25th
Award-winning WorksEntertainment Division

This work is NHK Educational Television’s documentary program featuring the art of “manga.” It closely documents manga artists at work, especially focusing on their hands. Multiple cameras carefully record how Japan’s leading manga artists move their hands. URASAWA Naoki, who is also an active manga artist, discusses the production process with a guest manga artist while watching the video. From the perspective unique to manga artists, he points out the guest artist’s techniques and tendencies that the artist is even unaware of, and draws out their charm. The featured artist in this work is YASUHIKO Yoshikazu, who has been active in two fields: manga and animation. He worked on the storyboards and original illustrations for Uchusenkan Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato, 1974-75), and character design and animation director for Kido-senshi Gandamu (Mobile Suit Gundam, 1979-80). His manga works include Arion (Tokuma Shoten, 1979-84), which was made into an animated feature film in 1986. For three days, four fixed-point cameras captured him working on his final full-length work, Inui to Tatsumi: Zabaikaru Senki (Inui and Tatsumi: Transbaikal War Chronicle, Kodansha, 2018-). The documentary revealed a series of his marvelous techniques that differ markedly from typical manga production processes, such as starting a rough sketch without a drawing panel layout, drawing a complex overhead-view composition without construction lines, starting from the eyebrows when drawing a person, and using a brush to ink a pencil sketch.