Anime by Design: Paradise Kiss and the genius of Osamu Kobayashi

In the grainy, flickering photo montage that opens Paradise Kiss (2005), things immediately take a turn for the surreal. Monsters, ghosts, aliens and creepy crawlies of all kinds seem to wander about, their unintelligible grumblings and gurglings fading into ambient noise as people go about their days. They haunt mythical spots in Shibuya: its fashionable backstreets, Harajuku Station, Takeshita Street, Laforet, Omotesando Avenue…

Yukari's narration guides us through the unknown world we're stepping into. Her sentimental phrasing paints an alluring picture as the montage transitions to background art. Beyond descriptions of sights, smells and sounds, the choice of verbiage itself is just as evocative. The door leading to the Atelier isn't ‘pink' but ‘Shocking Pink', a nod to Elsa Schiaparelli. The singing pouring out from the underground is ‘hysteric’ and not merely ‘hysterical’, echoing cult fashion brand Hysteric Glamour.

Standing at a crossing, Yukari has to deal with monsters of her own: stylish kids around her age. She takes shelter behind a copy of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the themes of which speak directly to her state of mind at the beginning of the story (in the source material, she was only carrying a generic English textbook.) Unlike the oblivious crowds in the opening shots however, she seems to hear and even understand the strange sounds they produce:

- Isn’t today’s outfit a bit iffy?

- What do you mean? It’s super cute!

- It looks pervy. [sic]

Shooting daggers at one of them, Yukari positions herself against their perceived superficiality, but ultimately cannot escape her own aimlessness and alienation. As she comes in direct contact with Arashi and the other members of ParaKiss, she begins to recognize how much of their freedom she actually craves.

I've thought long and hard about what exactly makes Osamu Kobayashi’s Paradise Kiss adaptation so dear to me. Some of it is thematic and narrative: a coming of age story about a young person coming in contact with alternative lifestyles, while the disillusionment of adulthood looms in the distance. There's an irresistible glamour to seeing youths passionately chase their dreams in the arts, reinventing themselves, meeting like-minded people, creating or integrating tight-knit communities, working hard towards a common goal… In the case of this series in particular, there's also my passive interest in the fashion world which, like other art industries, is constantly grappling with creating and redefining beauty or some other nebulous quality. Much of this was directly present in Ai Yazawa’s source material.

I suppose what really makes the show special to me is the way it engages with and expands on those ideas through specific design and direction choices. The show feels intent on delivering the most sensorially rich and emotionally potent vision of the world the story takes place in.

There’s perhaps no better place to start than the opening credits. They’re set to a glitzy, melancholic synthpop number by style icon Tommy february6, further connecting the show to the broader zeitgeist of Japanese fashion culture in the early 2000s. The sequence is an elusive montage of vignettes and images that as a whole serve as a kind of glorified moodboard for the show. There’s mostly no discernible narrative order to the cuts, but they come together to create complex emotional and aesthetic meanings.

The original Paradise Kiss members take on various glamorous clichés: driving a luxury vehicle, performing for an adoring audience, clad in lushly rendered accessories for a photoshoot, looking impossibly graceful even while longingly staring into the distance… This notion of glamour is at the core of the story because these idealized impressions of the characters help activate Yukari’s sense of longing and desire for emancipation. Sprinkled in between all of these are brief glimpses of equally glamorous fetish objects and symbols: a rose, a luxury car, a ring, the fluttering wings of a butterfly, heels, an electric guitar… and the city itself, arguably the most important of them all.

I love the glamorous aura the Paradise Kiss logo takes on when inserted in this context.

Through a series of 3D and parallax-assisted shots, we take in the sights of Shibuya as if we were Yukari, passengers in George’s car. The sequence opened on a shot of buildings reflecting on its freshly polished surface, immediately tying both hers and our impression of the sprawling setting to him. We see buildings plastered with various advertisements and welcoming shop fronts full of colorful identities ready to be sold, hinting at a potential for reinvention and even fame. We also get a glimpse of the thrills of nightlife: live music, alluring neon lights and flashlit, seedy back alleys scribbled all over with graffiti.

