Koji Morimoto – Orange

I picked this beauty up at Amecon this weekend. After getting Cannabis Works at Minami, it now seemed that otaku.co.uk’s stand was geared towards selling things to me. They had this, the Capcom design works book and the Mine Yoshizaki art book on display, alongside more Cannabis Works volumes, and a couple of books by a name who escapes me – someone who’d done some Cowboy Bebop work for sure. This book had been advertised in Cannabis Works, so it’d been on my radar, and despite the £35 price, I picked it up.

And it’s well worth that money. Morimoto is one of the founders of Studio 4°C, and director of Magnetic Rose, Noiseman Sound Insect and  Animatrix:Beyond. The book is full colour throughout, packed with sketches from his various works. The book even does strange and interesting things with paper quality through out. Some pages are deliberated translucent so that the page behind acts as a background to the page you are currently looking at. Other pages have sections cut out of them, some have a smooth texture and others a rough paper texture. And there’s some photo work here too, it’s interesting to see Morimoto’s designs made flesh.

Best of all though is all the text is in English and Japanese. Including a conversation between Morimoto and Katsuhiro Ôtomo, which is illuminating. Plus there is a filmography and an index of the sketches indicating where they came from.

This is best art book I’ve purchased so far, the next on my list is to get a copy of Takashi Murakami’s Superflat. Just so I can feel confident enough to argue what Superflat is and isn’t. It’s always amused me to see people say what is and isn’t Superflat without even reading the book that proposes the art theory in the first place.