Kusanagi ( 株式会社草薙 ) is a prolific animation background art studio located in the Nerima area of Tokyo. Founded in 1990, it has contributed background art work for a huge number of animation and video games. This book is the 2nd volume from a long running series of art books dedicated to the showcase of studio’s impressive background art portfolio.

With a special focus on background art for the science fiction genre, I chose to pick up this particular volume for review also because of sentimental reasons; one of the anime series featured in this book is Katsuhiro Otomo’s Freedom, for which I worked on at Sunrise Ogikubo for about 2 years from 2006-2007.

Besides Freedom, the book also includes excellent background art from animation films like Appleseed, Sol Bianca, Merty Lancer, Bakuretsu Tenshi ( Burst Angel ) and many more.

With over 190 pieces of background art work spread across 127 pages, this volume is an excellent collection of Kusanagi’s sci-fi portfolio. Despite the big number of projects the studio takes on, the quality of their work remains consistently good is a testament to the caliber of the artists, and this book is a great way to catalog and enjoy it. Recommended.

Availability : Because this book was released quite a while back in 2007, stock on Amazon Japan can be hard to find, but the Amazon stores from other countries like USA and Canada do carry it too, and they all ship internationally.

“Kusanagi Studio Background Art Vol 2 ( Sci-Fi ) 背景画集 草薙2 SF編” details :

Dimensions – 27x 1.8 x 23 cm
Softcover, 127 pages
Full color, In Japanese ( book is mostly images )

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