Hidenori Matsubara Art Works

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Hidenori Matsubara Art Works released in late November 2006, and marked the first art book from this well-known animation artist. Anyone who has seen the anime designs for classics like Ah! My Goddess or Sakura Wars is familiar with Matsubara’s art work. Possibly less well-known are his designs for Gankutsuou, but all of these are in the art book.

This 144 page art book is A4-size, though it’s wider than the average book of that size. It’s full color from start to finish aside from three pages of monochrome. The Sakura Wars cover art appears inside as a single-sided fold-out poster.

Ah! My Goddess is the first section in the book. The images are organized into the ones from the TV series, and the illustrations for the OVA and movie. The TV series, being the newest art work at the time, comes first, and covers about 19 pages of this 36 page section. Many of the illustrations are from the DVD and CD covers. Some were also promotional works from anime magazines.

The Ah! My Goddess OVA and movie illustrations look really dated, but they’re still beautiful. It’s also worth considering that these older works are cels. Makes me wonder if the older animators like Matsubara think the new guys have got it too easy!

The Sakura Wars section takes up the largest portion of the book with about 45 pages of illustrations. There are more painted illustrations than animation ones!

The three monochrome illustration pages in this book are in the Sakura Wars section, with inked portraits of the characters. I never got into the Sakura Wars series, but there really is a lot of impressive art work for it.

My main interest in this book when it came out was the Gankutsuou art work. This includes covers for the novel versions of the anime along with all of the magazine illustrations. Also included are smaller versions of the posters that were new for the Gankutsuou Complete visual book. This section covers a total of 21 pages.

Seven pages with game illustrations from an MMORPG called Flyff.

Gungrave has four pages of illustrations, and they all feature promotional art work released before the series started. There are a few pages of Ruroni Kenshin illustrations that appeared as covers for the LD and VHS releases.

A couple of pages with small illustrations from Nadia Secret of Bluewater are the last pictures in the book. There is a short cross-talk interview with Hidenori Matsubara and Ah! My Goddess creator Fujishima Kousuke before the index. There aren’t really any artist comments on single illustrations, but he comments on groups of illustrations.

If you’re into any of these series, you’ll love Hidenori Matsubara Art Works. It presents the anime art work that we seldom get to see outside of visual books or magazines, and piles it into an illustrations only collection.