Mamoru Hosoda is an anime film director and the founder of Studio Chizu (2011). His features — The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), Summer Wars (2009), Wolf Children (2012), The Boy and the Beast (2015), Mirai (2018), and Belle (2021) — are sometimes described in the Western press as the closest current parallel to Studio Ghibli's feature-anime tradition.
Career
Hosoda joined Toei Animation in 1991 and built his early career on Toei's Digimon films, where his 2000 short Digimon Adventure: Our War Game! introduced visual ideas — a digital-space confrontation rendered in flattened, geometric environments — that he later expanded in Summer Wars. He was attached to direct Studio Ghibli's Howl's Moving Castle in 2002 but left the project, which Miyazaki then took over. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), produced at Madhouse, became his independent feature debut.
Studio Chizu
Hosoda left Madhouse in 2011 to found Studio Chizu with producer Yuichiro Saito. The studio has since produced all of his features. Chizu remains smaller than Ghibli but operates on a comparable production-cycle length of one feature every two to three years.