Exhibition: Anime Architecture: Backgrounds of Japan

The UK’s first ever exhibition of handmade background illustrations for classic sci-fi anime films. It features drawings and paintings from some of the most influential productions in the genre’s 1990s heyday, including Production I.G’s influential film Ghost in the Shell.

This collection of artists, who share an interest in presenting convincing visions of future worlds, have had a defining influence on the style of anime we think of as typical today.

The show includes Hiromasa Ogura’s watercolour paintings for Ghost in the Shell, an anime epic that informed pioneering sci-fi works such as The Matrix and Avatar. Inspired by Asia’s emerging megacities and based on photographs of Hong Kong, Ogura’s work depicts the striking contrast between a derelict Chinese town and ruthless urban development.

Pencil drawings by Takashi Watabe – one of the most important Japanese illustrators of his generation – for 2008’s sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence also feature. His meticulously realistic style has become a hallmark of Japanese anime films as a whole.

The exhibition also includes work from Patlabor: The Movie (1989) and Metropolis (2001), by Mamoru Oshii and Atsushi Takeuchi.