KAIJU GIRL CARAMELISE Director Teruyuki Omine On Turning Teenage Heartbreak Into a Monster (EXCLUSIVE)

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KAIJU GIRL CARAMELISE is one of the stranger, more ambitious swings anime has taken at the shojo romance genre (or shojo-like if you will, the manga is serialised in a seinen magazine) in years. Based on Spica Aoki’s manga, which has sold over 300,000 copies since it began serialisation in Monthly Comic Alive in 2018, the story follows high schooler Kuroe Akaishi, a girl who has spent her life keeping people at a distance because of a mysterious condition. The moment she falls for Arata Minami, the most popular boy in her class, that condition awakens into something far bigger than a coming-of-age crush: she transforms into a towering kaiju named Harugon. It’s a premise that sounds like a punchline on paper but it plays out as something very tender on screen.

That person behind this adaptation is Teruyuki Omine, a Japanese animator and animation director who has spent years working as an episode director on other productions before taking on KAIJU GIRL CARAMELISE as his first full series as director. Directing a single episode within someone else’s vision is a very different job from being the person everyone else’s decisions ultimately funnel up to, and Omine was candid with me about exactly how much that shift weighed on him.

After watching Kuroe’s transformation play out across the show’s premiere episode, which I reviewed here, I had a lot of questions about how a show built on a premise this delicate manages to hold together instead of collapsing into gimmick. A lot of that, it turns out, comes down to one idea Omine refused to compromise on. I got the chance to speak with him exclusively about exactly how he pulled that off.

Duality Is the Whole Point

Before getting into the mechanics of the show, I asked Omine how he’d describe KAIJU GIRL CARAMELISE to someone discovering it for the first time. His answer laid out the thesis of the entire series far more precisely than any marketing synopsis could.

“The core theme of this series is the duality of human nature,” he told me. “Someone who looks quiet and reserved from the outside might actually harbor intense passions. Conversely, someone who appears absolutely perfect might secretly be struggling with deeply rooted anxieties or complexes.”

This description reframes Kuroe and Arata as two sides of the same coin rather than a shy girl and a golden-boy love interest. Omine extended the idea further, situating it as something the whole cast expresses rather than a trait belonging to Kuroe alone: “The characters in this world express these inner complexities in their own unique ways – sometimes through turning into a kaiju, sometimes through cosplay, and sometimes through their ordinary everyday appearance.”

Protecting Kuroe’s Emotional Curve

The premise of KAIJU GIRL CARAMELISE lives or dies on one idea: Kuroe’s feelings, specifically her falling in love, are what trigger her transformation. I asked Omine directly whether preserving this tender idea was the single biggest priority going into production, and his answer confirmed just how load-bearing that mechanic really was.

That loss of control is exactly what my review flagged as the sharpest part of the premiere, the idea that any emotional spike, good or bad, risks turning Kuroe into a national incident. Omine confirmed that this isn’t incidental to the story, it’s the engine of it: “This is the very reason why she struggles to close the distance with others, and it also serves as the driving force that propels the story forward.”

Where this got more interesting is that Omine treats the emotional arc as a character study and the structural glue holding two genres together. “This element was also crucial in successfully coexisting Kuroe’s high school daily life with the world of giant kaiju,” he explained. “To bridge the gap between the mundane and the extraordinary, we needed Kuroe’s emotions to feel seamless and continuous. If we failed at that, the entire show risked falling apart.”

That’s a striking admission from a first-time series director. He’s not describing a nice-to-have creative flourish, he’s describing the one thing that, if mishandled, would have taken the whole show down with it. “We were extremely careful not to disrupt her emotional curve,” he added, “and I believe this focus ultimately contributed significantly both to the fun of the show and to its overall cohesion.”

Making a Classroom and a Kaiju Feel Like the Same Show

KAIJU GIRL CARAMELISE asks its audience to accept two very different scales in the same frame: an ordinary high school romance and a monster large enough to level parts of Tokyo. I asked Omine how he approached directing tones that different without the show splitting into two disconnected halves.

“Visually, blending the scale of a normal human with the scale of a giant kaiju is usually easier if you raise the level of realism,” he said. “However, for this series, both scales required a degree of stylisation and comedic expressions, which I knew would be no easy task.”

His solution circles back to the same continuity he’d already described. “By developing scenes around Kuroe’s emotions, we were able to prevent abrupt transitions between scenes,” he said. “I believe this emotional continuity allowed Kuroe and the other characters to coexist naturally even after her transformation.”

One detail he shared stood out to me as the kind of production choice that’s easy to miss on a first watch but says a lot once you know it’s there: “We even processed Kuroe’s actual voice to create Harugon’s roars, making sure that the kaiju didn’t feel disconnected from the Kuroe inside.”

Directing For the First Time

Omine has worked as an animator and episode director before, but KAIJU GIRL CARAMELISE is the first time he’s fully helmed a series. I wanted to know how that shift in responsibility actually felt from the inside.

“In my previous roles, my job was to trust the director and do my absolute best within the specific scope I was given,” he said. “A director, on the other hand, must find answers to the various problems presented by the staff, while constantly looking at the overall balance to give directions and manage the production.” He didn’t soften what that meant for him personally: “If the project doesn’t turn out to be engaging, the responsibility ultimately falls on the director, so it was a role with immense pressure.”

When I asked about the hardest scene to storyboard or direct, Omine didn’t point to a kaiju battle or a complex set piece. He pointed to the very beginning.

“The most difficult part was the first half of Episode 1,” he told me. “I remember struggling quite a bit to truly grasp the characters’ personalities and emotional states. Once I got a solid handle on that, however, the process of storyboarding and checking the final footage became much smoother.” I’d argue it doesn’t show. The first half of Episode 1 is precisely where the show does its heaviest lifting, establishing Kuroe’s trauma, her isolation, and the rules of her condition, and Omine’s account confirms that the difficulty was proportional to how much that opening stretch had to carry.

Not Just Meta-Cute

Kaiju as a genre carries decades of cultural weight in Japan, and grafting that onto a shojo romance is a strange, ambitious swing. I asked Omine whether he felt a particular sense of responsibility bringing kaiju storytelling into a romantic comedy format.

“While people might sometimes find kaiju cute in a meta sort of way, it’s quite rare to see a story where a girl transforms into a genuinely cute and charming kaiju,” he said. That distinction, cute as an ironic, knowing joke versus cute as a sincere quality, is a useful way to understand what Harugon is going for. Omine credited the source material directly for setting that bar: “The original manga is incredibly fun, so I felt a strong sense of responsibility to ensure we brought out that unique charm as effectively as possible in the animated adaptation.”

I closed by asking Omine what he hoped audiences would feel once they finished the show. His answer looped back to the duality theme he opened with.

“I believe everyone has their own insecurities or something deep inside that they keep hidden,” he said. “If watching this series can help people feel even just a little bit lighter or more positive, it would truly warm my heart.”

Rayan Sayyed is the deputy editor for IGN India who writes and speaks on pop culture, spanning from games, anime, manga to films and everything in between. You can reach out to him at [email protected], or find him on Twitter/X @rayanaver and Instagram @rayansayyed

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