1998
Nineteen ninety-eight was a great time to be a kid. At least that’s how I remember it.
Growing up as video entertainment grew up, as this rich escapist culture we find ourselves in was developing into the strong broth that it is today.
There is so much excellent archival material at our disposal that even if everyone stopped creating right now we would never run out of things to discover about ourselves, about human culture.
That’s why I love to labor over my particular corner. To help it endure. To help time remember. The Word and man’s hubris; to capture the ringing of your own voice in a crystal lattice and hope it doesn’t melt on the tongue of the world like a snowflake.
Let me introduce you to my 1998; have you ever played Final Fantasy III for Super Nintendo? These days they call it Final Fantasy VI. In 1994, it was a peak experience. The instruction manual alone was like an artistic awakening for me, and I really imprinted on the entire product. I’ve played through the game multipe times as an adult, and I still think the instruction booklet is a real art object.
If you haven’t seen it before, it is my distinct pleasure to be the first to share it with you.
Vampire Hunter D and the gnarly anime from the video rental store was also a big part of that year. If you don’t know Vampire Hunter D,
The same year I got really into Final Fantasy III was the same year that I first saw Vampire Hunter D, which was also the same year Cartoon Network’s Toonami first aired.
Toonami was an after-school anime block that sometimes treated us to Speed Racer Marathons that were painful to sit through, even as a child.
We had to sit through them, though.
Dragon Ball Z was waiting, just on the other side of Chim Chim and Trixie and. Did you ever see Speed Racer? Holy shit. We had a lot of fun parroting the bad voice-acting amongst ourselves. That show is totally unique in how far the dubbing deviates from the natural flow of speech. It’s aggressive.
There is the story of how at the end of World War II, entire stockpiles of amphetamine were left abandonned in urban warehouses throughout Japan.
In time, this lead to an amphetamine-addicted Japanese working class. When I first heard this story, I immediately thought of Speed Racer.
Maybe everyone talked like that… maybe everyone moved like that… because the writers and producers and animators…
were actually…
on speed?
Too good to be true? Haha, maybe..
Besides decorating the threshold of my adolescence, there is another factor which unites these pop-cultural artifacts:
all of these projects (Final Fantasy III, Vampire Hunter D, and Speed Racer) are heavily indebted to the design work of Yoshitaka Amano, an artist who has been quietly helping to shape the worlds imagination for decades.
His influence is settled across the fields of my childhood like a morning dew before the sun burns it; Indeed, if Akira Toroyama, due to the central place his work has occupied in so many of our childhoods, is the sun, then Yoshitaka Amano, for many of us who were raised in the intervening years between 1990 and 2000, is the moon.
Tatsunoko Production
Legend has it the idea for Tatsunoko Production was seeded when the brothers Tatsuo, Kenji, and Toyoharu Yoshida were given western super hero comic books by American enlisted men at the end of World War II. Yoshitaka Amano also cites silver age Batman and Superman comic books as among his chief artistic influences, but these young artists weren’t just looking to the West.
Astro-boy (1963), the first animated series to embody the style and thematic content of what would later be called Anime, inspired a series of mangas from Tatsunoko, such as Z Boy, which attracted the attention of the much larger Toei Animation. By the time negotiations between Toei and Tatsunoko fell through, Toei had already trained several of Tatsuo Yoshida’s mangaka in the art and skill of animation. Tatsunoko’s transition from manga to animation was christened with the release of Space Ace in 1965. It was Space Ace that compelled a young Yoshitaka Amano to introduce himself to Tatsuo Yoshida, the 28-year-old president of Tatsunoko Production.
On the strength of his drawing ability, Yoshitaka Amano was brought on board at Tatsunoko Production in 1967. At the ripe old age of… 15. The young artist was immediately pressed into service as a character designer for Mach GoGoGo, Tatsunoko’s second attempt at an animated series.
Mach GoGoGo had begun as a manga written and illustrated by Tatsuo Yoshida himself. It enjoyed a wide readership in Japan, and any animated adaptation of the popular series was sure to be a commercial success. First airing on Fuji TV between April 1967 and March 1968, things went exactly as the creators had expected. The Trans-Lux Television Company, headquartered in New York City, was so impressed that they immediately purchased the import rights.
In the fall of 1967 Mach GoGoGo, as Speed Racer, began airing on American UHF television.
