These make clear the sharp contrast between the old and the futuristic new architectures, with the sense of unease mirroring the main character’s struggles with questions of identity and authenticity. Photos of Hong Kong, produced in monochrome so as not to hamper the art director’s colour palette, inspired Ogura’s watercolour image boards and backgrounds, even incorporating the halo effect around the streetlights caused by a misted-up camera lens. The cityscape was inspired by the fast-vanishing vernacular architecture of Hong Kong, which Oshii and his team visited several times as part of their research, and its contrast with the rapid new development. Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (remade as a live action film this year) is set in 2029. These are contrasted in the film with large-scale new development, the site of the action central to the plot. For this, location photography by Hawhiko Higami captured the forgotten canals and old, wooden houses of Tokyo, and these images in turn inspired the evocative backgrounds produced by art director Hiromasa Ogura. We learn how Oshii was the first anime director to use location photography as part of the creative process in the late 1980s and that his film Patlabor: The Movie (1989), was the first to give backgrounds as much importance as characters. These were directly inspired by the fast-changing urban landscapes of real Asian cities. The settings for these films share common themes relating to the pace and scale of urban development, and specifically the replacement of humble, vernacular buildings with gleaming high-rises which loom, seemingly malevolently, in the background. Nowadays, only a handful of studios produce manually painted backgrounds, with each highly specialised stage accomplished by different artists. Films such as Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995) make use of both. Japanese anime dates back to 1917 and these late 20th/early 21st century works were made at the turning point between hand-drawn and digital artwork. The painstaking production process is explained through displays of more than 100 original technical drawings and illustrations from four films. While anime fans will no doubt love it, you don’t have to be familiar with the films to appreciate the level of artistry that goes into creating the architectural backdrops – the sets that are so fundamental to the design of these films. Shown at the House of Illustration, the exhibition is the first of its sort in the UK. What inspired the futuristic cityscapes of Japanese anime (animation) films, and how were they created? The exhibition Anime Architecture: Backgrounds of Japan, seeks to reveal the virtuosity of the creative process behind some of the classic films from the 1990s heyday of the genre.
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