Biography

Shingo Tamagawa is a freelance independent animator who started at studio Sunrise.

As a child, Tamagawa discovered a love of and a talent for drawing, and by the time he had reached high school, he discovered the works of Hayao Miyazaki and Hideaki Anno, both of whom would become major influences on his animation style, where he also learned how animation is dependant on the director and inspired him to work in animation someday. Having graduated from art school, Tamagawa decided to work in the animation industry and began to train to work in the industry, dropping out of graduate school to join the industry.

Joining Sunrise Animation Studio in 2010, Tamagawa worked as an animator for series such as Mobile Suit Gundam AGE and Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, however by 2015 he began to feel as if he was losing his passion as he began to feel that working in the animation industry would make him start to hate his own work, so he decided to simply stop drawing, and for eighteen months he didn't draw a single thing and spent his time reading and taking walks. Yet it was during this period where he began to formulate his own ideas about work of his own, which rekindled his interest in working as an animator, but this time he wished to be fully independent rather than beholden to the animation industry.

Tamagawa came to wider attention in late 2020 when his first short, PUPARIA, was uploaded to his YouTube channel.

PUPARIA became a painstaking project taking three years to complete, with Tamagawa drawing and coloring every single frame by hand and refusing to use CG as he believes the increasing reliance on CG in the anime industry comes at the cost of audience engagement, likening the art style he used to manga due to the focus on the various characters' facial expressions. Tamagawa also insisted on making it himself, partly as he was highly doubtful that any other studio would be interested in making it and partly because he didn't want to rope other people into the project in case it didn't pan out as he hoped, which gave Tamagawa the benefit of putting his own personal stamp on the project.

Despite the heavy workload, Tamagawa realized that creating PUPARIA on his own allowed him to gain a better understanding of what it is to be a director in animation and allowed him to create his work honestly. Luckily for Tamagawa, one of the producers at Sunrise allowed him to use the Sunrise studio to work on PUPARIA as long as he was willing to help out the studio from time to time, which Tamagawa is thankful for as he felt that working from home sometimes led to him getting stuck, and working for Sunrise also helped the project financially as Tamagawa had been living off his savings for the eighteen months where he took a break from the industry.