Using this setting as a backdrop are the heightened emotions of romance and melodrama: idly swaying to your lover’s song at the back of the hall, tense conversations, charged gazes, the threat of a kiss. The empty train station oppresses, the tables at the stylish bistro seem to keep people at arm’s length. Urbanity encompasses both the alienation and fantasy that the series wants to explore.

Adapting Yazawa’s comic to screen was an interesting undertaking. There was of course the precedent set by the Neighborhood Story adaptation a decade prior. It pretty closely replicated Yazawa’s style, adopting a playful flatness, thick line work, inky black shadow accents and a bold approach to color directly inspired by her promotional illustrations for the series. These choices also extended to the environments, resulting in one of the rare (yet unsung) instances of anime entirely closing the (rather overstated) gap between cel and background art. The show still looks really great.

Various scenes from Neighborhood Story (1995) Episodes 1-3

ParaKiss being a sequel to Neighborhood Story, it might have been sensible to continue in that direction. It certainly would've been interesting to see an attempt at designing an entire show anchored around the notably few official color illustrations Yazawa produced for the series. They trend towards abstraction, an emphasis on graphic patterns and limited palettes. While that's fun to imagine, Kobayashi followed a far more transformative path.

Nobuteru Yuuki, Paradise Kiss

One of the first of many incredibly inspired creative decisions was to tap Nobuteru Yuuki to adapt the character designs for animation. This didn't necessarily result in drastic reinvention –the characters are still clearly Yazawa-esque– but this successfully established a certain drawing attitude for most of the show, one that felt intrinsically related to its source material. My previous (and only) article on this blog was about another series with deep ties to the fashion world, and its failures to truly engage with its visual language. In this case, while he isn’t necessarily directly connected to fashion design and illustration, Yuuki had cultivated a particular taste for pictorial beauty that could easily be slanted to meet those ends.

His seminal design work for the Lodoss saga, for example, had demonstrated a deep appreciation and careful study of Alphonse Mucha, an artist whose commercial work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries arguably helped create many of the beauty archetypes we (and the anime industry in particular) are still influenced by today. Beyond the typical pastiche of his work in the form of abstract designs framed by sinuous, organic forms inspired by or depicting vegetation, Yuuki incorporated many of Mucha’s sensibilities into his drawing style. This included employing locks of hair and swaths of fabric to decorative and broader compositional ends, as well as developing extremely sharp skills for depicting accessories and other forms of ornamentation.

This impulse to constantly sublimate hairstyles, clothes and jewelry unsurprisingly lends itself well to adapting a story where the worlds of fashion and beauty play an integral role, both narratively and as a source of aesthetic pleasure. Yuuki’s character designs are dignified and modelesque, almost doll-like. Their hair is luxurious, they’re adorned in a lushly articulated variety of fabrics and accessories, while importantly still retaining a nice range of emotional potential.

While the previous description of Yuuki’s adapted designs might ring faithful to received ideas about Yazawa’s style, reading her comics reveals quite a bit of playfulness in the characters’ expressions, often going from extremely glamorous and stylish in one panel to wacky and super deformed in the next. This isn’t particularly revolutionary for anime or manga, but the point of interest here is how Kobayashi seizes those moments of contrast to introduce his own sensibility into the design language of the series. Anyone familiar with his drawing style knows it to have quite a rough edge, more easily likened to zany doodles than the kind of polish we’ve discussed so far.

Building upon those moments in the comic, the show's comedic scenes feature a decidedly crude, almost grotesque take on the characters, directly analogous to Kobayashi's character designs for the ending credits. What's even more engaging about those scenes is how often they will invest in an entirely new background painting to adapt to the shift in drawing style, even across cuts where viewers might not even notice the changes.

I’d watch an entire show that looks just like this.

