Innocence, Scene No. 36, Solegraph Edition

SHŪICHI KUSAMORI (B. 1961)
Innocence, Scene No. 36, 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: 13 1/2 x 18 1/4 inches (34.2 x 46.5 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 2018. supplied unframed.

Mamoru Oshii's Innocence (2004) was the first anime film ever nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, featuring a Chinese Gothic city with ornaments drawn out of both the Eastern and Western hemispheres, leading Oshii to regard the artwork itself as perhaps the star of the film.

This Solegraph edition reproduces the image board for Scene No. 36, cut no. 38: the deserted ruins of a temple with ivory walls. Rendering the appearance of ivory occupied the artwork team through many attempts, and the one object in the composition that is not ivory is the copper relic at its centre, which sets a dark green accent against everything around it and holds the picture together.

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. In the finished shot the lighting was reversed between the planes — upper areas lit and lower ones in shadow in the background, the opposite in the foreground — which is what gives the ivory its material presence and the scene its uncertain atmosphere. What the viewer sees in the film is therefore a later state of this image, while what hangs on the wall is the hand-painted layer underneath. Kusamori is one of Japan's leading art directors in animation, known for his extremely detailed rendering of wall surfaces and signs of decay.