As I've said I want to start talking on this blog about how I think Directors often get too much credit and we should maybe start paying more attention to the writers.
The thing that makes TV Anime a particularly interesting medium in this case is how there are usually less writers then directors.
The "Series Composition" credit seems to be the writing equivalent of being the Series Director, it's a job that in theory could be done by someone not writing individual episode scripts at all, but it generally doesn't play out that way. Usually the writer with that credit also writes more episodes then anyone else and that includes the first and last episodes and a number of the other most definitely not filler episodes in-between. And there are usually only 4 or 5 writers in total, often only 3 who could be said to have written a significant amount.
However there are usually between 7-10 Episode Directors, and the first and last episodes usually don't have the same director. And the series director probably actually episode directs less Episodes then he would have if he weren't the series director. And no director even comes close to directing as many episodes as the "Series Composition" person usually writes.
Some shows fail to give a Series Composition credit, at least on the main English language Database websites (MAL, ANN and AniDB), but it's often easy to guess who was serving that function by looking at what and how many episodes the writers wrote. Like Sukehiro Tomitia for the first season of Sailor Moon
who I've already talked about. He also seems to be this again for the Black Moon saga, but for
the Doom Tree Saga I would argue the most important writer was Shigeru Yanagawa.
For
Sailor Moon S things are a bit different. Tomita seems to no longer be obviously the most important writer, Megumi Sugihara wrote the most episodes for S at 10 episodes, but still not as many as Tomita wrote for prior seasons. She had been around since season 1 but not quite from the start of it. S had more writers total because of the newcomer, Youji Enokido who wrote 9 episodes, which began with the Jupiter and Venus spotlight episodes of the first cour, but would then include the HaruMi origin story episode. Tomito did write the first and last episodes, but S is structured so different from season 1 that even that doesn't mean as much, the last episode of S is literally filler. Tomita wrote 7 episodes total.
Three of Sailor Moon's writers including Tomita would leave after S to go work on other projects, to some extent I think they were writing less during S because they were doing the prep work for those projects. The one I talked about in the
Cutey Honey Flash post was the lead writer of
Gundam Wing, if you've ever felt like Wing is the most Shoujo esque of all Gundam shows, that's because it was written by someone who spent most of the 90s writing Magical Girl shows.
Sailor Moon SuperS is the first season to actually have a Series Composition credit, which is given to Youji Enokido. Kind of surprising as he was the complete Newcomer for S, Megumi had seniority but I guess you can't have the lead writer of a show for girls actually be a girl. Enokido also wrote the Screenplay for the SuperS movie, Black Dream Hole (the first two movies were written by Tomita).
Megumi and Enokido both left Sailor Moon after SuperS creating a situation where Sailor Stars the last season had no writing staff overlap with the first 3 seasons and two writers who had no prior Sailor Moon experience at all. If you think Sailor Moon's quality went down hill it was definitely the writing staff that changed more then the directorial staff, the Series Director of Stars had been part of the Sailor Moon directorial team since Goldfish Warning!. But I don't think the Stars writers are overall inferior writers, they were just at the time less experienced, some of them I know went on to write stuff that can compete with the early seasons of Sailor Moon (Doki Doki PreCure has the same Series Composition writer). When Sailor Moon started Toei hired some pretty experienced writers and directors because they kind of wanted this to become one of their most important shows. But once those writers wanted to go on to other things they were replaced by relative newcomers.
The first 6 episodes of
Sailor Stars I feel would work really well edited together into a 2 hour movie. What's interesting here is each one has a different director, but it was all written by two writers, the only two Stars writers who were veterans of SuperS, so ideally placed to write that season's epilogue. Though they had no experience writing the Outer Senshi since Enokido did their episode of the Special, in which case they did surprisingly well.
Megumi doesn't seem to have done much after leaving Sailor Moon. Enokido while doing SuperS wrote 4 episodes of
Neon Genesis Evangelion, all of them from the first half of the show. I at first thought the only reason he had writing credits in the Rebuild films is because the first two redo/remake stuff from his episodes. But then he also has a credit in 3.33 which has no connection to any episode he wrote. So either their credits by default list everyone who worked on the original or they did consult him on something.
