Mohammed Abdul had goose bumps. As he surveyed the exhibition of Japanese anime cels at Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Modern Art Gallery, the 30-year-old banker felt like he had stepped back into his childhood.
Abdul, a member of Abu Dhabi Anime Club, is particularly taken with original animation cels of android hero Astro Boy, the lion from the 1997 movie Jungle Emperor Leo (by Manga Legend Osamu Tezuka), 1970s super robot Grendizer, (the series was dubbed into English under the title Voltron), and the long-running football series Captain Majid.
A cel (short for celluloid) is a transparent sheet onto which cartoon frames were painstakingly drawn or painted, before anime – the name for Japanese animation – became an all-digital format in the late 1990s.
Original cels from animated TV shows and films have become highly sought-after collector's items. The most-expensive anime cel in the exhibition – of the Catbus from the Studio Ghibli movie My Neighbour Totoro, directed by legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki – costs Dh77,200.
Abdul says the hefty price tag is more than justified.
“This exhibition shows you the hard work it took to make just one scene, which I’d never realised before,” he says. “Seeing the artwork up close really connects you to the spirit of the story.”
Ali Shkeili, an 18-year-old Emirati and fellow member of the anime club, echoes Abdul’s sentiments.
“What I love about anime is that it’s very creative,” says Al Shkeili. “It’s vast, there are so many shows that you always have something different to watch every day to entertain yourself.”
The exhibition’s organiser is Yuji Ueda, the Japanese head of Tokyo Toy Films. He is delighted with these responses to the show.
An avid collector of memorabilia himself, he says his own niche passion is for Batman toys that were produced in Japan in 1966, coinciding with the cult-classic animation American TV show.
He says the exhibition is proof of a surge in the popularity of Japanese anime in the UAE.
“At a ministerial meeting in February between Japan and the UAE, there was a request from the UAE government to hold Japanese cultural events, to bring more Japanese culture to the country,” he says.
Since then, Abu Dhabi in July hosted the world premiere of the latest big-budget anime feature, Gold, and last month the capital's first anime festival, Ani:Me, attracted between 10,000 and 12,000 fans to the event on Yas Island.
“This is something genuine, not PR-led,” says Ueda.
He first brought an exhibition of Japanese animation artwork to Abu Dhabi last November, but says the difference this time is that he has cherry-picked artworks he knows Middle Eastern anime fans will appreciate.
"We'd been expecting Studio Ghibli artworks to be very popular at the first exhibition, but their films [such as Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, which won the Oscar for best animated film in 2003] are not so well known in the Middle East," he says. "Captain Majid and Grendizer artworks were very popular, so this time around, we've brought more of those."
This year’s exhibition includes a new twist – fine art, with oil paintings by Japanese artist Koji Yoshioka, are on display at the gallery. The 73-year-old is often called the “poet of colours” for his evocative paintings. He specialises in depictions of well-known global beauty spots, including a snow-topped Mount Fuji, which contrasts aquamarine blues with deep reds.
He enrolled in Paris National Art School when he was 24, and seven years later, was the youngest Japanese artist to become an official member of the prestigious Parisian annual art exhibition, Salon d'Automne.
He flew to Abu Dhabi from Osaka for the exhibition’s opening night last week, his first trip to the Middle East, and brought a painting of Sheikh Zayed Grande Mosque, available for Dh34,300, which he completed using a photo as inspiration.
“I wanted to bring pictures of iconic landscapes to Abu Dhabi,” he says. “The colours I choose reflect how I’m feeling, so every time the colour will be different from the original colour.”
• The exhibition of Koji Yoshioka and Japanese anime cels is at Etihad Modern Art Gallery, Villa 14, Al Huwelat Street, Al Bateen, until November 24. For more details, visit www.etihadmodernart.com
artslife@thenational.ae