Ken’ichi Ishikura

Ishikura began his career in the industry in 2000 as a production assistant for Invincible King Tri-Zenon under E&G Films, and made his debut as an episode director with the 18th episode of Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars. For the next several years, he worked mainly as a freelance director. In 2007, Ishikura had his first job with Shaft as an episode director and storyboard artist for Hidamari Sketch. Ishikura was working with a subcontracting studio when they asked him to choose one of their projects to work on. Ishikura chose Hidamari Sketch as he had seen director Akiyuki Shinbo's previous works including Pani Poni Dash!, which was a type of project he was interested in working on. According to him, Ishikura often got in trouble in his previous works for including too many parodies to other works; but for Hidamari Sketch, director Shinbo and the staff gave him the okay to do such. For the next 5 years, Ishikura worked mainly with Shaft, and made his series directorial debut with Natsu no Arashi! Akinai-chū (under Shinbo's general direction). The following year, he directed the third season to the Hidamari Sketch franchise with Shinbo, but he started to work less with Shaft. Following his mainstay departure from Shaft, Ishikura dirercted Da Capo III (2013) at studio Actas, but mainly based himself out of Studio Deen, where he directed both Sakura Trick (2014) and a short Ongaku Shōjo (2015) film. He stopped series directing for the time and focused mainly on episode directing and storyboarding until 2025 with the release of I'm a Noble on the Brink of Ruin, So I Might as Well Try Mastering Magic.