Unearthing Anime: Materials of Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise

30 March – 3 April 2019 12:00-18:00
Opening: Fri, 29 March 2019 16:00-18:00

Coorganized by the MEXT-funded Archive Centre for Anime Studies and Asian Link Research Center, Niigata University, Japan, and the Japanese section at the Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies, Stockholm University.

Anime has been a vital cultural mediator between Japan and the world since the 1960s, and as such it has attracted attention by researchers engaged in animation studies, media studies and Japanese studies. Intermediate materials – such as story-boards, key animation drawings, inbetween drawings, backgrounds, and so on – are indispensable for the production of anime as well as its research but get easily lost in the course of time. Amidst the present shift from handdrawn cels to digital production this loss is becoming recognized as a cultural loss, and first attempts to archive the remaining materials are under way.

This exhibition presents replicas of intermediate anime materials from the animated movie Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (Gainax, 1987). Writer and director YAMAGA Hiroyuki, now president of Gainax studio, will speak at the opening and explain the exhibits at the gallery in the afternoon of Sat. 30 March 2019.

The exhibition forms part of a symposium, which addresses the issue of archiving vernacular popular film, exploring the construction of such an archive and its potential contribution to future cultural creation. For more information, please see the University website.