Obscure Adventures in Geek and Nerd Culture

The Studio Break Lineage Mao Lamdo School  Mao Lamdo > Hokuto Sakiyama Takuji Miyamoto   Nakazawa School Kazuto Nakazawa Toya Oshima Studio Break School  Shinya Ōhira  Shinji Hashimoto (by adoption)  Akihiro Ota  *As usual, Shinya Ohira still has more surrealists influences than fellow expressionists and realists who were raised by Kanada schoolers. His first known influences are estranged friends Masahito Yamashita and Atsushi Yano, the Toyoo Ashida and Shinsaku Kozuma inspired effects rebel. Funnily enough, somewhat unlike both Yamashita and Yano, his biggest influence still is Akio Sugino, followed by Manabu Oohashi (Mao Lamdo), Takashi Nakamura, Shinsaku Kozuma, Osamu Dezaki and Akira Daikuhara. Something similar can be said for the more Ghibli friendly Shinji Hashimoto, who is more likely to otherwise come from Norio Matsumoto’s realist-expressionist lineage. 

The Shinbo Lineage  Wakabayashi School Atsushi Wakabayashi  Atsuko Inoue *Oddly enough, Atsushi Wakabayashi mainly has realist school origins, but accumulated both Kozuma and Itano characteristics throughout his early career. Given a somewhat stronger Sano influence, Oishi’s the wackiest of the bunch, having led the Yoshinari Brothers to gain international fame. Ishida School Atsuko Ishida  Rihiro Yamane  Akio Watanabe  Shota Goshozono  *Shota Goshozono has inherited quite a lot of stylised Kanadesque realism from Rihiro Yamane, thus he is considered Rihiro Yamane’s own true successor. The Obari Lineage  Obari School Yousuke Kabashima  Masami Obari  Kunihiro Abe > Munetaka Abe  Yoshinari Saito  Risa Ebata  Ryuuta Ura  *The Obari school is a Shinbo Anno hybrid, gaining quite a ton of expressive playfulness in the mid-late 1980s from both Hajime Kamegaki and increasingly later on Akiyuki Shinbo, while retaining the multip...

Ms Atsuko Nakajima is a true innovator in that she merged Itano, Miyazaki and Komatsubara styles and made them her own.  That being said, the few major manga artists and animators who inherit very obvious Nakajima-like characteristics (at least from the mid-late 1980s and early-mid 1990s onward) tend to more usually hybridise Obari and Hirata-Flow styles, Obari and Full-Limited styles or Full-Limited and Hirata-Flow styles, depending on the budgets of any anime show or film. While retaining its own Sunrise Realist origins, Tomohiro Hirata’s Flow style has evolved into a somewhat cartoonier style more akin to Nakajima’s, which is most likely due to both sharing a major stylistic influence in Hideaki Anno.