Yoshitaka Amano

Life

Yoshitaka Amano was born on March 26, 1952, in Shizuoka, the youngest of four children. His father, Yoshio, was a lacquer artist specializing in the traditional Suruga lacquerware of the region. Amano was drawing obsessively by early adolescence, and in 1967, at fifteen, he joined the animation department of Tatsunoko Production in Tokyo, one of the studios building Japan's young television-anime industry. His first paid work was on the Speed Racer franchise.

At Tatsunoko he designed characters for Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (1972), Casshan (1973), Tekkaman (1975), Honeybee Hutch, and the long-running Time Bokan comedies. He absorbed an unusually wide range of influences: American comic books (Neal Adams was a favorite, to the point of buying used comics for Adams covers only to be disappointed by the interiors), Western psychedelic and pop art including Peter Max, and, in the 1970s, European Art Nouveau, the Russian illustrators Léon Bakst and Ivan Bilibin, and Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. He left Tatsunoko in 1982 to go freelance.

Work

As a freelancer Amano turned to fantasy and science-fiction illustration. From 1982 he illustrated Baku Yumemakura's Kimaira novels; in 1983 he illustrated Hideyuki Kikuchi's Demon City Shinjuku and the first Vampire Hunter D novel, and he designed the characters for the 1985 anime film of Vampire Hunter D, one of the first anime features released outside Japan. He also illustrated the long-running Guin Saga novels and co-created the haunting 1985 film Angel's Egg with director Mamoru Oshii. His style by now was unmistakable: pale, elongated figures, fluttering fabric and hair rendered as calligraphic lines, jewel-like washes of color, and a sense of melancholy grandeur.

In 1987 Amano was brought in by Square / Square Enix to design the imagery for a high-stakes role-playing game for the Famicom, Final Fantasy, directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi with music by Nobuo Uematsu. His paintings of the four Light Warriors, the Black Mage, and the game's monsters gave the tiny sprites a grand, romantic identity on boxes, manuals, and posters. Where Enix's Dragon Quest wore Akira Toriyama's cheerful manga style, Final Fantasy looked like an illuminated manuscript. Amano remained the series' conceptual, image, and graphic designer through Final Fantasy VI (1994), whose operatic cast of Terra, Celes, and Kefka he painted in some of his most admired work.

When Final Fantasy VII (1997) moved the series to 3D on the PlayStation, the day-to-day character design passed to Tetsuya Nomura, but Amano stayed on to produce promotional and image art and to design the calligraphic title logos that still head each numbered game. Ironically, his international fame grew after Final Fantasy VII carried the series to a vast Western audience. In 2006 Sakaguchi, by then running his own studio Mistwalker, recruited Amano and Uematsu to work with him again.

Amano's range extends well beyond games. His first solo exhibition, Hiten, opened in Tokyo in 1989, and from 1990 he worked as a set and costume designer for theater. His paintings have been exhibited internationally since the mid-1990s, often on aluminum panels in acrylic and automotive paint. With Neil Gaiman he created The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (1999), which won a Bram Stoker Award; he illustrated an adaptation of Mozart's The Magic Flute (2008), and in 2010 founded the film company Studio Devaloka. He has won the Seiun Award five times.

Legacy

Amano's contribution to the Japanese RPGs (JRPG) is subtle but enormous. In the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, when on-screen characters were a few dozen pixels high, box and manual art did the work of imagination, and his paintings told players that Final Fantasy was lyrical, strange, and adult in its melancholy. That identity helped differentiate Square's series from its great rival and fed the ambition that eventually produced cinematic entries like Final Fantasy VII.

He also embodies the cross-pollination this museum traces between East and West. An artist raised partly on American comics and European Art Nouveau shaped a Japanese reinterpretation of the Western computer RPG, itself descended from Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord and Ultima, which then returned to the West as a new genre. Later, his collaboration with Gaiman carried his line back into Western fantasy comics. Few illustrators have moved so fluidly among anime, novels, video games, gallery painting, and stage design, and few logos in games are as instantly recognizable as his.