The art direction and setting design are where a good chunk of the show's most interesting quirks lie. For example, across its entire run, the city is depicted with an ambiguous sense of weather. We might be used to seeing atmospheric conditions shift to emphasize characters’ emotional states, but here the sky will often appear overcast or conveniently blown out of exposure, as if intentionally concealed. There’s a conspicuous rejection of the sunny blue sky as a default, serving not only to create a more specific visual atmosphere for the show, but also obfuscating cheap inferences about the characters’ interiorities. The entire first episode features a milky-gray sky that undercuts the life-changing events in Yukari’s story. Throughout the show and its emotional ups and downs, the sky shows a potent kind of irreverence, cycling from sunny to overcast with little regard for the events transpiring. It’s a cliche to say the setting is its own character, but by decoupling its appearance from the whims of the cast, this one does gain a striking sense of individuality.

On the subject of atmosphere, a distinct color philosophy also emerges. It’s hard to describe the show’s sense of color in concise terms. What’s certain is that there’s a clear specificity to the palette: the eye latches onto shades of burgundy, lavender, navy, teal, mint and mustard. This assortment of jewel tones is supported by a sturdy scaffolding of neutrals, and the overwhelming impression is above all one of balance. Applauding the mere congruence of a show’s color design might just imply collapsing standards, but even compared to its contemporaries and most of its earlier digipaint peers, there’s a remarkable sense of harmony between characters and setting, especially considering the visual richness of their ever-shifting, extravagant clothes and candy-colored hair. So much effort seems to have gone into ensuring this level of seamlessness.

A color analysis chart based on 16 key scenes across the show reveals a surprisingly compressed palette. It's enlightening to map out the main characters’ color schemes on this diagram (typically near the edges of the gamut,) and notice just how thoroughly the color design philosophy was conceived to make them stand out.

This palette also makes for particularly remarkable nocturnal scenes.

In researching anything that could explain this immense feat of production design, especially for a TV series, I found out by scouring his Twitter that Kobayashi admitted to going through every single shot in his shows to adjust the colors of both the cels and backgrounds. There are multiple posts of his where he mentions the importance of colors and his process for unifying the screen and building atmosphere. He even discusses in passing the care he puts into tweaking the brightness of the sclera, which is the kind of oft-overlooked detail I could go on about for hours.

Many of the key story locations were redesigned by Kobayashi himself, bringing them from the stylized flatness and implied spaces of Yazawa’s manga into more specific, fully realized environments. My favorite example of this is the Atelier in which the titular design circle spends most of its time together.

Ai Yazawa, Paradise Kiss, Chapter 1. This layout is reused many times throughout the manga.

The atmosphere is decadent and atemporal, almost Biba-esque. The floors are stamped with Maija Isola’s iconic 1964 ‘Kaivo’ pattern design. The walls, finished in a dégradé from plaster to bare brick, are painted a lush shade of berry and adorned with framed Toulouse-Lautrec reproductions and various jazz and R&B posters ranging from mid-century to current day. By the entrance is a red leather couch surrounded by yards of fabric and other clothesmaking paraphernalia. The corner plant of choice is a pygmy palm tree. A legion of colorful bottles seem to glow from the absinth green shelves of the bar, reflecting off the gleaming surface of the counter. Around an antique oak wood table, a chartreuse Louis XV chair nonchalantly sits across the sleek contours of Eames and Saarinen. At the back of the room, the luminous velvet of a pool table seems to call for both play and pageantry.

Extras from French Paradise Kiss DVD Volume 1

This is in my opinion a kind of microcosm for the way Kobayashi approaches the source material. The general layout, structure and contents of the Atelier are largely lifted from the comic, but he uses his interest in architecture and design history to flesh it out into a sensorially rich, dreamlike space. He employs various materials, textures, colors, furniture styles and decorations to create a potent sense of personal taste and history on behalf of the members of ParaKiss who occupy it (and redecorated it
themselves, in the text.)

