Yōichi Kotabe

Yōichi Kotabe (小田部 羊一, Kotabe Yōichi, born September 15, 1936), is a Japanese animator and character designer. He has worked on several anime films from the 1960s and 1970s, on the Super Mario video game series, and the Pokémon series in television and film. He was an employee at Nintendo for two decades doing illustrations, character designs, and supervision from 1985 to 2007. At that time, he began to work as a freelancer for the anime and video game industry, including for Nintendo again.