Yasuhiko Yoshikazu

Yoshikazu Yasuhiko (安彦 良和, Yasuhiko Yoshikazu^?, born December 9, 1947) is a Japanese animator and manga artist in the anime industry.

Born in Engaru, Hokkaidō, Yasuhiko dropped out of Hirosaki University and was hired by Osamu Tezuka's Mushi Productions in 1970 as an animator. He later went freelance and worked on various animation productions for film and television. He began working as a manga artist in 1979. In 1981 he won the Seiun Award in Art category. In 1992 he won the Japan Cartoonists Association Award, and in 2000, an Excellence Prize in manga for Ōdō no Inu at the Japan Media Arts Festival. He is also known as a novelist and science fiction illustrator. Some of his most notable works as character designer and director are Brave Reideen, Combattler V, and Mobile Suit Gundam. Less well known is the fact that he was the original character designer for the Dirty Pair, long before their first anime or manga appearance, when he was illustrating the Haruka Takachiho short stories that became the 1980 fixup novel Great Adventures of the Dirty Pair. He's also worked on the character designs for the video game, Vay.

In recent years he has branched out artistically, creating such works as Joan, a three-volume story of a young French girl living at the time of the Hundred Years' War, whose life parallels that of Joan of Arc; and Jesus, a two-volume biographical manga about the life of Jesus Christ.

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