Manga Monday: The Art Of Satoshi Kon

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Manga Monday: The Art Of Satoshi Kon

08/03/2015 4:22pm

We’re honored this week to release the third book in Dark Horse’s Satoshi Kon program that began last fall with his manga Satoshi Kon’s OPUS, and continued this spring through his collaboration with Mamoru Oshii, Seraphim 266613336 Wings. This week’s release, The Art of Satoshi Kon, focuses on the work that gained him international acclaim—that is, his anime.

Yet we hope that his anime will become even better known through this book; his thoughts about it and his working process are included in Kon’s notes, translated, as was Seraphim and OPUS, by Zack Davisson (also the person behind the English version of Shigeru Mizuki’s Showa: A History of Japan, which won the Eisner Award last month for Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia). For example, an entire section of The Art of Satoshi Kon is devoted to Ohayo (Good Morning), a one-minute film Kon directed for NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster. The 18 pages of storyboards by Kon for Good Morning are fully translated; scale that up, and you begin to appreciate how much work must have gone into his feature-length films. You even get to see sequences in the storyboard that Kon decided to cut from the film, and realize that anime directors, unlike those who work in live-action, must make many of their editing decisions before, rather than after shooting.

In addition to Kon’s illustrations for his anime work, The Art of Satoshi Kon contains several of his manga illustrations (including a full-page version of the painting used as the cover of the recent Vertical collection of his short works, Dream Fossil), designs for unmade projects, illustrations Kon made to experiment with technique, and even some of his work from art school—some of which have Kon’s distinct style, and some which are intriguing just as classic assignments in still life and life drawing, for you realize that Kon had to learn these things, too.

Two weekends ago at Otakon in Baltimore, Kon’s good friend and longtime producer Masao Maruyama remarked that the reason Kon’s unfinished film concept The Dream Machine (also known as The Dreaming Machine, and featured in the book) has remained unfinished is because Maruyama has not yet found someone of Kon’s talent to complete it. Mr. Maruyama said that with the combination of realism and idealism that marks a truly great producer, without more of whom, anime will continue, but not advance. Like him, Satoshi Kon was a man who worked hard, but for a purpose. In just nine years he directed four feature films—Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika—and a television series, Paranoia Agent. Talent like Kon’s is rare enough, but as an artist he was more than talented; he was virtuous, for he wasted not a moment of his time.

—Carl Horn

Editor

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Manga Monday: The Art Of Satoshi Kon

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