Cityscapes in Anime Background Art
I’m very happy to share the announcement of our upcoming exhibition at the Yoshiro and Yoshio Taniguchi Museum of Architecture in Kanazawa, Japan. The show is titled “Cityscapes in Anime Background Art” and largely based on our research for the book “Anime Architecture”. It will open on 16 June and run until 19 November. Here is the official announcement of the exhibition, taken from the museum’s website:
Unlike live action film making, in animated films everything is created from scratch, bringing unique levels of intentionality to every aspect of the worlds created: from the "natural" location to the "built" architectural environment, both exterior weather and interior designs, protagonists and their styling, and how the camera apprehends them. This exhibition presents the original meticulously drawn hand-drawn backgrounds from several of Japan's most iconic late 1980s ~ early 2000s sci-fi anime films, supplemented by interviews with core creatives, chronological tables, reference materials (notes, books, and location scouting photos, etc.), and architects' plans for these future cities. Experience these cities from their creators' perspectives, and see how they merged reality and fiction.
Organized by : Yoshiro and Yoshio Taniguchi Museum of Architecture, Kanazawa (Kanazawa Cultural Promotion Foundation)
Subsidized by: The Kao Foundation for Arts and Sciences
Supervised by: Taro Igarashi（ Professor, Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku University）
Curated by: Stefan Riekeles, Hiroko Myokam, Yoshiro and Yoshio Taniguchi Museum of Architecture, Kanazawa
In Cooperation with: Kanazawa College of Art, Riekeles Gallery, Eizo Workshop G.K.
Exhibits:
AKIRA (1988/DIR.: Otomo Katsuhiro/ART DIR.: Toshiharu Mizutani)
Patlabor: The Movie (1989/DIR.: Mamoru Oshii/ARTDIR.: Hiromasa Ogura)
Patlabor 2: The Movie (1993/DIR.: Mamoru Oshii/ART DIR.: Hiromasa Ogura)
GHOST IN THE SHELL (1995/DIR.: Mamoru Oshii/ART DIR.: Hiromasa Ogura)
Metropolis（ 2001／DIR.: Rintaro／ART DIR.: Shuichi Kusamori）
Tekkonkinkreet (2006/DIR.: Michael Arias/ART DIR.: Shinji Kimura
Flyer for the exhibition, front side.
Back side of the exhibition flyer.
My research for this undertaking began in the year 2007 as an assistant to David d’Heilly and his wife Shizu Yuasa whom I had the pleasure to help and who still continue to accompany this journey into “anime land”, this time as interpreters, translators and friends. The first public presentation of our research was the internationally touring exhibition “Proto Anime Cut” (Les Jardins des Pilotes, 2011 - 2013, Berlin, Dortmund, Barcelona, Madrid, Tallinn, Basel) and the publication “Proto Anime Cut Archive” (Kehrer Verlag, 2011), assisted by Hiroko Myokam, our curatorial colleague and producer for the present exhibition.
The second installment was the exhibition “Anime Architecture” (Les Jardins des Pilotes, 2016, Berlin, London, Sydney, Delray Beach) and the book of the same title, published by Thames & Hudson in 2020. Our latest presentation of spectacular anime background art was the exhibition “AKIRA - The Architecture of Neo Tokyo” (Tchoban Foundation, Berlin, 2022). All of these projects had been taking place outside of Japan, mostly in Berlin because that is where I am based, far away from the creators’ studios. With the translation and publication of “Anime Architecture” in Japan by Graphic-Sha in 2021 we could finally bring our research back to its origin.
Today I am happy that we can celebrate the presentation of our joint efforts, which matured through so many years in the exhibition “Cityscapes in Anime Background Art” and present it to a Japanese audience. I am very grateful to the organizers of this project for taking the risk of such a bold and unseen presentation and for entrusting this significant showcase to our hands and minds.