Visualist Series: Kenichi Sonoda Collection (1994) [COLC-3107]

It's not clear to me whether there were any other entries in this "series", besides the Haruhiko Mikimoto volume, which I also have.

Sonoda, it must be said, is (or was — I don't know what he's been doing lately) one of the leading "girls-'n-guns" illustrators, with significant work in both character & mecha design on properties such as Gall Force & Bubblegum Crisis. I happen to like his style a great deal, & have purchased the two "B-Club" artbooks, "Vision" [an untranslatable pun involving the Japanese word for "beautiful woman] & "Gallant", which collect a great deal of his work up to about 1992. This disc covers much the same ground.

The Mikimoto volume, in my opinion, spent too much time on cheesecake shots of Minmei from Macross, to the detriment of the artist's many other creations. (How about Jung-Freud from Gunbuster, who canonically goes topless when not in uniform?) This volume is a bit more balanced. The biggest chunk of time is, no surprise, spent on the original & "Earth Chapter" flavours of Gall Force, with a large number of images, including concept & production art, as well as promotional images & the like. A very interesting feature is the presentation of multiple versions of the same image, flashing back & forth between line-art, colorist's notes, & the finished picture, zooming into & panning over various areas in a way which makes it easy to appreciate both the detail & the artistry of the successive phases of work. Some works, such as Wanna-Be's, are represented by very few images, but the in-depth treatment of each helps to make up for it. The second longest section is devoted to Bubblegum Crisis. The "super-deformed" incarnations seen in Ten Little Gall Force & Scramble Wars also make their appearance in appropriate places. There is a substantial portfolio on Riding Bean, but it seems to be a little too early for Gunsmith Cats. And there are segments for Otaku no Video, something called Su-Chi-Pai, & "original work".

Some of the art sections are accompanied by music, while others have narration which may be of interest to those who can understand spoken Japanese. I do not believe this volume has ever been fan-subtitled, or re-released anywhere. (According to the obi, a MAC format CD-ROM, catalog number CORC-2, with some of the same material, was released.) There are also live-action "Short Talk" segments, in the form of interviews with the artist, who keeps his back the camera. And we get a quick walk-through of his studio, displaying in passing a nice shelf of anime CDs, as well as his impressive collection of what (this being Japan) are probably replica firearms.

If you're the sort of person who buys anime artbooks or cels, the "Visualist" discs may interest you. In my opinion, this is the better of the two, in terms of presenting a view of the artist's body of work. The one complaint to be made against it, by no means a small one, is that it is in CLV format. Splitting it to two sides in CAV would not only have made it easier to get a good clear look at the artwork, but also could have allowed including a still-frame portfolio. As it is, the disc shows to best effect when played by a machine capable of full-resolution stills, such as a MUSE player or LD-V8000.