When the Beautiful Boy Entered the Battle Anime

In the spring of 1989, Japanese television was crowded with warriors.

Saint Seiya had transformed armored young heroes into a phenomenon. Yoroiden Samurai Troopers had demonstrated that a series ostensibly built around battles and toys could develop an enormous female audience. And on April 6, 1989, Tatsunoko Production introduced another group of elaborately dressed young men:

Tenku Senki Shurato.

But Shurato looked different.

Its heroes were not simply muscular fighters wearing armor. They were elegant, elongated, sometimes androgynous. Long eyelashes, carefully shaped mouths, flowing hair and slender hands existed alongside swords, supernatural combat and elaborate mechanical armor.

At the centre of this visual identity was Matsuri Okuda.

Matsuri Okuda, 1990. Source: Animage, June 1990, Tokuma Shoten.

Matsuri Okuda

Born on March 4, 1958, Matsuri Okuda belongs to a remarkable generation of Japanese women animators who became increasingly visible during the anime boom of the 1970s and 1980s.

Her credits before Shurato already reveal an unusually refined approach to character drawing.

She worked on productions including Space Adventure Cobra, Touch and Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, before taking major design responsibilities on California Crisis in 1986 and contributing original character designs to Legend of the Galactic Heroes. In 1989 she designed the characters for the dark supernatural OVA Yoma.

Then came Shurato.

What makes Okuda especially interesting is that she was not simply an illustrator who happened to work in animation.

She was an animator.

Her drawings therefore had to function as acting.

In a remarkable 1990 Animage round-table devoted to women working in the animation industry, Okuda described character animation in almost microscopic terms. Everyday gestures mattered. The way someone holds an object, sits, moves a hand or adopts a particular pose can reveal personality. She argued that those details enter an animator's drawings through observation, often unconsciously.

That philosophy can be seen everywhere in Shurato.

The Shōjo Feeling Without Being Shōjo

It would be slightly misleading to simply call Shurato a shōjo anime.

It wasn't.

But visually, something associated with shōjo manga and female-oriented illustration was entering the vocabulary of the male battle series.

The faces are narrow.

Eyes receive extraordinary attention.

Hair is not merely a hairstyle but part of the silhouette.

Necks are long.

Hands are elegant.

Men are allowed to look beautiful rather than merely strong.

And the relationships between them are emotionally intense.

This was happening during a very specific moment in Japanese animation. After Saint Seiya and especially Samurai Troopers, the industry had discovered that ensembles of distinctive, attractive male characters could attract a passionate female audience alongside the expected young male audience. Japanese animation historians still identify 1988–89 as a particularly important period for this emerging female fandom.

Okuda's drawings fitted that moment perfectly.

But her men did not resemble the delicate boys of conventional romance manga either.

They were something stranger.

Beautiful men built like warriors.

Designing the Ideal Man

A fascinating clue to this aesthetic comes from that same 1990 Animage discussion.

Okuda participated alongside an extraordinary group of female animators including Michi Himeno, Atsuko Nakajima, Kazuko Tadano and Sachiko Kamimura.

The conversation eventually turned to a deceptively simple problem:

How do female animators draw convincing male characters?

The women discussed observing actors and real men, but also deliberately constructing idealized men from fragments of different references. Fashion magazines, cinema magazines and rock magazines were specifically mentioned as visual material.

It is an extraordinary little window into the development of late-1980s anime aesthetics.

The male anime hero did not necessarily have to be copied from another manga character.

A hand could come from one person.

A posture from an actor.

A haircut from a musician.

A silhouette from a fashion photograph.

Those fragments could then be synthesized into an ideal male character that did not quite exist in reality.

Look at Okuda's drawings of Gai, Reiga or Hyuga and this suddenly makes enormous sense.

Eight Characters, Eight Silhouettes

This is one of the great achievements of Shurato.

Its principal warriors are attractive young men, but they are not interchangeable.

Shurato has the open, energetic face of the protagonist.

Gai is narrower, colder and more inward.

Hyuga possesses a calmer maturity.

Ryoma feels physically heavier.

Kuuya is severe.

Dan is visibly more aggressive.

And then there is Reiga.

Reiga is perhaps the character through whom the series' visual freedom becomes most obvious: elegant, theatrical, feminine in certain gestures, but never visually treated as weak.

That range matters.

Okuda was not designing eight costumes for the same handsome body.

She was designing eight different types of beauty.

And contemporary fans noticed. A surviving account of Newtype's 1989 Shurato character polls records Reiga, Renge and Gai among the characters occupying the highest positions at different points in the series. Newtype also repeatedly commissioned prominent Shurato imagery, including an Eight Guardians poster drawn by Okuda herself and later a cover illustration by her.

The character designs had escaped the television screen.

They were becoming objects of fandom in their own right.

The Armour Was Designed Separately

This is a particularly interesting detail when studying original production drawings.

Okuda established the characters, but she was not solely responsible for the elaborate divine armour that defines Shurato.

The Shakti designs were handled by Studio Ammonite and designers Hiroshi Ogawa, Hirotoshi Okura and Takashi Ono, with Jin Fukuchi assisting. Mechanical arrangement was subsequently handled by Makoto Matsuo.

This explains one of the most interesting tensions in the finished designs.

Underneath the armour are Okuda's extremely organic human figures: soft hair, expressive faces, long limbs.

Over them sits a much harder graphic vocabulary: symmetry, plates, ornaments, animal motifs, weapons and mechanical articulation.

Soft character design meets hard armour design.

For anyone looking at original genga, douga or setting sheets, understanding this separation of responsibilities becomes particularly important.

India Through the Lens of 1980s Fantasy Anime

Shurato also distinguished itself through its mythology.

