Here for the Holidays, my latest little big art book: The Art of Blade Runner: Black Lotus

Okay, here goes the new book, out now worldwide from Penguin Random House and Titan Books. I'm no good at this launch stuff but I can assure you the book is beautiful. Just got big boxes of it here in Tokyo:

So what's it about? I wrote a preview of it in one of my monthly columns for The Japan Times.

"British director Ridley Scott’s 1982 original 'Blade Runner,' a Hollywood live-action movie set in a futuristic Los Angeles, features several neo-noirish nods to a dystopian urban Japan. Signs in Japanese flash above neon-lit alleyways lined with cramped standing food stalls. Snatches of Japanese dialogue are heard on the streets and from the radio in Los Angeles police officer Gaff’s hovercraft (the brilliantly designed “spinner”), and in the voiceover accompanying an indelible image of a geisha, popping a pill on a gigantic skyscraper video projection.

Even today, seeing Japanese culture embedded so deeply in the mise-en-scene of a mainstream Hollywood film is startling. In 1982, it must’ve been revolutionary.

It certainly didn’t go unnoticed in Japan. While initially “Blade Runner” was not a box-office hit on either side of the Pacific, it was revered by those who understood its heady blend of sleek high-tech environs with low and grimy street culture, a visual icon of the emerging cyberpunk sci-fi subgenre.

Over time, “Blade Runner” was tagged as a “cult classic.” And oh, what a cult it was, particularly in Japan.

A generation of anime artists was shaped by the film’s daring and gritty aesthetic, and would go on to create some of Japan’s consecrated anime classics such as “Akira,” “Ghost in the Shell” and “Cowboy Bebop” — titles that are now so popular and renowned that they have been or are being remade in Hollywood. Talk about circles.

“Akira” director Katsuhiko Otomo and “Ghost in the Shell” director Mamoru Oshii have both cited “Blade Runner” as a key source of inspiration for their conceptual designs, and “Cowboy Bebop” creator Shinichiro Watanabe has seen Scott’s film over 20 times.

“It was the feel of the world in ‘Blade Runner’ that surprised me the most,” Watanabe says, commenting on the film’s mix of futuristic surrealism and grim urbanism. “With ‘Star Wars,’ the story takes place in a world different from where we actually live. But ‘Blade Runner’ takes place in our reality, and the visual design is so cool in every scene.”

Hope you like the little big book! 

courtesy Jeff Krueger