Koji Morimoto is one of my favourite directors and animators. You may not recognise his name but if you have a remote knowledge of Japanese animation I’m sure you would recognise his work (Akira ring any bells?). While he is perhaps most famous for animating on large anime films and series I am personally most fond of his work as a director – he directed “Magnetic Rose” by far the best film on the “Memories” anime shorts DVD, and directed “Beyond” on the original “Animatrix” DVD (again my personal favourite of the collection). As a director his films have a distinct style, inhabiting dreamy scifi worlds not far removed from our own (and, of course, the animation is always phenomenal). Anyway, I heard there was an artbook of his lurking around so after much hunting I managed to get myself a copy, and it didn’t disappoint.
His “Orange Scapbook” is absolutely packed with artwork, mostly consisting of concept art and illustration. It includes a lot of strange urban landscapes, and a lot of weird and wonderful characters often combining the two to make more polished standalone images. The print quality is excellent with a lot of full page prints, even occasional double page prints – there are also plenty of pages that look (and even feel) like the pages of a sketchbook, with character doodles and even what looks like some observational drawing. Photography occasionally creeps in, even some storyboards and a couple of pages of film stills (thankfully, not a big fan of film stills – If I wanted film stills in an artbook I would have just bought the film!). My favourite part of the book is where they have printed coloured images on to a translucent paper (like tracing paper), each image is part of a city and the pages build up in layers to create this incredible scene – really amazing and I’ve never seen anything like it in a book before. At the back of the book there is also an index giving information about many of the images in the book (with English translation!) which is quite interesting.
There is no question that if you liked Tatsuyuki Tanaka’s “Cannabis Works” then you will like this (and vice versa) as the two books share some similar cyberpunk themes and landscapes. Morimoto’s worlds are a far more colourful affair than Tanaka’s, replacing the grey/green palette of “Cannabis Works” with vibrant reds, yellows and (fittingly) oranges. Morimoto’s work also contains some slightly more futuristic and “clean” concepts, vehicles and machines that look a bit more utopian than the distinctly grimy world of Tanaka.
As mentioned previously reviewing an artbook like this is quite difficult, but basically if you enjoy the work of Koji Morimoto then I can’t conceivably imagine you would be disapointed by this book. It really is packed with stuff – If I had to criticise I guess it could be seen as slightly repetitive and there is SOME filler in there but if you took out that repetition and the filler then you’d still have an awesome book left over! Check it out if you can.
September 17, 2008 at 7:43 am |
That translucent paper idea is really interesting. It could have all kinds of applications in books about archaeology and architecture.
April 24, 2009 at 11:16 am |
If you ever want to read a reader’s feedback
, I rate this post for four from five. Detailed info, but I just have to go to that damn yahoo to find the missed parts. Thank you, anyway!