What twenty ten!
Just returned from Tokyo where the fine folks of SCAD let me lose for a few weeks. Then headed down to Kyoto, and then on to Osaka. Amazing, amazing, amazing….would rather live there then Montreal/ -30C ice town. So much visual goodness. It’s numbing. Myself and frequent collaborator Mr. Khouri went book crazy. Here’s a few of the gems we plucked from the depths of the book shops.
First up:
The Colours Of Mary Blair
This book is absolutely gorgeous…plus I had no idea that Preston Blair and Mary Blair were related… So much for my animation history classes.
Orange
Koji Morimoto sketchbook. I had recently seen Genius Party Beyond, and fell in love with the last film in the series Dimension Bomb, turns out they were made by one in the same. Jacques tried to hunt down this book the entire trip, eventually buying it from a grad student in Tokyo (thanks Brad). The first book store we hit in Kyoto had it, so I snatched it up.
Yasuji Mori
The animation director of The Little Prince and The Eight Headed Dragon, Yasuji Mori is a treasure trove of animation and design. The book covers his entire lifes work from early manga and childrens books to features and series. We picked this up at the Ghibli Museum along with the Mary Blair book.
Genius Party Beyond: Making Of
This last book is a great companion piece to the film, which if you haven’t seen it yet, then you haven’t seen the best animation this world has had to offer in the last couple years. A huge thanks to SCAD student Dan Woodling for the awesome gift. The film is five shorts from five different directors of the Studio 4C super studio.
I’ll post some photos and stories from the trip soon.
Happy New Year kids!