Nizo Yamamoto made his name as a background artist and art director — a really, really great one. If you are familiar with his name (you should be!), you’ve probably seen films he’s worked on, such as the films he worked on while at Studio Ghibli, such as Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, Grave of the Fireflies, Spirited Away and more.
After leaving Ghibli, Yamamoto did work on the The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which is one of the best looking anime in recent memory.
Yamamoto is famous for his highly detailed background art, and as website Spoon & Tamago points out, there’s an exhibition of 200 of his works at the Shizuoka City Museum of Art. The exhibition begins August 4 and runs until September 23.
This year, there have also been other exhibitions of Yamamoto’s beautiful background art earlier this year as well.
If you like Yamamoto’s art (and really, you should), his Twitter account has a couple of neat pics of him working and snapping landscape photos.
The Narrative World of Ghibli Art Director Nizo Yamamoto [Spoon & Tamago]
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2 responses to “Making Anime Idyllic And Beautiful”
I KNEW he was the guy behind The Girl Who Leapt Through Time from the very first picture up there. Fantastic work.
To any of you, anime initiates that loved Disney-distributed Ghibli films and wonder whether there’s some other great anime like that, but were wary of inching any deeper into a world allegedly full of molesting tentacles, ridiculous spiky-haired and spiky-glassed heroes, and doe-eyed damsels with breasts several sizes bigger than their heads, TGWLTT and other films by the same director, Mamoru Hosoda, are a great option.
I’m pretty sure one of those backgrounds is used in a 3DS game called Attack of the Friday Monsters too, isn’t it? Girl Who Lept Through Time is easily one of my favorite non Ghibli anime.