The pictures consist of both specific, recognizable elements from existing cities that are multiply drawn over and given a denser mood by adding futuristic aspects, or are combined with other scenes in which entirely fictitious building blocks are integrated into the cities. In this way, in the background images you often see a mixture of a cityscape consisting of many, familiar and everyday elements and on the horizon the gleaming high-rises, huge infrastructure and strangely interwoven tube systems tower up. In such a scenery of the familiar and the imagined, objects such as the flying junks in “Ghost in the Shell” never seem completely out of place.

In all three films, the purpose-developed urban utopias play a special role. Often long pans present them in an almost meditative vein: The backdrops are a quite realistic Tokyo in “Patlabor”, a clearly futuristic and somberly revisited Hong Kong in “Ghost in the Shell”, and a Taipeh taken to a surreal-exotic extreme in “Ghost in the Shell 2” – including a massive version of the Milan Cathedral transformed into an Asian version. Given the huge production costs each and every minute of animated movie entails, these long, dreamy sequences with no action are especially astonishing.

It is likewise astonishing just how small the original images actually are. There is hardly a sheet that is larger than a European A5 page – and yet you can easily lose yourself in the precise representations. This type of drawing is by no means considered as art in Japan, as Stefan Riekeles says in the accompanying exhibition catalog, but purely as craftsmanship. The illustrators work on shift in the large studios and assign all the rights to their work to their employer. Many of the drawings were destroyed after production and thus Riekeles has an entertaining story to go with just about every image, recounting the coincidences that led to precisely this or that scene surviving. Many of the illustrators are self-taught and never attended art college or a drawing class, instead being mathematicians or others from completely different disciplines who simply took up drawing animes because they so loved the subject and over time evidently became masters of the subject – and today have their own loyal following. They initially had little interest in an exhibition of their drawings, Riekeles recounts. In fact they expressed a certain lack of understanding for why the nice guy from Europe wanted to hang their “unfinished” background images on a wall. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing as the actual artwork is the finished movie, surely...

Given these stories you might be forgiven wishing the exhibition would look a little less polished and breathe a bit more of a workshop atmosphere. A few film takes and an outline of the individual working steps that turn the first sketch and storyboards into a film would have helped to explain the overall process. The way it is, there is no counterpart to the manically devoted side to producing an anime movie to be found in the strict hanging – of sheets that have been framed against their creators’ will. The silence that arises as a consequence ensures you have a completely uninterrupted view of the background to the films. And you can probably get them on loan from a good DVD club anyway.

Exhibition:
Anime Architecture
Tchoban Foundation – Museum für Architekturzeichnungen
Christinenstrasse 18a
10119 Berlin
Thru October 16, 2016
www.tchoban-foundation.de

Book:
Proto Anime Cut Archive
ed. Stefan Riekeles
296 p., 234 ills., hardcover.,
German/English
Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2011
ISBN 978-3-86828-253-5
EUR 40