The first thing Enokido did after he left Sailor Moon was be the head writer of
Revolutionary Girl Utena. Yes I'm applying my maybe we give directors too much credit idea to even the most revered work of one of Anime's most worshiped Auteur Directors. Utena definitely looks the way it does chiefly because of Ikuhara, and the basic idea of it's story started with Ikuhara.
But there is a segment of the fanbase who thinks Utena is the only (completely original to him) Ikuhara show that's great and are not so infatuated with his over hyped 2010s stuff, like WhiningAboutYuri on Tumblr, and that could be largely because the 2010s shows had completely different writers. I personally enjoy his 2010s stuff, and probably consider Penguindrum more rewatchable then Utena. But Utena is the only Ikuhara show I'd ever really call a must watch show. And YuriKuma's final act frustrates me, on a list of Yuri shows it'll always fall below Citrus and Strawberry Panic in my rankings. Of course even with Penguindrum I'd have preferred a happier ending.
And also on Utena Ikuhara was never even an Episode Director. So he was at the top of the pyramid but there was a lot of delegating. It was a collaborative effort on every level. It's almost like when that one comedian makes fun of Steve Jobs getting all the credit for the iPhone. Enokido may well have done more writing then Ikuhara did directing.
Enokido wasn't Utena's only writer.
One I already made a post about due to my love of some of his other work. But a lot of the other writers seem to have Utena as the only Anime they ever worked on. Including the person who wrote most of the Nanami episodes, how is it that person hasn't gotten more work when they're obviously a comedic genius?
Enokido however had the Series Composition credit and wrote 20 episodes, just over half. They include the first five,
episode 7, and 9, the two not as filler as you think recap episodes, the episodes that start and end the Black Rose saga, the start of the Akio arc, and
The Barefoot Girl which if I recall is the one with the leg message scene, and almost all of the final Apocalypse Arc. And he wrote the Screenplay for the movie.
Enokido would have a lot of post Utena work, but not always stuff that is still well known. He wrote 5 episodes of RahXephon, a show often compared to Evangelion that in my opinion is far better. Maybe that's partly because Enokido wrote more of it then he did Eva. He also wrote Redline which seems to be a popular racing movie.
But perhaps the most notable thing Enokido has done in the last decade is Stardriver. I haven't seen Stardriver yet mainly because it lacks a dub, but at this point I doubt it ever will get one so I might as well just give in and watch it subbed. I've seen it described as like if Eva and Utena had a baby who grew up to do musical theater. And I feel like Musicals are maybe extra difficult to consume through a language barrier?
Stardriver's director is the same series director as Sailor Stars, who had been an episode director on Sailor Moon going back to season 1 and also worked on
Cutey Honey Flash. He then worked on
Fun Fun Pharmacy and a number of the shows that proceeded Pretty Cure in it's time-slot, and did episode 8 of the first season of Pretty Cure. His visual style is certainly an interesting one to combine with the writer of Utena.
Gen Urobuchi is a rare example of a writer who's name gets mentioned as much or more then the directors of the popular shows he wrote. But sometimes his association is with the source material rather then the Anime directly, it varies. I find it interesting how many of his shows have Yuki Kajuria on the music even though nothing else connects them, maybe they just naturally go together.
All that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty more Anime where I think the writer is more why I like them then the director. I'll likely make more posts on this subject in the future.
One detail I'd like to point out before ending this post is that the two most popular up and coming Female Anime directors of the last decade also had female writers on their most notable work, who also wrote plenty of stuff directed by men.
Update 01/14/2020: Turns out according to AniDB two of those Utena writers who have no other credits are actually Non Deplums of people who were still working on Sailor Moon and Cutey Honey Flash while Utena was in production. Maybe there was a legal reason for that. One is the Director of Sailor Stars and Stardriver, and he also directed Utena episode 9 under that pseudonym. However there are still two Utena writers about whom we have no other information. And my mind is starting to wonder if one of them is really Megumi and that's simply been kept a secret all this time?
