Born in 1955 in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, Takashi Nakamura is an animator and an anime director. He worked on a 1988 cyberpunk action film Akira as an animation supervisor and many other films. He directed his first feature film Catnapped! in 1995. Among his other works are A Tree of Palme, which was an official selection of the Berlin Film Festival, The Portrait Studio (Shashinkan), and Bubu and Bubulina.