Trigger Reassembles a Partnership That Never Stopped Breaking

Studio Trigger announced a fourth collaboration between director Hiroyuki Imaishi and screenwriter Kazuki Nakashima—without revealing the title or details.

The entire marketing strategy rests on a quiet assumption nobody examines. Imaishi and Nakashima are presented as a continuous creative partnership, a proven machine you can point to and say "those two, together again." The track record looks real.

Gurren Lagann. Kill la Kill. Promare.

Between Kill la Kill in 2013 and Promare in 2018 came five years of silence. Promare landed in 2019, and we are now in 2024, or close enough. The gaps matter more than the hits because the gaps reveal what actually happened: Nakashima wrote for other people. Imaishi directed other things. They worked separately, frequently, for years at a time. This is not a partnership that naturally recurs—this is a partnership that has to be reassembled.

Studio Trigger is marketing the announcement as a return, but the word choice contains the lie. A return suggests you never left. A return suggests inevitability, continuity, the momentum of a thing already rolling. But if two artists can spend half a decade doing other work with other people and still be called a "proven partnership," then the word partnership has become useless. What the announcement actually signals is rarer. Two people are deciding, again, to work together, a deliberate choice made across considerable distance, not the natural rhythms of a creative duo. The exception pretending to be the rule.