Presea’s Library: Concept Art
Source: TV
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Added 9/1/2010
Updated 3/16/2017
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Episode 2: Presea of the Woods of Silence. After being taken to the vicinity of Presea’s house by a magical beast, the three girls nervously enter a series of doors and find themselves inside a huge library, where someone or something is scattering papers off a long desk onto the floor.
This watercolor painting was not used during the filming of this episode. If you screen the episode, you’ll find that the backgrounds used showed disconnected glimpses of the tiled floor, the shelves of books around, and the gateway around the heavy door that the three girls enter. Some shots from a low perspective looking up show the balcony that tops the bookcases, and in all of these you can see that the characters are lit by gently diffused light from a ceiling skylight.
All these details are pulled together in this small watercolor. You can see Presea’s desk at lower left, with the papers Mokona has scattered on the floor. The two thumbnails call out portions of the image in more detail so you can see how carefully the details have been executed.
According to Jan Scott Frazier’s useful summary of anime jobs, this must be one of the “image boards” executed by the series Art Director ( Bijutsukantoku). In American animators’ jargon, these would be called “concept art,” as they were painted as a guide to the other artists and not for a specific cut or shot. In this case, the painting clarifies the relationships between the locations used in the specific shots, as well as the scale (which is why figures are added at the center of the room and in the back corner. (I’ve preferred the term “concept art,” as “image board” increasingly has come to mean a web-based discussion forum that emphasizes graphics rather than text.)
One has to keep remembering that there was never any physical Library, and so all of the “shots” used in this scene were projections of the animators’ imaginations. Paintings like this ensured that all the background artists and key animators “imagined” the setting in the same (or similar) detail, to guard against continuity errors.
If my inferences are correct, this painting was executed by Tsutomu Ishigaki, an experienced studio artist who provided backgrounds and art direction for a wide variety of series. He began his career doing backgrounds for The Fantastic Adventures of Unico in 1981, and then moved on to many assignments for Lupin III, including The Castle of Cagliostro movie directed by Miyazaki. In addition to serving as art director for both seasons of Magic Knight Rayearth, this artist contributed to several Detective Conan/Case Closed movies and OAVs, and was art director for all four of the Inuyasha movies.
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