Interestingly, Kobayashi uses blinding spotlights as the main source of lighting in the otherwise somber underground setting, along with a few key accents. The room is dotted with halos of light in every direction, adding visual interest to every shot. This unusual setup is also richly articulated through compositing, washing the characters in soft, warm bounce light across different layers of the space. The atelier feels enveloped in a constant otherworldly haze, enhancing the sense of glamour and romance so central to the story.

The atelier's bathroom underwent a rather spectacular transformation. Kobayashi seems to have latched on to the motif of sinuous vine leaves adorning the ceiling and developed the setting into an absurdly luxurious and fantastical space, directly inspired by Alexandre Charpentier’s Art Nouveau dining room at the Musée d'Orsay. Since this is where Yukari first tries on ParaKiss’ clothes, I think making it a strange kind of fairy tale setting was appropriate to convey the transformation taking place.

Ai Yazawa, Paradise Kiss, Chapter 1

I love the irreverence of the generic galvanized steel garbage can and modern toilet seat set against such a rich backdrop.

In one of the most peculiar examples of design shifts, Arashi's typical if vaguely affluent-looking family home is completely transformed into a brutalist mansion. The design and its juxtaposition against more traditional houses feel indebted to the work of Tadao Ando. Perhaps this felt appropriate for a punk household?

Ai Yazawa, Paradise Kiss, Chapter 46

By naming these references, I'm not simply signaling a cursory knowledge of architecture, but trying to highlight how Kobayashi sought to connect the central element of fashion to broader currents of design (as is famously the case in real life.) This doesn't necessarily ‘improve' the story in a functional sense, but the compound effect of these highly specific displays of design is a world that feels richer and more memorable on screen.

The school elevator scene in episode 7 is anime original: the manga originally had the characters walking up stairs. Whatever the reason for the change, Kobayashi uses the opportunity to add decals by Art Deco designer Georges Barbier to the elevator doors. I wonder if this is a cheeky nod to main character George.

Just as he uses his personal interest in design to strengthen the presentation of fashion in the show, Kobayashi allows fashion language to slur the delivery of certain anime and manga conventions. Many times across the show and particularly during Rintaro's rather eccentric episode 10, the abstraction of the classic flowery background effect is reinterpreted into intricate lace patterns, hand painted by the background team.

Ai Yazawa, Paradise Kiss, Chapter 2

In fact, every single pattern worn by the characters has been painted by the background team, and there are quite a few of them between the multiple new outfits worn by the main cast every episode, and even background extras on screen for a few seconds. It's a small consideration in the grand scheme of things, but one that I personally feel has a sizable impact on the coherence of elements on screen, as the characters wear a tangible textural connection to their surroundings.

Whatever the actual difficulty of the compositing process for that shot, the preciousness and delicate craft of the blue lace is immediately conveyed through its transparency. I think this is the only instance of this kind of asset use in the show, and it really pays off even if it only lasts a few seconds.

I love the juxtaposition of these shots from episode two: the almost baroque lighting on the closeup of the ParaKiss label, the luxurious silk lining and crocodile leather, contrasting with the playful, colorful abstraction of the fuzzy Happy Berry patches and their loosely embroidered logo. There's so much to infer about the identities of both of these brands, purely expressed through displays of fabric.

Despite a clear showcase of the art team’s ability to faithfully express an extremely wide range of material qualities, the show also makes a pretty active usage of photography. While this is a signature of Kobayashi’s across his output, it’s also a convenient instance of overlap with the source material where photographs filtered to the point of total abstraction are very often used as backdrops.

There are of course the inscrutable recurring opening segments with their more straightforward mixed-media approach. The images seem to mostly be sourced from Kobayashi’s location scouting for the show and they range from atmospheric collages to the kind of zany, surreal scenes we looked at earlier. I’ve tried pretty hard to assign a rational narrative framework to some of these sequences, especially since they constitute a pretty indulgent use of runtime. Whatever functional purpose could be argued however, thanks to them, the screen feels open to all possible forms of expression. We’re to experience the world as this constantly shifting collage of various degrees of ‘reality,’ from real to fictional locations, from photographs to paintings, and everything in between.

