin’s Kagerou Project, a cross-media work that originated with songs and expanded through novels and other formats. Mekakucity Actors centers on the Mekakushi Dan, young people with unusual eye-related abilities. Its plot repeatedly returns to August 15, when a group becomes caught in a time loop associated with the Kagerou Daze. The show does not simply adapt one linear source: it reorganizes material from across the project’s songs and prose works. Yase also directed Kubikiri Cycle: The Blue Savant and the Nonsense Bearer, an eight-episode original video animation released from 2016 to 2017. It adapts Nisioisin’s novel Kubikiri Cycle, the first book in the Zaregoto series. The mystery begins when protagonist Ii accompanies Tomo Kunagisa to an island gathering of specialists, where a double murder occurs in an isolated setting. In 2019, Yase moved to David Production for Fire Force. He directed the first television season of the adaptation of Atsushi Ohkubo’s manga. Its protagonist, Shinra Kusakabe, joins Special Fire Force Company 8, a unit that combats people transformed into destructive “Infernals” through spontaneous human combustion. The series combines emergency-response action with Shinra’s search for the truth about the fire that killed his family. Fire Force’s first season aired in 2019, and Yase’s direction covered its full twenty-four-episode run. His career links these distinct productions.