Head in the Clouds

Anime lost a legend this week: art director Nizo Yamamoto. His work transformed the medium from fantasy into an all-enveloping reality for fans.

From The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, 2006. (All images are property of their respective owners.)

We love it when anime transports us to castles in the sky, or lets us leap through time. We lavish attention on directors of anime, and also on the animators who keep the protagonists and antagonists moving, and on the voice actors who bring the cast to life. This makes sense – anime is drama, after all, and the characters and their stories naturally grab viewers’ hearts. 

But where would these heroes and villains be, without the dynamic backdrops that accentuate their emotional arcs? Directors direct the action; they don’t create the fantastic settings. Those backgrounds are the responsibility of the bijutsu kantoku, the art director – the title of the person who creates the visual appearance of an animated world on screen. They work under the film or series directors, but the director’s vision wouldn’t come to life without them. And the anime industry just lost one of its most visionary bijutsu kantoku: Nizo Yamamoto, who died at the age of 70 last weekend.

You probably don’t know Yamamoto by name. But you are almost certainly familiar with his work. Yamamoto was a man who spent his career in the background of anime – literally. While others specialized in characters or vehicles, he was different. “I seem to have a certain facility for painting things that can’t be touched by human hands,” he said in a 2013 interview. “Clouds, skies, forests, flames, water, snow, wind.” Yamamoto fiercely resisted the siren call of digital tools, working with brush and paint until the very end. His approach and his subjects call to mind Nihonga painting, which uses natural pigments to capture the feel of dramatic vistas and terrain.

Yamamoto painted the backdrops for some of anime’s most celebrated titles. The epic European cliffs and ruins of Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro; fantastic floating worlds of Laputa: Castle in the Sky; the big-band apocalypse of Robot Carnival; the wartime streets of Kobe that frame the tragedy of Grave of the Fireflies; the cozy urbanity of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time; the towering cloudscapes of Weathering With You. 

From Laputa: Castle in the Sky, 1986.

Yamamoto will undoubtedly most be remembered for his work on Hayao Miyazaki’s fantasy-historical epic Princess Mononoke. It was he who brought the dense forests of that primeval Japanese wonderland to life. There’s a classic scene, about halfway through, in which the protagonist enters the realm of the Shishi-gami, a powerful deity that is something like the forest incarnate. In a documentary, Yamamoto is seen fretting over the background for this very moment, while Miyazaki tries to calm him. The sight of a mercurial control freak like Miyazaki playing the role of soother highlights just how much he depended upon Yamamoto’s talents.

If you keep watching, Yamamoto then shows how the elaborate backdrop came to be. He starts with a meticulously hand painted and airbrushed backsheet; then he lays numerous other scenic accents atop it, eight sheets in total, to create a gloriously lush and inviting sylvan world. When the late Roger Ebert called Princess Mononoke “one of the most visually inventive films I have ever seen,” he was, in essence, talking about Yamamoto’s handiwork.

Princess Mononoke, 1997.

Like manga, anime is, at its heart, a medium for adolescents, which is why so much of it features young protagonists raging against various authority figures. But the actual work of directing anime generally falls to older folks. The average age of an employee in the Japanese animation industry is just under 40 years old. Auteurs tend to be significantly older. Mamoru Hosoda is 55. Hideaki Anno is 63. Miyazaki just released his latest film at the age of 82. These long careers are a testament to the time it takes to hone one’s craft. “I always tried my best to strive for quality,” lamented Yamamoto in that same 2013 interview, “but I feel like I could have done more.” He indeed kept doing more: the last film on which he worked, Weathering With You, came out in 2019, and Yamamoto’s family said that he’d been painting all the way up until the day before he passed away last week.

They’re also a testament to an aging society – the median age in Japan is just over forty-eight. It’s a paradox: one of the oldest nations on the planet has created a genre that represents one of the planet’s biggest youth subcultures. People in their twenties and thirties make up the bulk of the tourists to Japan, and a not-insignificant number of them visit because of an interest in anime. I get it. I did, too, back when I first started coming here in the Nineties. Back then, I was an outlier. Today, there’s an official word for it: an anime pilgrimage. 

