Director Hiroshi Ikehata on Adapting Giant Ojō-sama: scale, comedy, and keeping the manga’s details

Hiroshi Ikehata is directing the upcoming Giant Ojō-sama television anime. He has decades of work in the industry, including shows such as Robot Girls Z, Kiratto Pri Chan, and Witch Watch, and he approached this project with attention to both the manga's unusual premise and its subtler elements.

Ikehata had encountered the manga's pilot and knew it had drawn attention online, particularly within the "giantess" community. He describes the central combination—an extremely tall character who is also an ojō-sama (heiress)—as a fresh setup. That premise created two overlapping demands for the adaptation: preserve the manga's character dynamics and make the physical scale feel believable on-screen.

Preserving relationships and tiny authorial details

Translating rough, comedic art into motion

The manga includes intentionally "rough" drawing in places, a quality Ikehata found appealing and comedic. The challenge was animating those elements so they read as purposeful humor rather than unfinished art. That required directing animation choices that communicated deliberate roughness while maintaining clarity and comedic timing.

Oriko's size and attractive figure are essential, but Ikehata told character designer Hajime Mitsuda to keep her relatable and a little rough around the edges despite her heiress status. The team debated which period of the manga's evolving art style to use, since the artwork became more detailed over time. Hair gradient was a specific technical issue: the production used a two-layer gradient only for that element to achieve the look they wanted.

Tokusatsu techniques for scale and perspective

The production wrestled with how a gigantic character should sound. Rather than using an echoing or obviously amplified voice, the team kept Oriko's voice largely normal at giant size to avoid confusing the audience. They layered in environmental cues—wind, pressure, and sound pressure—where needed to convey scale.

Collaboration and directorial goals

Ikehata consulted with Nikumura Q on scripts and storyboards and sought confirmation when adapting scenes. He noted that even small scenes in the manga contained authorial preferences that affected staging and tone. Compared to his prior projects, he hadn't worked on a production featuring a character repeatedly moving through a city at giant scale, so he experimented with multiple approaches to solve problems of scale, perspective, and comedy.