Last week had an overnight trip to Nagoya for Hideaki Anno, Mamoru Nagano, and Samurai Armor & Sword exhibitions. Many photos and thoughts to consider...
Anno most famous for GAINAX, Evangelion, Shin Godzilla, but received acclaim for his amateur animation, such as the hugely copyright infringing openings of the DAICON fan-con. (Daicon is radish in Japanese, but also DAI means big, the first kanji in Osaka 大坂 (big slope), where they were held, and CON is convention, so the openings have flying radishes in them ) .
The exhibition has all his armature animation works, storyboards and shows he was influenced by.
He even did these Thunderbird 1 & 2 illustrations for a publication.
In the hallway there was a giant projected wall of the TV shows that influenced him as a kid. Opening titles or key scenes all running at once, without sound. Guessing it was maybe 10 x 30 of 25cmx25cm moving images. It was one of the things no pictures allowed. Of all the shows there, I had seen maybe 8 as a kid. Things like Gigantor, UFO, Captain Scarlet, Marine Boy, Thunderbirds. So much more of that kind of media was in Japan than in Australia when we were kids. Anno is just 2 years younger than I am.
Nagano is mostly known for his Five Star Stories Manga he has been releasing since 1986. But he also did designs for early Gundam and like productions, and the later BRAIN POWERED. Exhibition was mostly no photos, and many framed images were the large watercolors used as the covers of the collected manga volumes I have. Interesting to see the detail in these watercolor works. Highlites had been airbrushed in white. Most of the design sketch work looked like color photocopies stuck to core board. These sketches are in the back of the manga volumes too. I had read the he draws his manga on larger than the standard B4 comic paper, and was disappointed that a comic artist had no original comic pages on a display of his work!
Music and music gear is an influence and one of his productions was called FOOL FOR THE CITY. That 1975 track by UK band Foghat was playing from a speaker over that display.
There was a large monitor showing a clip from his limited release animation GOTHICMADE. Near that was a display of VOLKs garage kits of the mecha in the comic.
Samurai exhibit was a free exhibit at the Touken Building. There is a much larger exhibit with 500 swords at a different location, but this smaller display was fine for me before setting off home. The armour and the sword hand guards are particularly interesting to me.
You end up walking a long way using the trains in Nagoya, and I was worn out by the morning of the 16th.
The music in the 58sec music-comic above cuts between 2 different music tracks, both at 126BPM. One EDM, the other synths+metal. That kind of feels like the jumps in items on display in the exhibitions. So now you know.
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