Rather than relying primarily on Greek constellations like Saint Seiya or Japanese samurai imagery like Samurai Troopers, the series built its fantasy world around concepts and names drawn from Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

Vishnu.

Indra.

Shiva.

Lakshmi.

The Deva.

The Asura.

The Hachibushu.

Tatsunoko itself still describes the show's defining feature as its distinctive world inspired by Indian mythology.

It is not an academically faithful representation of Indian religion, of course.

It is something much more characteristically 1980s Japanese: religious terminology, visual exoticism, armour toys, fantasy landscapes and pop mythology recombined into an original science-fantasy universe.

And Okuda's characters are what make that world emotionally coherent.

Shurato and Gai

At the centre of the series is a beautifully simple dramatic idea.

Two friends become enemies.

Shurato and Gai begin as teenage martial artists in the human world. After being transported to Tenkūkai, they discover that they are reincarnated divine warriors.

But while Shurato becomes Shura-Oh, one of the guardians defending the heavenly world, Gai becomes his opponent.

The visual opposition is immediate.

Shurato is warmth.

Gai is control.

Shurato projects outward.

Gai retracts inward.

Even before animation or dialogue, their faces tell different stories.

This ability to make male relationships emotionally readable was central to the appeal of the series.

And it is precisely the territory in which Okuda's refined drawing style becomes more important than the armour surrounding it.

Another Dark Pair: Yoma

There is another fascinating Okuda work from almost exactly the same period.

In 1989 she served as character designer and animation director on the OVA Yoma, released internationally as Blood Reign: Curse of the Yoma.

Visually it feels like a darker relative of Shurato.

Once again we find beautiful male warriors, supernatural forces, historical or mythological imagery and a relationship between men placed under extreme pressure.

But without the requirements of a weekly children's television series, Okuda's drawing can become darker, sharper and considerably more sensual.

Put production artwork from Yoma beside Shurato and suddenly her visual language becomes much easier to recognize.

Before Shurato: California Crisis

Go back another three years and the transformation becomes even more interesting.

For the 1986 OVA California Crisis, Okuda is credited with character design and animation direction.

The work belongs to a completely different visual universe: American cars, desert landscapes, 1980s fashion, pop illustration.

Yet the same interest in elegant anatomy and fashionable bodies is already present.

It is another reason why reducing Okuda to a “shōjo style” does not quite work.

Her drawing absorbed a much broader visual culture.

Fashion.

Cinema.

Music photography.

Anime.

Manga.

Illustration.

And observation of real people.

The Galactic Heroes

At roughly the same time, Okuda was also one of the artists responsible for the original character concepts of Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

This is a completely different character-design problem.

Shurato needs a small group of instantly recognizable heroes.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes needs an enormous political and military population.

Officers.

Aristocrats.

Politicians.

Soldiers.

Young men.

Old men.

Characters who may have only a small amount of screen time but must remain distinguishable.

Okuda's involvement in both productions shows the range behind her apparently elegant line.

Beauty was only part of the job.

Differentiation was the real skill.

And Then There Was the Production Itself

The finished Shurato television series is also fascinating because its visual identity was passed through an unusually diverse group of animation directors.

Among the names credited by Tatsunoko are Masaki Kudo, Katsuji Matsumoto, Tsukasa Yuki, Masashi Hirota, Nobuyoshi Habara, Kazuchika Kise, Michitaka Kikuchi...

and Masami Suda.

Yes, the same Masami Suda who designed the television version of Hokuto no Ken.

That makes Shurato a fascinating meeting point between radically different drawing traditions.

Okuda's elegant original characters could pass through the hands of artists trained in muscular action animation, mecha, realistic drawing and the rapidly changing aesthetics of late-1980s anime.

Consequently, the characters do not look identical from episode to episode.

For a modern production that might be considered a defect.

For historians of hand-drawn anime, it can also be part of the fascination.

You can sometimes see the animator inside the character.

The Return of Okuda's Characters

After the television production, Shurato continued in the six-part OVA series Tenku Senki Shurato: Sousei e no Antou, released from 1991.

Here the credit becomes even more significant.

Matsuri Okuda is officially credited not merely with the original character concepts but with character design and animation direction.

It therefore provides an especially valuable opportunity to see her characters closer to her own drawing.

For collectors comparing television and OVA production material, this distinction is worth remembering.

The same character may reveal a noticeably different degree of refinement depending on the production, episode and animation director involved.

Drawing Until It Is Right

Perhaps the best insight into Okuda herself comes not from Shurato, but from something she said immediately after making it.

In the 1990 Animage discussion, she explained what kept her working as an animator.

She was never completely satisfied.

After finishing a production, she would watch the result, see what had not worked, and immediately begin thinking about how she could correct those problems on the next one.

During the same conversation she casually recalled once remaining awake for 72 hours while working, until sleep deprivation caused her to hallucinate small figures moving at the edge of her vision. She finally slept for an entire day.

Behind the extraordinary elegance of these drawings was the brutal physical reality of Japanese animation production.

Why Shurato Still Looks Different

More than thirty-five years later, Shurato remains visually difficult to confuse with anything else.

Not because every frame is perfect.

Not because it invented the armored-warrior genre.

And not simply because of its mythology.

It is because several visual cultures collided in the same production.

The muscular action anime.

The toy-driven armour show.

Shōjo-adjacent ideals of male beauty.

Fashion illustration.

1980s fantasy.

Indian and Buddhist imagery.

And the individual hands of a generation of extraordinary animators.

Matsuri Okuda stood directly in the middle of that collision.

Her great contribution was not simply making the warriors of Shurato handsome.

It was giving each of them something far harder to design.

A face you wanted to keep looking at.