Person: Amano Yoshitaka

Amano Yoshitaka is a Japanese artist known best for his illustrations for Vampire Hunter D and for his character designs, image illustrations and title logo designs for the Final Fantasy video game series developed by Square Enix (formerly Square).

Animation

Amano was born in Shizuoka, Japan; as a young adolescent, he was fascinated with drawing. In 1967, he began working for Tatsunoko Productions in the animation department, where he was introduced to the early Japanese anime movement. His first paid project was for the Speed Racer anime franchise (also known as Mach GoGoGo). He worked in character design for anime shows such as the Time Bokan series, the Gatchaman series, Tekkaman and the Honey Bee.

In the 1960s, Amano was exposed to Western art styles through comic books and their Japanese Western-influenced counter parts, and believes Western comics to be his artistic roots. He has cited Neal Adams as his favorite comic book artist, noting that he would often purchase used comics based on his cover artwork, only to be disappointed that the interior artist was different. Amano was also fascinated by the art styles of psychedelic art and pop art of the West, particularly the work of American Pop artist Peter Max. In the 1970s, Amano's intrigue led him to the study of the artworks of the late 19th century and early 20th century European movement of Art Nouveau, as well as the ancient Japanese hand woodblock printing work of Ukiyo-e. While concentrating on illustration, he was still at Tatsunoko Productions until he left in 1982.

Early fantasy works

In the early 1980s, he concentrated on illustrations for Science Fiction and Fantasy, while still keeping the influence of his animation and other illustration works from the 1960s and 1970s. This in turn created a unique personal style, which was influenced by both modern surrealism as well as realism fluent in many classic and modern techniques.

In 1983, he was behind the illustrations for the novel Demon City Shinjuku and the first of Hideyuki Kikuchi's novel series Vampire Hunter D. This was adapted to a movie in 1985 for which Amano worked as character designer. The film was one of the first anime movies to be released outside of Japan. In interviews, however, Amano has stated that he was not pleased with the final product of the movie. More involvement in illustration had led to the creation of collections of his artwork being published, such as "Maten" in 1984.

Final Fantasy

In 1987, he was introduced to a newly developed art department with a promising future for conceptual design for video games. He joined Square (now known as Square Enix) to work on what was expected to be their last video game for the Famicom (Nintendo Entertainment System): Final Fantasy (released on December 18, 1987 in Japan). This task opened a new realm for Amano to work in. Even though video game technology was very young, Amano produced striking pieces of conceptual design for the games in both traditional and computer designed artwork. Final Fantasy, the first in a continuing series, was a success and brought Square popularity in the RPG genre in Japan, as well as modest international fame. But the series would ignite extreme international fame as the series continued. At this time, he also worked for another video game company called Kure Software Koubou in which he did box cover illustrations as well as some character designs. This included work on Kure's First Queen series, which, despite being fairly unknown overseas, is regarded a classic in Japan.