Speed Racer became the second japanese animated series to reach the United States, being preceded only by Astro Boy. One commentor who is old enough to remember says,
'Speed Racer was one of the very few series cartoons here in the states that had adult action, quality content with guns and plenty of fight scenes that rivaled live action movies...'
Richard Fernandez, who had worked on voice-overs for the english language distribution of Astro Boy, was put in charge of the english dub of Mach GoGoGo/Speed Racer as well. It is believed that the famously rapid-fire, over-the-top dialog that I was making fun of earlier came about largely due to the fact that Fernandez was only given two days to script and record for each episode, while attempting to convey sophisticated plots in a short amount of space.
Yoshitaka Amano would stay on with Tatsunoko Production as a character design specialist for 15 years. His talents would grace a range of essential titles in the Tatsunoko catalog such as:
Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (1972-1977), Hurricane Polymar (1974), The New Adventures of Hutch
the Honeybee (1974), Tekkaman the Space Knight (1975), mecha series Gowappa 5 Gōdam (1976) and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA (1983), which would be released in the United States in 1984 as the third installment of ROBOTECH. The ground-breaking Neo-Human Casshern (1974), which is still a big deal in Italy, 1975’s Time Bokan and the 1994 Time Bokan Revival, along with its spinoffs, Yatterman (1975), Zenderman (1979), Rescueman (1980), Yattodetaman (1981), Gyakuten! Ippatsuman (1982).
American producer Sandy Frank (Lassie, Lone Ranger, The Bill Cosby Show, etc.) saw episodes of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman during an MIP-TV Convention in Cannes in 1977. He committed to an American release of the series hoping to capitalize on the landmark success of the first Star Wars film, released in May of that
same year. The producers took eighty-five of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman’s one hundred and five episodes, overdubbed them with a brand new english language script that made no reference to the original, and renamed the product Battle of The Planets. American producers made conscious efforts to disguise the japanese origins of these products; the total overhaul of the Gatchaman script represents such an effort.
Amano has said that his designs for the Gatchaman series were inspired by Andy Warhol, American rock music, and the American psychadelic movement.
It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that this series would represent many Americans’ first exposure to Japanese animation.
Its release would also mark the beginning of the development of the American Anime Fandom in earnest. The initial success of Battle Of The Planets showed television studios that there was a real demand for the stuff.
In the coming years, the number of Anime being imported, translated, and marketed to an American audience would turn from a trickle into a flood. Comic artist Alex Ross has said of the cast of Gatchaman, ‘they belong to the great pantheon of characters’.
In 1978, you could count the number of anime available in the United States on one hand. Meanwhile in Italy, independent companies had only recently been given court sanction to operate outside the umbrella of the state-run broadcasting monopoly Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI).
These fledgling broadcasters were generally short on funds; as fate and fortune would have it, japanese animation studios were offering their products at a reduced price to western broadcasting agencies due to the uncertainty involved. While the West was an untapped market, it was also largely untested. Toei’s UFO Robot Grendizer (1975) was the first japanese anime to significantly impact a European audience, but the Tatsunoko production ‘Neo-human Casshan’, first released in italy in 1980, looms large in the Italian memory as one of the greatest of its time.
Telestudio, the company which aired ‘Neo-human Casshan’ in Italy, carried over 30 japanese animated series on its airwaves between 1978 and 1986- in choosing their favorite, it isn’t as if the Italian market was short on options.
‘Neo-human Casshan’ is about a boy who turns himself into an android endowed with human consciousness in order to hunt down the robots that have taken over the world. His biological father had created the first robot as a servant of mankind, but it was struck by lightning and started having opinions.
Among its opinions was the fairly standard deduction that humans were a threat to the ecosystem, and therefore needed to be destroyed. It would appear that there has never been a time where this wasn’t a science fiction trope. But its a trope that Neo-human casshan executes with a unique style and grace. This is to be expected, as this is the one Tatsunoko project where Yoshitaka Amano acted as both character designer and art director.
“My roots lie in the works I created for Tatsunoko Production… My work for Tatsunoko paved the way for me to enter the world I live in now. It all started there.”
In considering the legacy of Yoshitaka Amano, we have to consider Tatsunoko’s impact on the youth culture of Japan in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s .
