Curated by Stefan Riekeles and Nadejda Bartels, the exhibition features original drawings from a number of iconic Japanese animated films.
Riekeles tells The Creators Project that Anime Architecture is the outcome of long period of research within the realm of Japanese animation. He and his colleague David d'Heilly launched this endeavor back in 2007 when they began visiting animation artists in their Tokyo studios.
“First I was impressed by the amount of work that is necessary to produce a few seconds of animated films,” Riekeles says. “In the studios we saw piles of boxes filled with drawings. Then I was astonished by the quality of the drawings: thousands and thousands of great drawings in cardboard boxes. We were sure that other people wanted to see these, too. And so we decided that we have to show at least a few of them in an exhibition.”
The next major task was to find the criteria for selection. From the very beginning, Riekeles was fascinated with the background illustrations, which he says present large parts of the films’ worldviews. While each background is worked out in painstaking detail, they occupy only fleeting moments of screen time.
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“In the 1990s, Asia—especially the growth of China—stimulated a large discourse about the future of large cities,” Riekeles says. “In the visual arts it was the exhibition Cities on the Move by Hou Hanru and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, in which David d'Heilly actually took part, which captured these ideas best. Ghost in the Shell reflects this mood in its story and visual language.”
“The idea was to evoke a feeling of submerging into the deep levels of the city, where a flood of information overflows the human senses and a lot of noise surrounds the people,” he adds. “The artists were looking for an expression of a crowded space.”
Anime artists found their blueprint, according to Riekeles, in Hong Kong. The international city, with its epic skyscrapers, was exotic enough for a Japanese audience, helping to evoke a feeling of alienation and “strangeness but familiar enough to relate their daily life to”. ... In all of the cases of which Riekeles is aware, however, anime borrows from the built world, not the other way round. In other words, the real world is building as if it were constructing a fantasy, but not one of a strictly anime tone. But in the works of Anime Architecture, the fantasy is being pulled from the real world.