Hiroyuki Imaishi: Trigger's Founding and the Gainax Aftermath

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is the work that made Hiroyuki Imaishi a household name outside Japan in 2022, but it sits at the end of a thirty-year arc that runs through Gainax in the 2000s, the founding of Studio Trigger in 2011, and a decade of work that has more or less defined what “Trigger style” means to the international anime audience. Imaishi, born October 1971, is the rare director whose visual grammar — hyperkinetic action, exaggerated proportions, color-saturated cel-shading, sincere optimism under the chaos — is so identifiable that a single shot can be attributed to him.

This piece traces the career and the studio: the Gainax years, the Trigger founding, the breakout works, and what Cyberpunk: Edgerunners did to Imaishi’s profile and to the Cyberpunk 2077 franchise it adapted.

The Gainax years: Dead Leaves, Gurren Lagann, Panty & Stocking

Imaishi entered the industry in the 1990s and built his reputation at Gainax in the 2000s. His major Gainax-era credits are Dead Leaves (2004), a Production I.G. theatrical co-production that already showed the hyperkinetic, exaggerated style he would later refine; Gurren Lagann (2007), which he directed and which became the breakout series of late-period Gainax; and Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt (2010), the Powerpuff-Girls-inflected adult-comedy series that closed Imaishi’s Gainax run.

Gurren Lagann is the work where Imaishi’s style fully crystallises. The mech designs scale absurdly, the action sequences abandon physical realism for emotional realism, and the series ends not with conquest but with a sincere meditation on grief and continuation. The grammar Imaishi developed on Gurren Lagann — the willingness to be ridiculous in service of sincerity — became Studio Trigger’s house style.

Studio Trigger, 2011

Imaishi co-founded Studio Trigger in 2011 with Masahiko Ohtsuka. The founding of Trigger came at the end of a slow institutional decline at Gainax, and many of the core staff who would define Trigger’s first decade — Imaishi himself, Yoh Yoshinari, Sushio — followed him from Gainax to the new studio.

Trigger’s early years were defined by short-form experimental work (Inferno Cop, 2012-13) and breakout television series. Kill la Kill (2013-2014) was the studio’s first major TV production and consolidated the Imaishi style for a new generation: hyperkinetic action, sailor-uniform-as-mecha visual jokes, and a sincere coming-of-age story under the absurdity. Little Witch Academia (TV, 2017) expanded the studio’s range into family-friendly fantasy. BNA: Brand New Animal (2020) and other smaller works rounded out the studio’s first decade.

Promare, 2019

Promare (2019), Trigger’s first original theatrical feature, is the purest distillation of Imaishi’s visual grammar to date. The film is structured around a binary color scheme — blue and pink, ice and fire — and uses cel-shaded CGI to push the Imaishi style into geometric abstraction. Promare became a cult international hit, and its theatrical release helped establish Trigger as a studio with international box-office potential, not only a TV studio.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, 2022

The breakout English-market work is Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (Netflix, 2022), a ten-episode series Imaishi directed as a Trigger production based on CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 game. The series released two years after the game’s troubled 2020 launch and arrived at a moment when Cyberpunk 2077 was being rehabilitated by patches and the Phantom Liberty expansion.

Edgerunners did several things at once. It gave Cyberpunk 2077 a sustained boost in player count and sales — the game’s concurrent-player count tripled in the weeks after the series released, and CDPR has publicly credited the anime as a major driver of the game’s commercial recovery. It gave Trigger its first sustained English-language critical breakthrough; the series was nominated for major awards and won Crunchyroll’s Anime of the Year for 2022. And it demonstrated that Imaishi’s grammar — designed originally for high-school comedy and giant-robot melodrama — could carry a tragedy about implant-induced psychosis and class violence without losing its visual identity.

Edgerunners is, structurally, an Imaishi work. The hyperkinetic combat, the exaggerated body language, the saturated color, the willingness to commit fully to a single emotional register — all of it is Trigger house style. What is new is the genre. The series proved that the grammar generalises.

The Imaishi signature

Imaishi’s style is defined by a few specific commitments. Hyperkinetic action that subordinates physical realism to emotional realism. Exaggerated proportions — characters whose silhouettes prioritise readability and personality over anatomy. Color-saturated cel-shading, often pushed into geometric flat-shading for stylised sequences. And, importantly, sincere optimism under the chaos: Imaishi’s series are loud and ridiculous, but they are not cynical. The grammar exists to deliver a sincere emotional payoff at the end of every series.

For the encyclopedia record, Imaishi’s three-decade career maps cleanly onto the post-Gainax decade of anime. He inherited the Gainax tradition, co-founded the studio that absorbed Gainax’s best people, and turned that studio into one of the international face-studios of 2020s anime. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is the present marker of the arc; what comes next is the open question of the late 2020s.