Who directed the 2011 Hunter x Hunter anime?

The 2011 Hunter x Hunter was directed by Hiroshi Kojina at Madhouse, running 148 episodes from October 2011 to September 2014. Kojina, a veteran animator and episode director, was given a brief most directors never receive: adapt a beloved, unfinished manga at full length, in a late night slot that freed the production from children's television constraints, and keep going until the story's natural pause, the Election arc's end, more than a hundred episodes away.

The staff around him defined the version's character. Series composition was led by Atsushi Maekawa for the first stretch and Tsutomu Kamishiro later, character designs came from Takahiro Yoshimatsu, whose clean models could hold Togashi's shifting art at television pace, and Yoshihisa Hirano composed a score that fandom adopted wholesale. The production's discipline shows in its pacing: roughly two chapters per episode for long stretches, almost no filler across 148 episodes, a restraint nearly unheard of in long Jump adaptations.

Contrast clarifies credit. The 1999 series was directed by Kazuhiro Furuhashi at Nippon Animation, a moodier production with Toshihiko Sahashi's orchestral score and a slower hand, continued in OVAs he supervised through Greed Island. Furuhashi's version is an interpretation; Kojina's is an edition. Both are legitimate, but when a piece of merchandise shows Yoshimatsu's models, it is a 2011 object, and when it shows the 1999 designs, it belongs to Furuhashi's production, whatever a listing claims.

Togashi's role in both was supervisory at a distance: he is the manga's author, not the anime's director, and the distinction matters to this Library's crediting. The anime staffs chose the pacing, the voices, the music and, in the 2011 case, the famous decision to narrate the Chimera Ant invasion in long, tense voice over passages that became the version's signature.

Kojina's series ended in 2014 not from cancellation but from completion of its brief, closing on the manga's best available curtain. Its reputation has only grown since, routinely placed at the top of all time anime polls, and its staff's names, Kojina, Yoshimatsu, Hirano, are the credits a collector should learn beside Togashi's own.