His work with directors Akiyuki Shinbo (and more broadly studio Shaft) and Kunihiko Ikuhara have gained noteworthy fame since the late 1990s and especially through the mid-2000s.
In 1997, Takeuchi worked as the animation director for Shaft's outsourced episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara.
[3] The following year, in 1998, studio Radix was set to produce an adaptation of Silent Möbius, but the production ended up being outsourced to Shaft.
[2] Chief director Hideki Tonokatsu worked at Shaft, and Shaft became the main production site and also the company responsible for finding the series' staff; and finding interest in Takeuchi's work, saying that Takeuchi had a clear vision and direction, he was given the role of series "animation director" (not referring to the correction of drawings).
[2] For the next several years, Takeuchi continued to freelance as a key animator and animation director across several studios, even doing work for Studio Ghibli, but he gained prominence in 2004 when Shaft teamed up with Akiyuki Shinbo to produce Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase, the start of Shinbo and Shaft's long collaborative history.