Curator Yozo Yamaguchi looks back on the journey of the "Yoshiyuki Tomino's World" exhibition, which was realized through the collaboration of six art museums [Anime Industry Watching No. 84

The exhibition "The World of Yoshiyuki Tomino," which delves deeply into director Yoshiyuki Tomino's anime works by theme, is currently on view at the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art (through January 23, 2022).
Starting at the Fukuoka City Art Museum in June 2019, "The World of Yoshiyuki Tomino" has traveled to six museums in Hyogo, Shimane, Shizuoka, Toyama, and Aomori prefectures, and has continued for nearly three years with the addition of Niigata and Hokkaido. We asked Yozo Yamaguchi, curatorial director of the Fukuoka City Art Museum, who has been involved in the planning of the exhibition since its inception, why the "The World of Yoshiyuki Tomino" exhibition has grown to such a large scale. Can animation works really become "art"?

Simply displaying animation production materials is not an exhibition of "Yoshiyuki Tomino.

─ ─ Mr. Yamaguchi, you are the chief curator at the Fukuoka City Museum of Art, but what does a museum curator do?

Yamaguchi: It is the collection and conservation of art works. We collect artworks in accordance with the museum's policies, preserve them appropriately, and exhibit them. This is what we call holding permanent exhibitions. In addition to these basic tasks, there are special exhibitions. Another job is to borrow artworks that are not in the museum's collection and organize special exhibitions according to a theme. Each curator specializes in a different field, and in my case, I specialize in contemporary art. I collect works by artists who are currently active in the field, and I link them to exhibitions.

─ ─ Of course, it is a job that requires a great deal of specialized knowledge. ......

Yamaguchi: In the case of Fukuoka City, there is a position called "cultural curatorial position" that is related to cultural properties, and you need to pass an employment examination for it.

───Then, please tell us how you started planning the "The World of Yoshiyuki Tomino" exhibition.

Yamaguchi: There is a curator at the Aomori Prefectural Museum of Art named Takeshi Kudo. He and I have known each other for a long time, and we had a connection through our joint exhibition "Toru Narita: Art, Special Effects, and Monsters" from 2014 to 2015, and we had been talking about doing something together again. Both Mr. Kudo and I have always had a strong interest in anime and plastic models, and he in particular has been involved in many exhibitions in these fields. Mr. Kudo asked me if it would be possible to hold an exhibition on Yoshiyuki Tomino. At that point, I was like, "How can we do that? I don't think either of us had any concrete ideas of what we wanted to do. We probably would have exhibited settings and celluloid drawings, but simply displaying materials would not be an exhibition of Yoshiyuki Tomino, an animation director. This is because Director Tomino himself does not draw pictures. However, for example, the character Amuro Rei in "Mobile Suit Gundam" (1979) was expected to be created only under the direction of Director Tomino (......). In an animated work, nothing is expressed without the director's direction. I thought that if I could explain such director's intentions, an exhibition would be possible.
However, what convinced me that this would be possible was when it was decided that Director Tomino would provide us with the materials he had stored in his own possession. If we could organize and exhibit the fragments of the director's own intentions and ideas before the work took shape, it would be a proper "Yoshiyuki Tomino Exhibition. When I actually looked at the materials provided by the director, I found many sketches and storyboards. It took three to four people two weeks to go through them all. In addition to Sunrise, Tezuka Productions, Tohoku Shinsha, and Nippon Animation, we borrowed a large amount of materials from creators and others, and the number of items on display officially reached 3,000. Around the time of "Holy Gundam (Turn A Gundam)" (1999) and "OVERMAN King Gainer" (2002), digital production was progressing, and the number of data materials has increased considerably. We also play a lot of videos at the exhibition, so if those are included, the actual number of items exceeds 3,000. The curators of each museum were assigned to a particular work, and the overall structure of the exhibition was created with the utmost emphasis on how the director's intentions were expressed in the production materials. On the other hand, we could not ignore the need to see the drawings of star creators such as Yoshikazu Yasuhiko and Tomoken Kogawa, so we made sure that the exhibition would be visually spectacular.

▲ Venue 1, Fukuoka City Art Museum

─ ─ I think it was essential to negotiate with Director Tomino and Sunrise in order to get the project moving, wasn't it?

Yamaguchi: When we first approached him about the project, he didn't shake his head very much.