Promare Director Addresses Main Character's Resemblance to Gurren Lagann

Studio Trigger recently dropped its latest big anime effort, Promare, in Japanese theaters, and one of the biggest elements immediately catching fans' eyes was how the film's main character, Galo, seemed to bear a striking resemblance to another Studio Trigger favorite, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann's Kamina. This lead to all sorts of hilarious reactions and memes among fans, but it turns out this resemblance was a total accident.

In an interview with Anime! Anime! (via Anime News Network), director of the film Hiroyuki Imaishi this accidental resemblance to Kamina was just because his character just seem to end up with that kind of hair.

Elaborating further, Imaishi explained, "When I draw protagonists for the pitch, they just always seem to end up with that kind of hair. Gurren Lagann was the same. I give the drawings to the character designer, who workshops it on their end so that the design fits the anime." So while Galo and Kamina look a lot alike in face and hair, there's a lot of thought that went into this hair to separate Galo from the previous work.

Screenwriter for the film, and Gurren Lagann before it, Kazuki Nakashima had a good explanation for Galo's particular Kamina styled hair, "Promare is about firefighting, which means that there's often a wind that blows upward. When there's an upward draft, one's hair naturally stands up as well...That's why Galo is different from Kamina. He's got job hair."

But while Galo's resemblance to Kamina was an accident, the film certainly had a lot of work put in as Studio Trigger first began work on it shortly after the final release of Kill la Kill in 2014. The film took three years to develop into its current concept, and now fans in Japan are finally seeing the results of Trigger's years of work.

Promare is a joint effort between Studio Trigger and X-FLAG Studio (Monster Strike The Animation), and premiered May 24th in Japan. Directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi and written by Kazuki Nakashima, who have previously collaborated for fan-favorite Studio Trigger projects Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill, the film stars Kenichi Matsuyama as Galo Thymos, Taichi Saotome as leader of Mad Burnish Lio Fotia, Masato Sakai as administrator of the Independent Republic of Promepolis Kray Foresight, Ayane Sakura as member of Burning Rescue Aina Ardebit, and Rikiya Koyama as Burning Rescue captain Ignis Ex.

via ANN