Anime characters aren’t real (sorry!), but the settings of many anime are, and this is precisely what aficionados seek out on their pilgrimages. In essence, they want to find the backgrounds – they want to walk through them and experience them just as their favorite characters did, a sort of real-life metaverse. Studio Ghibli understands this. Neither its museum in Tokyo nor its theme park in Aichi prefecture features anything in the way of rides or traditional attractions; only re-creations of settings from the films. They are essentially “background art” re-engineered in three dimensions for flesh and blood humans. Otaku, as adult fans of anime were once known in Japan, pioneered the consumption of anime as a lifestyle – but even they were locked into consuming it on screens. Anime is a medium, but as the parks and pilgrimages show, it is also increasingly a sort of habitat. 

Background artists played an important role, perhaps the key role, in bringing anime to life in this way. Japanese fans have known this for a long time; they call puffy clouds of the sort Yamamoto paints nizo-gumo, or Nizo’s clouds, a tribute to his craftsmanship. There have been numerous exhibitions of Yamamoto’s work in Japan over the last decade, and there’s a museum dedicated to him in his hometown of Goto, on an island off the coast of Nagasaki Prefecture.　

But abroad, at least in the English-speaking fandom, there’s little attention paid to these literal background characters, the technicians and craftspeople who quietly build animated worlds for the flashier directors to play in. Yamamoto only belatedly received a Wikipedia entry this week, after his death was announced. Kazuo Oga, whose backgrounds on My Neighbor Totoro are practically another member of the cast, has a Wikipedia page consisting of just three sentences. Hiroshi Ono, who painted the obsessively detailed backdrops that brought Neo-Tokyo to life in Akira, doesn’t have one at all. Anyone up for the task?

Although Yamamoto’s early work was set entirely in fantastical worlds, over the years reality began to creep in in all sorts of ways: studying the forests of Yakushima Island for inspiration in Princess Mononoke, for instance. And more recently, his work on Hosoda’s films is all the more striking for its grounding in Tokyo cityscapes – a sort of hyperreality that enhances the fantasy of the stories through its concreteness. (See what I did there?)

From The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, 2006.

Fans have compiled websites juxtaposing real-life and animated scenes for easy visiting. The image above is based on an intersection in Takadanobaba, right off the Yamanote line. It’s interesting comparing a photograph of this totally unremarkable street scene to Yamamoto’s idealized re-imagining of it – tweaked in countless subtle ways so as to feel, somehow, even more realistic than the photograph. All of us hold idealized visions of ourselves in our minds; Yamamoto’s painting feels like the intersection’s idealized vision of itself. If cities dream, I suspect the dreams look like this.

As someone who got into anime because it was so wildly different from reality – space battles, giant robots, post-apocalyptic dystopias, futuristic cityscapes, etc. – I have mixed feelings about how the medium is increasingly coming down to earth. I’m as wowed by the hyperrealism of Sonoda’s theatrical releases as anyone, but there’s something about seeing Japan’s top animators pour so much effort into portraying a Shinjuku Starbucks that feels like a letdown. (This scene wasn’t, to be clear, Yamamoto’s handiwork.) Still, for many anime fans, real-life Tokyo must feel as exotic a destination as Macross City felt for me as a kid. And, come to think of it, most of the stuff I watched back then was set in thinly-veiled fictionalizations of real-life Tokyo, so maybe we’ve just come full circle.

A residential street in Kobe, as seen in Grave of the Fireflies, 1988.

Whatever the case, whether he was envisioning castles in the sky or the streets of residential Takadanobaba, there’s no denying Yamamoto’s talents. He was truly a creator of worlds – both onscreen in the form of his backgrounds, and offscreen, in the sense that the settings, even more so than characters, are attracting increasing numbers of anime fans to Japan. 

Once, anime was a fantasy for entertaining kids. Thanks in part to Nizo Yamamoto, it is a new form of reality for fans around the globe. I’ll be thinking of him next time I see one of those summer cumulonimbus clouds towering over the city, untouchable by human hands – at least, none save Yamamoto’s.