The studio was a pioneering force and chief luminary in the industry, particularly when it was young. When everyone that worked there was young. When the world of anime itself was still quite young.
Discussions about the history of Japanese Anime in the 60’s and 70’s usually revolve around the rivalry between Toei Animation and Mushi Production, and proceed without mentioning Tatsunoko at all. Because people love to work in binaries, there is another school which views this period as an essential conflict between the comic-book style of the young upstarts at Tatsunoko and the Disney aspirations of Mushi. Both accounts are disingenuous.
A true and full account is beyond the scope of this article. The major bullet-point is that, for all that Tatsunoko languishes in near-total obscurity in the west, it was front and center during the early development of TV animation in Japan. Its products were hugely influential in its country of origin.
Along with Toei Animation and Tokyo Movie Shinsha, Tatsunoko is one of only three Japanese Animation Studios still in existence with roots that go back to the ‘first anime boom’. And there, in the first wave of animes produced in the wake of Astro-boy, is where we find Yoshitaka Amano working. Although almost none of Amano’s actual drawings would appear in any of the projects he was involved with at Tatsunoko, he was one of the visionaries who helped engineer an entire zeitgeist.
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n 1982, at the age of 30, Amano tendered his resignation at Tatsunoko Production. Commenting on this bold career move, the artist said in a 2017 interview:
"...One day I realized that what I really wanted to do was something that had never been done before- not create something that is based on research and assured to be a hit. I wanted to do something that no one has ever attempted."
It would appear that in Japan, as in the West, the promise of the Space Age gave way to disillusionment. Here we see Amano shift gears from an output almost strictly concerned with the relationship between Man and Machine to one almost strictly concerned with the fantastic. Sword and Sorcery was booming in the West at the same time that Yoshitaka Amano helping to elevate the ethos of the entire Fantasy genre.
Amano became a regular contributor to S-F Magazine, a japanese monthly periodical which had been in production since 1959, and remains in production today. While S-F had started as an outlet for japanese translations of english-language science fiction stories, it had become by this time a veritable hub for the japanese language audience to keep its finger on the pulse of developments in the science fiction and fantasy worlds, both foreign and domestic.
It was a place an up-and-coming illustrator would be noticed. Amano’s work was serialized in the magazines ‘Twilight Worlds’ section, where he did the illustrations for stories by Mariko Ohara.
Very shortly, he would land his first cover. Unfortunately, I could not track down that cover. But here are a few by Noriyoshi Ohai, demonstrating the spirit of the age and the stringent quality standards that these artists worked under:
In 1983, Amano would begin producing cover art and illustrations for Hideyuki Kikuchichi’s pop horror novels. This move significantly raised the profile of both Amano and Kikuchichi’s work. Several of these novels would go on to recieve OVA (original video animation) adaptations with international distribution. Kikuchichi’s novels present names that are familiar to us from the Blockbuster Adult Anime circuit circa 1996; Wicked City (1987), Demon City Shinjuku (1988), and Vampire Hunter D (1985) are notable examples. In short order, Amano became one of the most sought-after hired guns of the 1980’s Japanese fantasy genre. Like Kikuchichi’s beloved half-vampire, Amano was without a master and without a peer.
Amano illustrated the covers for Baku Yumemakura’s series of novels ‘Chimera’ from 1982 until 2002. The series remains unfinished. I was struggling to find photographic evidence of the covers for ‘Chimera’ Illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano when I learned that Amano illustrated an entire manga in collaboration with Yumemakura, called ‘Amon Saga (1984)’. I cannot find translated scans of this manga anywhere, but ebay listings assure me that the work exists, even if it is only in the japanese language. In this same period, Hayakawa Publishing enlisted Amano to work on japanese versions of foreign novels.
Tanith Lee’s ‘The Castle of Dark (1978)’ and ‘Shon the Taken (1979)’ are supposed to have had japanese versions with cover art by Yoshitaka Amano, but I cant find them. Here are a few covers from english language distributions, both to offer contrast, and to hype up an authoress who I had never heard of until this moment, but who has dozens of titles under her belt:
Amano’s enchanted style could not have found a better home than Yoshiki Tanaka’s ‘The Heroic Legend of Arslan (1986-2017). This is an essentially political Epic Fantasy that is based on the literature of ancient Persia, Invested with echoes of things like the Zoroastrian Avestas and the Shanameh:
There is a chonky media legacy behind The Heroic Legend of Arslan. The books have been adapted into a manga, two feature-length films, as well as several OVA’s and video games. To top it all off, an anime that covers the first six books in two seasons was released between 2015 and 2016.
