Innocence, Scene No. 24, Solegraph Edition

SHŪICHI KUSAMORI (B. 1961)
Innocence, Scene No. 24, Solegraph Edition
numbered and signed by the artist (lower edge)
solegraph high-grade fine-art print on Radiant White 270 g/m² archival cotton paper
sheet: 15 3/4 x 19 5/8 inches (40 x 50 cm)
image: 9 1/2 x 14 5/8 inches (24.1 x 37.2 cm)
original image board painted in poster colour on paper. This is one of 10 numbered examples, plus 3 artist proofs. Solegraph edition produced by Yamada Photo Process, Toyama, published by Riekeles Gallery in 2025. Supplied unframed.

Mamoru Oshii's Innocence (2004) was the first anime film ever nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and its Chinese Gothic cityscapes, assembled from ornament drawn out of both the Eastern and Western hemispheres, sit at a pivotal moment in the digital transformation of the animation process. Oshii regarded the artwork as perhaps the star of the film. Scene 24 shows the headquarters of a criminal gang; the sequence is an action scene animated on cels, and its backgrounds follow traditional anime convention more closely than anything else in the film. In a production that served throughout as a laboratory for digital methods, this is the most orthodox artwork in Innocence, and that is part of what makes it worth having — it shows what the older craft could still do at the moment it was being replaced.

What this sheet reproduces is the image board itself, the painting Shūichi Kusamori made by hand in poster colour on paper. Innocence was a hybrid production, and an image board of this kind was not the end of the process but its substrate: the painting was scanned and worked on digitally before it reached the screen. What the viewer sees in the finished film is therefore a later state of this image, while what hangs on the wall is the hand-painted layer underneath — the only state of the picture that exists as an object. Kusamori is one of Japan's leading art directors in animation, known for his extremely detailed rendering of wall surfaces and signs of decay.