JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Director Talks Difficulty in Animating The Steel Ball Run

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has returned with one of the most highly anticipated seasons of 2026. The Steel Ball Run has long been touted as one of the best entries of the franchise, featuring a horse race across the country that might make the victor’s dreams come true. Unfortunately, there has been a dark cloud lingering above the recent anime adaptation as the release schedule for future episodes remains a mystery. As fans wait to learn when Johnny and Gyro will return to the race, the director of the series discusses how difficult it is to take Hirohiko Araki’s work and bring it to the small screen.

In the latest issue of JoJo Magazine, JoJo Magazine 2026 Spring, director Toshiyuki Kato addressed the elephant in the room when it came to bringing the Steel Ball Run to life: “To begin with, I think everyone who read the original manga might have thought, ‘This would probably be difficult to animate.’ Simply because ‘there are so many horses in it.’ If we had been making it back in the days of the Phantom Blood, Battle Tendency, or Stardust Crusaders, I don’t think it would have been possible. Only in the last three or four years did we finally start to see a direction where we thought maybe we could pull it off. In fact, before we actually finalized the current animation approach, we made something like an in-house prototype of just under twenty cuts.”

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Kato went into further detail about the original steps taken to bring the Steel Ball Run to the screen, and how the first attempt didn’t take. “We took race scenes from Steel Ball Run and scenes involving horses, then turned them into storyboards. Rather than constructing them as a full story, we focused mainly on movement. For example, we looked at what kinds of long shots race scenes might need: medium close-ups of Johnny Joestar and the others, shots of the horses’ legs, and horses running along certain trajectories in long shots. We picked out several things like that and made an in-house experimental version around three years ago to see how they might work in animation. It was right after the Stone Ocean anime ended. The result was, ‘This is bad.’”

“It simply took far too much work, and the productivity was poor,” Toshiyuki confessed, “So we scrapped that trial-and-error approach and shifted to a method that could be adapted to the current anime series format. There are a number of smaller points, but the biggest issue was the horses. We had always planned to make use of CG, but I think that trial-and-error version served as one of our guideposts in terms of building up a sense of direction for how to use CG, and for establishing what was acceptable and what was not.”

As for when we can expect the return of the Steel Ball Run, we might learn more at this month’s Anime Japan. With the anime franchise set to take the stage with many of its voice actors in tow, JoJo fans are hoping to learn when the horse race across anime will continue.

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Via JoJo News