Amano also did tons of illustrations for Michael Moorcock’s Elrich of Melbion character and universe.
Moorcock was hugely prolific as a writer and an artist. He designed Elrich of Melbion to invert epic fantasy tropes pioneered by Tolkien, who’s work Moorcock equated to ‘epic Winnie The Pooh’. An innovator and an iconoclast, Moorcock has famously taken on what he called the ‘authoritarian agendas’ of writers like Robert A. Heinlein and H.P. Lovecraft and gold disc award for his collaborative work with ground-breaking experimental rock band Hawkwind.
Beginning in 1984, Amano would take over as illustrator for Guin Saga. He would perform this office until 1997, applying his talents to some 37 volumes of the sword and sorcery epic. Beginning production in 1979, Kaoru Kurimoto’s Guin Saga has since grown to be the longest single work by any author in the world. Amano’s work for the book series is, once again, highly compelling.
[*Dungeonposting Note: The Lisa Frank design company was incorporated in 1979, the same year that Guin Saga entered production. Was the art of Yoshitaka Amano influenced by Lisa Franks’ airbrushed sticker designs? His love of American pop art is well-documented. And we have touched on the relationship between Amano’s work and another American with the surname ‘Frank’ (Sandy Frank, the American television producer who brought Science Ninja Team Gatchaman to the United States) . The connection is tenuous, at best, but just look at this leopard: ]
1984 also saw the publication of ‘Maten (Evil Universe)’, Yoshitaka Amano’s first art book. The uncompromisingly dark aesthetic vision which suffuses the work was timely, to say the least; pluto had just moved into its native sign of scorpio, the Satanic Panic was picking up steam across seas, and the world of japanese animated media was about to veer sharply into the new zeitgeist.
The Vampire Hunter D 1985 OVA, directed by Toyoo Ashida of Ashi Productions in association with Sony Group, was based on the first Vampire Hunter D novel. It recieved an english dub in 1993, and was marketed in the United States as ‘the first [feature length] animated film for adults’. It was not; that honor belongs to, depending on the metrics you use, either the Canadian ‘Heavy Metal (1981)’, or Ralph Bakshi’s 1972 ‘Fritz, The Cat‘. Vampire Hunter D was, however, among the first feature length japanese animated films to recieve a stateside release. It’s impact was immediate. Kikuchichi says of the film,
"...the first [film], I wasn't completely satisfied with the way it came out. But as soon as it hit the theaters, sales of D went through the roof, so I found it very effective. As for the second film {Yoshiaki Kawajiri's Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)}, I consider it to be the top class of animation in Japan."
Personally, I fucking love the 1985 film and think Bloodlust is too glam. Still, we should elaborate on the figure of Yoshiaki Kawajiri here, as his legacy is entwined with this entire cultural complex. In fact, the co-founder of Madhouse Studios seems to be at the very beating heart of the nexus which spawned the Blockbuster Adult Anime boom I keep talking about. A short list of productions he was involved with includes Wicked City OVA (1987), Demon City Shinjuku OVA (1988), Record of Loddoss War (1990), A Wind Called Amnesia OVA (1990), Ninja Scroll (1993), Biohunter (1995), Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000). The list goes on, and on, and on.
While Yoshitaka Amano is only given partial credit for the character designs in the 1985 Vampire Hunter D film, and no credit at all in 2000’s Bloodlust, Amano’s visual aesthetic has undoubtedly become a hallmark of the franchise:
1985 would also see the release of Angel’s Egg OVA, a collaboration between Yoshitaka Amano and Mamoru Oshii. Two years prior, Oshii had pioneered the OVA format with the release of Dallos (1983), an anime about colonists on the moon revolting against the federal government of Earth. An OVA is simply an animated film that is released straight to home video without being shown in theaters or on television.
