This amazing exhibition visited others cities and Madrid, five years ago, now in London, is a good chance to visit it. The artists created a universe of fictional worlds reflected real-life concerns over ruthless urban development and erosion of identity, mirroring the films' narratives and giving the backgrounds a crucial role to play. Their work has had a defining influence on the style of anime we think of as typical today.
The show includes Hiromasa Ogura’s watercolour paintings for Ghost in the Shell, an anime epic that informed pioneering sci-fi works such as The Matrix and Avatar. Inspired by Asia’s emerging megacities and based on photographs of Hong Kong, Ogura’s work depicts the striking contrast between a derelict Chinese town and looming, faceless skyscrapers.
Takashi Watabe's meticulously realistic style has become a hallmark of Japanese anime films as a whole. We show his pencil drawings for 2008’s sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, as well as work from Patlabor: The Movie (1989) and Metropolis (2001), by Mamoru Oshii and Atsushi Takeuchi.
