Hisashi Hirai

Wiki (jp)

Hisashi Hirai is a Japanese animator, designer, illustrator and mangaka. He is best known for his character design work on Gundam SEED and the Fafner series.

Currently a freelancer. He began his career as an in-betweener for Nakamura Production and debuted in the 1983 TV series, Cat's Eye. He often worked on many outsourced episodes for Sunrise shows as a key animator and animation director.

In 1992 he would work on Dragon Slayer. An animated adaptation of the 1989 video game Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes by Nihon Falcom, his first major character design credit. Since then, he became more active as a character designer on numerous series. Most notably for Sunrise productions such as Infinite Ryvius, s-CRY-ed, and the aforementioned Gundam SEED series; which he had won the Character Design Prize for at the 3rd Tokyo International Anime Fair in 2004.

Hirai is also said to be a close friend of director Gorou Taniguchi.