It’s usually less on the nose across the show, but photo reference does seem to have been an important part of the process of realizing its worldview. I love the almost uncanny realism of George’s car in some shots, for example, and the fact that it somehow doesn’t end up feeling out of place in context.

This idea of Kobayashi walking around Shibuya with a camera colors the entire show in my opinion. Throughout it all, we’re experiencing his way of seeing, the things that catch his interest, a level of sensory information that only someone who’s experienced those spaces could articulate. Episode 3, which he directed and storyboarded himself, is rife with examples of this. It’s sprinkled with such a great sense of urban exploration and sightseeing, a vision of a city bustling with people to meet, things to do and places to be.

Urban sights in Paradise Kiss episode 3

My favorite scene in the episode, and perhaps of the whole show, is Yukari’s brief shopping montage. It’s no longer than 20 seconds, but it packs such a punch. We simply cycle through various shop signs captured at various angles, and with every new shop, the background music changes. Vibrant consumer worlds distilled down to an abstraction of colors, textures and sounds, so effortlessly potent, so unbelievably cool.

Upon seeing this, my good friend remarked: “a true flaneur, you literally can’t fake it.”

As I start winding down and think back to the notions of glamour I brought up at the beginning, I can’t help but think of Kobayashi as its ultimate agent in the show. Layered with the sense of longing I get from watching these characters chase their dreams is a sharp pang in my heart, a desire to make something, anything that could resonate with others even half as much as his work on this show does with me. Through it all, an image emerges of him: his virtuosic sense of color and screen design, his deep knowledge of art history, the sharpness of his taste and creative instincts… I want to be as knowledgeable as he was, and to have as much to show for it.

There are certainly criticisms to be levied against the adaptation. I’ve seen readers displeased with how the story was condensed for its runtime, and about what exactly ended up getting trimmed to fit. The drawings also get pretty janky, Yuuki wasn’t necessarily there correcting every single shot, and there’s not much in the way of ‘sakuga’ if that’s something that matters to you. Those are all fair observations, but I think it’s remarkable that the show still has so much to offer, even with all of those points knocked off its score. If anything, there’s much to learn from the way it fully exploits its themes to craft an extremely specific and memorable presentation: a world of leather and lace, of glossy metals and sleek plastics, of high rise apartments and sleazy undergrounds, expressed through all facets of its production design.

We’re seeing the lavishness of TV animation soar to new heights, and that’s great. I’ve certainly been sufficiently entertained by shows whose claim to fame are ‘drawing power’ above all else. That being said, it’s only when you watch something like this that you’re reminded you can sometimes walk away from your screen flashblind and smelling of secondhand perfume. How many supposed exploration fantasies have actually left you with dirt under your nails? How far have most sports anime gone to make you feel sweat-slicked and sunburnt? When did a seaside setting last make you breathe in salty air? I hardly know what any of those ideas would entail functionally, but that’s a director’s job to figure out, and Kobayashi’s work here is done.

Perhaps he was at an unfair advantage here just because he happened to like to read fashion magazines and listened to rock music, but I sincerely believe he would’ve treated any given premise with the same thoroughness and open imagination. If anything, a series about something as mundane as a laundromat probably would’ve revealed some hidden vested interest in 1950s washing machines or whatever else. Curiosity was his greatest weapon, and after ruminating on this show for so long, I do notice how rare of an asset that is for just about everyone else. We repeat so many tired adages about how an artist should look outside of their medium for inspiration. What does your favorite director know about Art Nouveau dining rooms and icons of the 1960s textile industry? If your answer is ‘nothing’, their shows are likely worse off for it.

I’m remembering now that Kobayashi wasn’t particularly well-liked or respected among anime fans. Perhaps that’s also part of his glamour, that his peers loved and platformed him despite that.

References:

Osamu Kobayashi's Twitter @osamukoba

Virginia Postrel, The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion, 2013