Nobuhiro Sugiyama (Japanese: 杉山 延寛, Hepburn: Sugiyama Nobuhiro) is a Japanese animator, character designer, and storyboard artist.

Sugiyama joined Shaft in 2001 as an in-between animator while he was interested in drawing a variety of subjects and learning from the industry.^[1] By 2003 he was a key animator, and by 2004 an animation director. In 2007, Sugiyama was chosen to design the characters for the studio's adaptation of the Ef visual novel.^[2] Sugiyama became one of the studio's primary character designers and chief animation directors and was again given the task of heading the Arakawa Under the Bridge project in 2010.^[3] In 2011, Sugiyama was opposite of character designer Asako Nishida in acting as the chief animation director for Ground Control to Psychoelectric Girl. Nishida commented on herself, the main animators, and Sugiyama being especially particular about the drawings of character's legs in the work.^[4]

In 2014, he was given responsibility of designing the characters for the Nisekoi anime adaptation.^[5] Sugiyama's work had a profound effect on two artists related to the series in particular: Shaft colleague Kazuya Shiotsuki, who was sharing chief animation direction duties with Sugiyama and another animator, called Sugiyama's character sheets and key visual drawings to be "god-like." When asked who had influenced him the most, Shiotsuki named Sugiyama.^[6] Nisekoi manga artist Naoshi Komi also noted a significant influence on his work from Sugiyama. Komi described Sugiyama's drawings of the cast to be feminine and admired them. When he first saw the designs and drawings for the anime, he considered them to be "unbeatable" and said that as of noticing them, sometimes imports Sugiyama's drawings and learns from him by copying them.^[7]

Shaft was approached to adapt the March Comes In like a Lion shogi manga around the time of Nisekoi's production. Chica Umino, the author, was a fan of Shaft and their chief director Akiyuki Shinbo's works and had decided that she didn't want an anime adaptation if it was not by the Shaft-Shinbo team.^[8] Through a series of events involving her editor from Hakusensha, Ryou Tomoda, being approached by Tohokushinsha Film producer Makoto Tanaka (the son of famed shogi player Torahiko Tanaka) about the possibility of an anime and getting a meeting with Aniplex producer Atsuhiro Iwakami and Shaft's president Mitsutoshi Kubota, the series was greenlit.^[9] Umino initially wanted several aspects of the anime to be aesthetically reminiscent of the team's Bakemonogatari series, which she was a fan of, and included her wanting Akio Watanabe to draw the character designs. Shinbo didn't think that it was a good idea, and Watanabe was busy so the schedule didn't align;^[10] and instead the role of character designer fell to Sugiyama.^[11] The series began airing in 2016, and Sugiyama was joined by Shiotsuki as co-chief animation director, with a second season airing in 2017. According to Shinbo, a key difference between the two seasons was the level of familiarity the staff had with the work and the incorporation of their own styles into it, which he noted in particular for Sugiyama.^[12]

He was chosen as one of the chief animation directors for Magia Record alongside Hiroki Yamamura and character designer Junichirou Taniguchi in 2020. He had only been involved in the original Puella Magi Madoka Magica series to a minor degree in which he did key animation for the first episode. Taniguchi was not strict about the differing styles in animation in different scenes from the animators and thought positively of showing their characteristics, like when drawings are given stylish flare in battle scenes; but he was particular about cut-by-cut depictions. Sugiyama closely watched Taniguchi's work in the first episode to try and imitate his drawings and worked on certain episodes alongside Yamamura, with the two splitting the work more on a scene basis than by segment of an episode. Yamamura generally supervised the action scenes, while Sugiyama did the "daily life" parts, as Yamamura struggled with depicting the characters "cutely" as opposed to Sugiyama.^[13] Yamamura thought that some of Sugiyama's work in the second episode was impressive, so he referenced scenes that Sugiyama supervised to make his own drawings cuter.^[14] Sugiyama mainly worked as an animation director on the series aside from Kenjirou Okada personally requesting that Sugiyama draw the layouts to one of the scenes in episode 3.^[15]

Sugiyama did not return for the second and final seasons of Magia Record in a major capacity as he became busy with another project. In 2022, Shaft debuted RWBY: Ice Queendom, an anime series based on the RWBY web series created by Monty Oum and Rooster Teeth. Talks about a RWBY anime had extended back to the mid-2010s when Oum had spoken with Good Smile Company CEO Takanori Aki, where the latter found out that Oum was a fan of artist Huke's work and was interested in making an anime-related work. Three weeks after their final meeting, Oum suffered an allergic reaction and passed away.^[16] Aki was still interested in pushing for the project they had worked on, and staff from Rooster Teeth later visited studios Shaft and Trigger, with production officially underway at Shaft in 2020.^[17] Huke was asked to re-adapt the designs from the web series, as well as design the new outfits that were to appear in Ice Queendom. Sugiyama was given the responsibility of then adapting Huke's redesigns for animation, as well as acting as the chief animation director alongside Yamamura, Yoshiaki Itou, and Rina Iwamoto.^[18][19] Director Toshimasa Suzuki noted that the team and Sugiyama faced various difficulties during production, as not only were they working on the project as its own story set between seasons of the main franchise, but that they also needed to be cognizant of certain aspects of the continuity and design sensibilities in relation to volumes that were still releasing. Despite the difficulties, Suzuki praised Sugiyama for his supervision of the drawings and designs.^[18]

• Kizawa, Yukito, ed. (2013). ひだまりスケッチデイズ -TVアニメ公式ガイドブック- [Hidamari Sketch Days: TV Anime Official Guidebook]. Houbunsha. ISBN 978-4832277403.
• Miki, Minami (January 24, 2018). アニメ「3月のライオン」新房昭之×友田亮対談 [Anime "March Comes In like a Lion" Akiyuki Shinbo x Ryou Tomoda Talk]. Natalie (in Japanese).</ref>
• Takahashi, Yumi, ed. (November 23, 2019). Akiyuki Shimbo x Shaft Chronicle (in Japanese). Dotcom. ISBN 978-4835457017.
• Maeda, Hisashi; Nakagami, Yoshikatsu; Kawabata, Takeshi; Nishitani, Nanako (2020). マギアレコード 魔法少女まどか☆マギカ外伝 TVアニメ公式ガイドブック 1巻 [Magia Record Puella Magi Madoka Magica TV Anime Official Guidebook Volume 1] (in Japanese). Houbunsha. ISBN 978-4832272019.
• Maeda, Hisashi; Nakagami, Yoshikatsu; Kawabata, Takeshi; Nishitani, Nanako (2022). マギアレコード 魔法少女まどか☆マギカ外伝 TVアニメ公式ガイドブック 2巻 [Magia Record Puella Magi Madoka Magica TV Anime Official Guidebook Volume 2] (in Japanese). Houbunsha. ISBN 978-4832274006.

• Nobuhiro Sugiyama at Anime News Network's encyclopedia
• Nobuhiro Sugiyama at IMDb