Despite no one being forced to watch it, the dark enigma that is Angel’s Egg pissed a lot of people off. Oshii claims to have struggled to find work for years afterward. He would find redemption in the court of popular opinion a decade later with the release of Ghost In The Shell (1995), widely considered one of the greatest animated films in any genre of all time. Amano said of Angel’s Egg in a 2012 interview,
'It was really Oshii's project. I'm not sure I should talk about this, but at the time he was getting a divorce and had a daughter that he couldn't see. So he felt that he was creating some unhappy memories and unhappy times for his daughter. And perhaps that experience resulted in Angel's Egg. But that was something I heard well after the fact. The worldviews of Oshii and I are a little different. I think Oshii brought a more religious angle to the film. []..I was more into the fantasy part. That was our collaboration.'
Despite being Oshii’s collaborator, Amano’s career fared a bit better in the aftermath of Angel’s Egg. Amon Saga, the 1984 manga which Amano had illustrated based on a story by Baku Yumemakura, recieved OVA treatment in 1986. Here, as ever, Amano served in his perrenial role as lead character designer.
In 1987, Amano would recieve a commission to design the monster for Hisayuki Toriumi’s LILY C.A.T., Another title familiar from our 1996 Blockbuster Adult Anime list. LILY C.A.T. is essentially an anime adaptation of Ridley Scotts 1979 Sci-fi Horror Classic Alien, merged with John Carpenters The Thing (1982).Part lovecraftian cosmic horror, part social commentary, and part classical japanese ghost story, Yoshitaka Amano’s incomprehensible space-beast made of mouths and tentacles and soul-piercing shrieks really seals up the package and sends it home to a forbidden planet through an emergency escape hatch (you’d laugh if you had seen the film).
Final Fantasy 1987
The story goes that Squaresoft was a fledgling software engineering firm on the verge of collapse. Its prayers hinged on the success of a digital emulation of the Dungeons and Dragons rules system which creator Hironobu Sakaguchi had decided to call ‘Final Fantasy’, in reference to the fact that it was his companies last chance to make a winning product before they packed up and went back to college. Yoshitaka Amano was a high profile artist in Japan at the time. Why he accepted a job with a failing Squaresoft when Sakaguchi’s team reached out to him seems to come down to creative license:
“For me at the time, fantasy was the theme I wanted to draw the most. I honestly didn’t know much about video games, but I wanted to try any job that led to fantasy.”
Yoshitaka Amano designed the characters, monsters, and promotional material for the first Final Fantasy game, released in Japan in 1987. While it was not released in America until 1990, the game was born the same year I was. Even in the dimmest recollections of my earliest years, it feels as if these guys have always just kind of been there:
The game was an international success, which single-handedly reversed Squaresofts financial fortunes and launched their flagship franchise. Amano would act as lead character designer and concept artist for the next five Final Fantasy Installments, with digital artist Kazuko Shibuya economizing and reinterpretting his designs in pixel format.
The international release of Final Fantasy VI (ported as Final Fantasy III in the USA) in 1994 for Super Nintendo/Super Famicom represents the grand finale of Yoshita Amanos work with Squaresoft. This was one of the first, and last, great RPGS of the short-lived 32-bit era; many believe it also represents Squaresofts magnum opus. I was in the 5th grade when I adopted Final Fantasy III like Terra adopting the Magicite; I internalized these characters and their story as spiritual armor, a moral atlas, a map to the world and experience. Amano said this about his own young sons video game consumption in a 1993 interview:
'Actually, yesterday I accidentally deleted his saved game data that he’d been working on for a month. (laughs) He was crying about it. Even this morning he was still upset, muttering “damn! goddamnit!” under his breath… I can only imagine how frustrated he was. I was actually kind of shocked to find out he was that obsessed with this game. It’s kind of shameful… he’s in the 6th grade! If he were a 2nd or 3rd grader I’d understand.'
With the development of polygon-based 3d rendering, game developers were eager to move beyond pixel art. As I recall, so was everybody else. Final Fantasy VII was to be released under a whole new graphic dispensation. The painterly quality of Amano’s design work was found unsuited for the hard-edged, low polygon count graphic environment of the Playstation 1. Amano’s chief responsibilities were assumed by Tetsuya Nomura, whos crisp, angular style was considered more appropriate for the new limitations and possibilities of 64-bit gaming.
Never the less, the core aesthetic imparted on the franchise by Amano in his years at Squaresoft has served as a key point of reference for the Final Fantasy franchise ever since.
