Now, the situation with who will direct JJK is up in the air, since Sunghoo Park left his freelance position at Studio MAPPA several months ago. So, there's a few people that I think who could take his place, as a director.
To recap, Sunghoo Park wasn't as involved in the making of JJK as some would believe, with him only storyboarding the last two episodes, and directing epiode 7 and 24, so while he's definitely an important figure for JJK, he's not as difficult as he would be to replace in, say, God of high school season 2 if it ever gets made, where his flair and style was fully intrenched in the show itself. However, his connections, as well as seshita's connections with animators, got him to recruit a ton of star animators to work on JJK.
So, to find someone who's qualified, we've got to look at someone who was as involved, or even more involved on paper, then he was, as well as helping to define how the show looked, as well as someone who's involved in the movie, and someone who's got just as many connections as park does.
Firstly, there's Yui Umemoto, who was very involved in season 1, she's the one who made the shorts for the ending episodes, the juju sanpo shorts, as well as storyboarding episode 21, and she also directed episode 1 and 21. She also carried onto making JJK Zero as an assistant and unit director, so it should be an easy slam dunk for her to work on it, right? Well... not really.
As listed by Entertainment and Human, the new studio that Sunghoo Park had made, she's reportedly one of the people who also left MAPPA to go with Park on E&H, and while the conclusiveness is hard to say of the leaked list, considering it also lists Takayuki Sano as one of the people who left, yet he's still very involved in AOT, and the relationship between E&H and MAPPA being unclear, she's probably out of the running to be the next director, unless some new information arises about her working on Season 2, which is possible.
Now, there's a couple of storyboarders who were involved in more episodes, as well as the unit directors for the JJK Zero movie that could also work on JJK season 2.
Now, with Sunghoo park and Yui umemoto out, who else is left? Yosuke Takada, Miyuki Oshiro, and Masataka Akai, who are the unit directors for JJK Zero, and have a lot of experience.
But out of the three, I think Masataka Akai is most likely to be the next director of Season 2. He's got the most shows he's done out of anyone, he's got a lot of directorial experience, with hm working on JJK episodes and joining as the unit director for Zero. Miyuki Oshiro is also likely to work on it, since they've also got experience working on both the show and movie, however, in terms of directing, I'd think that Akai, with two episodes under their belt, is going to be the most likely person to direct JJK season 2. |
