Pyrotechnics and Play

On the animation of Atsuko Fukushima.

A still from Labyrinth Labyrinthos (1987)

Happy Thursday! Thanks for joining us for a new edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This one is all about the Japanese animator Atsuko Fukushima.

The piece comes from journalist Andrew Osmond, author of books like Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist. He’s assisted on the translation side by Jonathan Clements — you might know him for his seminal Anime: A History, whose second edition dropped last year. To tell Fukushima’s story in English, they’ve drawn from a decades-old interview published by Anime Style, one of the rare major ones she’s given.

Fukushima is a special talent. When we pitched Osmond on the idea of covering her, he was all in. We’re glad that we get to share details about her art and life here — and we hope you’ll enjoy.

With that, let’s go!

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You may not know Atsuko Fukushima by name, but you may very well know her work. She’s an animator whose career spans more than four decades, and she’s appeared in the credits to multiple mainstream anime landmarks, from Akira to The Boy and the Heron. But she’s also worked on some of the most unusual, idiosyncratic and beautiful small films in anime.

Her style stands out in the industry: Fukushima’s animation abounds with jumpy, rambunctious energy. Surveying her career in an interview with Anime Style during 2001, she said that “fun things” were ultimately what appealed to her. The interviewer, Yuichiro Oguro, called attention to the “sense of playfulness” in Fukushima’s work.¹

With many of her projects, you spot it down to the lines. “I like them to be squiggly and wobbly,” she said. An example is the short Labyrinth Labyrinthos (1987), a milestone for her. Oguro alluded to a rumor that its director, Rintaro, had come up with it specifically to give Fukushima something to do!

A little Atsuko Fukushima animation for Opening from Robot Carnival (1987)

Two of Fukushima’s other short pieces, both released in anime anthologies, could serve jointly as her calling cards.

The first is the opening sequence to 1987’s Robot Carnival, titled simply Opening. Fukushima was responsible for its character designs and for all of its key animation. She was something of its co-director as well, but it wasn’t her own vision: she worked from a storyboard by Katsuhiro Otomo.

She was lured to the project by animator Koji Morimoto, today her husband, who promised a “cute musical.” When she saw Otomo’s vicious and challenging boards (based on his idea of turning the Ben-Hur or 20th Century Fox logo into a towering death machine), she could only resolve to try her best.²

Twenty years later, Fukushima would make a second short that was very much her creation. It feels like a counterpoint, a riposte, to the earlier one. This film is Genius Party, and it opens the 2007 anthology of the same name.³

The contrasts between the two shorts are clear. Opening is a horrific joke about tech whose purpose is to kill, however brightly it’s packaged; Genius Party, a wild celebration of nature and evolution, painterly and texturally dense. Yet they have more in common than might be obvious at a glance: both are pyrotechnic spectacles full of dazzling lights, loose linework and bouncy chaos. They’re animation in the Fukushima style.

A snippet of animation from Fukushima’s short Genius Party (2007)

Those films are only a slice of Fukushima’s career, though, so let’s wind back to the start.