Gaim Director Ryuta Tasaki on the Dance Motif and Urobuchi's Trap

Ryuta Tasaki, director of Kamen Rider Gaim, discussed the show’s dance-team premise and writer Gen Urobuchi’s approach to the material in an interview with the Japanese magazine Uchusen. Tasaki said he came onto the project after finishing work on Unofficial Sentai Akibaranger and Nintama Rantarou, by which point the samurai, fruit, and lock motifs, along with Urobuchi as writer, were already set.

The dancing, Tasaki explained, was Urobuchi’s idea, meant to track the cast’s coming-of-age as the series progressed: cool spectacle for younger viewers early on, giving way to more mature concerns as the characters grow up and move past it. The dance-team rivalries doubled as a stand-in for the Warring States period the series draws on, with the Rider powers settling disputes that the adult characters initially dismiss as children playing with toys.

Asked about series writer Urobuchi, new to Kamen Rider at the time, Tasaki called the opening episodes deliberately simple and accessible for newcomers, while describing the larger structure as “all just a clever trap”: familiar-looking setup meant to be dismantled by twists later in the run. He noted producer Naomi Takebe’s push to move away from the two-Rider format that had defined recent seasons like Kamen Rider W, restoring the multiple-Rider structure Urobuchi, a longtime fan of Kamen Rider Ryuki, was also keen to use, with an explicit goal of pulling the series back toward its early Heisei roots. Tasaki pointed to specific callbacks planted in the first two episodes, comparing Gaim’s large Rider roster to Ryuki and its corporate antagonist, Yggdrasill, to Faiz’s Smart Brain.

On the design side, Tasaki admitted Baron’s banana-themed helmet ears caught him off guard at first, in a franchise where he’d already been surprised by unconventional designs going back to Ryuki and Faiz. He described his job as making a design work in motion regardless of how it read on paper, crediting suit performer Gaku Takaiwa’s movement for selling looks that might not otherwise land. Among the show’s early cast of Riders, he singled out Gridon, armored around a persimmon motif and wielding a small hammer, as an early staff favorite he expected adult viewers to connect with as well.

Tasaki closed by looking ahead to Kamen Rider × Super Sentai × Space Sheriff: Super Hero Taisen Z’s follow-up, The Fateful Sengoku Movie Battle, celebrating the fifteenth Heisei Rider series with all fourteen previous Riders returning as “Warrior God” variants, filmed partly on Toei’s standing Edo-period set in Kyoto.