Hidetaka Tenjin, the robotics student who painted machines for 30 years and then built one

Hidetaka Tenjin

Born	October 13, 1973 Kobe
Occupation	Comics Artist
Awards	Inkpot Award

Hidetaka Tenjin studied robotics because of a cartoon. The police machines of Mobile Police Patlabor sent him into an engineering degree, and the degree taught him an awkward lesson: the robots in the laboratory could not do a fraction of what the robots on screen did. So he went the other way. For most of his working life the Japanese illustrator has painted machines that do not exist, so convincingly that a great many people have bought a kit of grey plastic because his picture was on the lid. The question his career is asking now is what the painter of impossible machines does when somebody hands him a real one.

Tenjin was born in Hyōgo Prefecture and grew up in Saitama, teaching himself to draw in pastel and poster colour. Two things fixed his direction as a schoolboy. One was the box art Yoshiyuki Takani painted for the original Macross model kits; the other was the feature film Macross: Do You Remember Love?, which made him a fan of the franchise for life. He names Takani alongside Noriyoshi Ohrai, Shigeru Komatsuzaki, Yuji Kaida and Tsuyoshi Nagano as the painters behind his realist style, a Japanese lineage of illustrators who made fantasy hardware look as if it had been photographed on a working day.

Tenjin, born on 13 October 1973, went to the Shibaura Institute of Technology to study robotics in its systems engineering faculty. The field, as he found it, was nowhere near the fiction that had drawn him there, but the campus gave him computer graphics, and with them the pleasure of making images on his own. After graduating he worked as a freelance CG illustrator, drawing album covers and writing software tutorials. He also ran a fan site devoted to the VF-1 Valkyrie, the transforming fighter of Macross. Through friends in the fan scene he met Shoji Kawamori, the creator of the franchise, who looked at the work and gave him the package art for the game Macross VF-X2. He has worked on Macross ever since.

The box became his format. Tenjin painted the lids of Hasegawa’s Macross variable-fighter kits, a long run of Bandai’s Master Grade Gundam models, Bandai’s Star Wars range from the X-wing to the Millennium Falcon, the fighters of Space Battleship Yamato 2199, the combat machines of Votoms and Dougram, and Kotobukiya’s Evangelion kits, along with covers for games such as Gradius V. He set up his own company, Studio Tenjin, to handle the work. A box painting has a blunt commercial job, which is to make a bag of unpainted parts look like a machine with weight and a history, and his solution became a signature: chipped paint, exhaust haze, the glare of a low sun on a canopy, the sense that the thing has been flown hard and parked badly. He began on Photoshop with a pen tablet and now paints mostly on an iPad.

Animation followed the boxes. From Macross Zero in 2002 he worked with the studio Satelight on CG special effects, colour design, image boards and mechanical design, then supplied mechanical art for Macross Frontier in 2008 and its two feature films. By Macross Delta in 2016 his contribution had spread across so many departments that he took a single umbrella credit, Macross Visual Artist. Outside the franchise he designed hardware for Hellsing Ultimate and Knight’s & Magic, the protagonist’s machine in the game Super Robot Wars T and the Briheights of Goro Taniguchi’s Back Arrow, robots that Taniguchi wanted to be neither industrial products nor military equipment.

There is a second career running alongside the first. Tenjin has worked as a voice actor since 2003, with roles in Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG, Hunter × Hunter and Jujutsu Kaisen, Japanese dubbing on Gladiator and Erin Brockovich, and the voice of the rebel Ryder Azadi in Star Wars Rebels, a part he took up again when the character returned in Ahsoka. He is a member of the Japanese garrison of the 501st Legion, the costuming club of Star Wars fans. Because he speaks English he has become a regular guest at conventions abroad, from San Diego and Otakon to Japan Expo in Paris, and in 2022 Comic-Con International gave him its Inkpot Award.

The contradiction in that reputation is easy to state. Most of the machines that made Tenjin’s name were designed by somebody else. The Valkyrie belongs to Kawamori, the mobile suits to the long line of Gundam designers, the X-wing to Lucasfilm. In Japan, box art is a trade whose product is meant to sell a kit and end up in recycling, credited in small type when it is credited at all, and Tenjin’s achievement is to make licensed hardware look more real than its source. That is a craft at the very top of its form, and it also leaves open whether the painter is an artist with a vision or the best interpreter in a service industry. His art books, from Kobunsha’s VALKYRIES series in 2005 to Udon’s Hidetaka Tenjin’s Artistry of Macross in 2022, argue for the first reading by presenting the lids as paintings. His original designs, the stronger argument, are the newer and less familiar part of the work.

That part is now in front. Tenjin was concept and mechanical designer on BULLET/BULLET, the original series by the Jujutsu Kaisen director Sunghoo Park that Disney+ released in the summer of 2025. In 2025 he also formed the project team HELIOSLIVE with the robotics company Asratec and Pia21, a maker of inflatable costumes, and designed its first machine, HL-ZERO: a pneumatic robot about four metres tall and around 200 kilograms, an air-filled outer skin moved by a metal frame, shown in September 2025 at the Expo in Osaka. And he is the mechanical designer of DARK MACHINE, a cross-media project built around a giant-robot eSports game, whose television series DARK MACHINE THE ANIMATION, directed by Kazuo Terada with Taniguchi as creative producer, began on Fuji TV on 13 October 2026.

HELIOSLIVE presents HL-ZERO as a reference model, the first of a line rather than a one-off for a fair. If the line continues, the engineering student who decided real robots were too slow will have spent three decades learning, on cardboard, exactly how a machine of that size ought to look, and will get to find out how much of it can be made to stand up.

Tags: art, artists, Goro Taniguchi, Hidetaka Tenjin, Back Arrow, DARK MACHINE THE ANIMATION