ARTBOOK SPOTLIGHT: Moyoco Anno Prints 21

Since I have completely failed at writing features (I’ve got about three in drafts right now that I’m too much of a coward to post), I thought I’d try something different and do an occasional feature on an artbook.  I wouldn’t say I’m a collector, but I have accumulated some over the years, and I’ll try to show off one a month.  Let’s see how long I can stick to this plan.

I’ve thought about doing this before (another draft is an artbook spotlight I wrote about four years ago, then took down after one day), but I do have objections to posting artwork like this.  Considering the fact that I’m taking photos of only a few pages in an extremely dark room rather than scanning it, I don’t think it’ll really serve as a substitute to buying the book, though, and I hope that it’ll pique curiosity.

Anyway.  I’ve failed in my mission already, because this isn’t an artbook, but an issue of an art magazine featuring Moyoco Anno.  I picked it up about a month or two ago, and it’s pretty cool, so I guess it counts.

Once again, my images are taken with a digital camera and are of terrible quality, and in the case of Moyoco Anno especially, the colors are ruined and don’t do the real thing justice.  If I am asked to take the images down, I will.

I haven’t heard of 21st Century Prints (which I’ve seen written out as “Prints 21″ and “21 Prints”), but apparently it is a quarterly Japanese art magazine.  This issue is from summer 2009, and I only found out about it because of an Amazon recommendation.  It’s pretty great.

Please ignore my hand.

It’s a look at her illustration work in comics, advertising, and other things, though there is a heavy focus on the art from her manga.  Her earliest work is absent, but it starts with Happy Mania and goes on from there, with a couple pieces from most of her later series.  There is also an interview, a section with various professionals commenting on Anno’s work, an interesting sequence that shows in detail how she draws Ochibisan, and a section that shows her various photo references and how they were worked into scenes in Ochibisan.

Ochibisan is her newest series, and I can’t comment since I haven’t read it.  It runs in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, and looks like a pretty simple episodic story about a cute little boy and his dog going on various adventures.  It also seems to be entirely in color.

Maybe that little character is a girl, I don’t know.  Ochibisan seems to have a fondness for Where’s Waldo/Kazuo Umezu red striped shirts.

Anyway, a quick look at some of the other art.

I have another Moyoco Anno artbook featuring just the illustrations from Happy Mania, and this is my favorite from that book.  I absolutely adore her use of color, which again, is completely lost in my pictures here.  They look much better in person.

A close-up, so you can see the nice, broad colored areas.  Happy Mania came out in English, and was what got me hooked on Anno.  It’s been out for a number of years now and may be out of print, but is worth tracking down.  I believe it was one of the first josei series published in English (I would say some of the work of Keiko Nishi that has been published in English counts as josei, but I don’t think there were any multi-volume works before Happy Mania).  The story’s all over the place at first, but just know it gets much better as it goes on.  The ending was absolutely amazing.

This illustration is from Sakuran, which came out… maybe eight or so years after Happy Mania, but is only available in Japanese.  It’s drawn in a completely different style, with a lot of the insane detail you can see in Sugar Sugar Rune.  Imagine the story she drew in Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators, and then stretch that out into a really long volume.

Sakuran is my absolute favorite of her series, and it has an amazing story to match its art.  It’s the story of a young girl who grows up in the brothels of the Edo era’s  Yoshiwara district and has to tiptoe around politics, the backstabbing women she lives with, falling in love, and being a sex slave.  I think it’s unfinished, but it’s still 100% worth wishing for in English.  The volume itself is absolutely gorgeous.  Unfortunately, my favorite illustration was not included.

Here’s an illustration from Sugar Sugar Rune.  It’s a shame the only color work we got to see in English were the volume covers, because I can only imagine how out there the color illustrations for this series are.  Again, the detail and range of color are lost in this image, but it does give you some idea.  Sugar Sugar Rune is also available in English.  It’s adorable, and the art is to die for, but it’s probably my least favorite of the Anno series I’ve read.

There’s even a few images from poor Hataraki Man, another series worth wishing for in English.  These ones aren’t as elaborate or extreme as the ones for Sakuran and Sugar Sugar Rune.  You might think that’s because it’s a seinen series, but so was Sakuran.  I suppose we can blame it on the office setting, then.  There was another illustration I liked with the main character getting harassed by drunk old men, it’s a shame I didn’t take a picture of that one instead.

There’s lots and lots of this kind of thing, random illustrations of girls from her other work in advertising and illustration.  This one is from an ad, and I’m not sure why I didn’t take a picture of the actual ad.  Some of them might be illustrations that go with her essays on beauty and appearance, something that she was apparently famous for in the late ’90s (There are three compiled volumes of these essays, called Bijin Gaho, and maybe other volumes of her essays that aren’t part of the Bijin Gaho series).  It looks like she does a lot of illustrations for women’s magazines and beauty products, too.  Lots of random girls.

My favorite of this group was this one:

Mostly because of the colors, again.  It’s a shame I can’t do it justice.

I don’t have that much to add that would inform these illustrations further.  The book’s about 120 pages long.  There are a few other articles on other artists, but the Anno parts are about 90 pages of the book.  Hilariously, there’s an ad for Evangelion 2.0 in the front, and I have to wonder if that was on purpose or not since that’s directed by her husband and all.  Anyway, the book is definitely worth picking up if you are a fan.  We’ve been pretty fortunate when it comes to getting Moyoco Anno translated into English, but we still don’t get to see nearly enough of her super-pretty color illustrations.  At around $16, the book isn’t that expensive, so you’re not taking too much of a risk.  As far as I know, there hasn’t been a volume of her illustrations in almost ten years, the last ones released were for Happy Mania and Flowers and Bees.  Though there was something released around the same time as this, called… “Parrot and the Ivy,” maybe, which I think is along the same lines, but meant to be a kind of catalog or companion book to an exhibition of her work from last fall.

I picked Prints 21 up at Amazon Japan, but you might be able to find it cheaper elsewhere, especially if you aren’t buying anything else.  They charge a criminal amount for shipping.