Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s Venus Wars arrived when high art and high budgets converged in Japanese theatrical anime. With a talented staff and an ambitious vision, Venus Wars followed in the footsteps of predecessors like Nausicaa, Royal Space Force, and AKIRA. In a cruel twist, however, despite Yasuhiko’s bonafides as an anime industry legend, Venus Wars wasn’t the hit folks hoped for and the talented animator and director sought to distance himself from the film and anime in general.
Watching it decades later can remind you of the film’s shortcomings, but it’s hard to ignore the spectacle and detail that oozes from every scene. And the movie has plenty going for it; gorgeous animation, an ambitious setting, impeccable mechanical designs. Those mechanical designs were handled by two talented artists who should be familiar to readers of Zimmerit: Kow Yokoyama and Makoto Kobayashi.
While Yasuhiko’s original Venus Wars manga featured three-wheel bikes, staff for the film disagreed on whether that style should be brought into animation. Writer Yuichi Sasamoto wanted two-wheeled bikes, while Kobayashi and Yokoyama argued for one-wheeled monobikes. During an early production meeting on May 17, 1987, Kobayashi sketched a rough design that would lay the foundation for the film’s iconic one-wheeled bikes.
According to an article in B-Club #39, because the movie called for two different bikes (one a civilian race model, the other a military combat model), it was agreed that the design work for these two bikes would be split between the two young mechanical designers. Kobayashi handled the race bike, while Yokoyama handled the combat bike. But Yokoyama also worked on the race bike so, as is often the case with these types of design projects, it seems the design work was shared quite a bit. Design cleanup for animation was handled by Kobayashi’s brother, Osamu Kobayashi, who did the same job on Dragon’s Heaven [1988] and later had a distinguished career of his own.
Early designs published in B-Club showed Yokoyama’s design journey from a snub-nosed battle bike to one inspired by the Messerschmitt BF-109 fighter plane from World War II (presumably, anyways–Yokoyama mentioned the Messerschmitt influence in his notes but didn’t specify the precise model). Some of his earliest sketches bore an uncanny resemblance to the monobike from the Bandai toy line Spiral Zone [1985]. It’s unclear if there was a direct influence there, but Spiral Zone was an ambitious toy line that featured mechanical design work by Kunio Okawara and Kazuhisa Kondoh, among others. While Yokoyama didn’t work specifically on the designs for Spiral Zone, he did create the models and artwork for Age of Dragons, an original photo novel series that ran in B-Club that used the Spiral Zone toys as the basis for a fantasy story.1
In his notes in B-Club #39, Yokoyama also mentioned that around the same time he was working on Venus Wars, he was working furiously on designs for an anime adaption of Chiaki Kawamata’s Mars Crustacean Corps novel. That adaption never made it to production, but the imagery of that story does bear a resemblance to what’s seen in Venus Wars. At least one edition of Kawamata’s novel featured model work and sketches by Yokoyama.
Sentai’s first release of Venus Wars on Blu-ray included a booklet filled with interviews and artwork highlighting some of the production history of the film. These included sketches by Yokoyama for the racing monobike (curiously, none of Kobayashi’s sketches are included and Yokoyama is credited with the design, it’s not clear why that’s at odds with the B-Club feature) and a model maquette that Yokoyama created to help animators visualize the design from all angles. In B-Club #40, Kobayashi also mentioned building a 1/35 maquette of the Octopus tank to help animators visualize the design from all angles.
An interview with Yasuhiko included in the Sentai booklet is fascinating because he talks at length about Yokoyama’s involvement in the design process and their relationship. He shares an anecdote of Yokoyama calling Studio Nue’s mechanical designs “kenophobic,”2 criticism that resonated with Yasuhiko given his own experiences having to animate complicated Studio Nue designs.3 Yasuhiko also shared a story of how Kobayashi was so proud of a transport plane he designed that he described it to Yasuhiko as “just like one of [Hayao] Miyazaki’s designs.” Yasuhiko was annoyed at the comparison but admitted that he still used the design in the film.
Both the interview with Yasuhiko and the writing in B-Club #39 point to the design relationship between the director and his young mechanical designers as being one of genuine collaboration and mutual appreciation. While Kobayashi’s involvement in the film’s mechanical design seems to have been a bit sidelined in Sentai’s booklet, it’s clear both designers had a hand in creating the most iconic imagery of an impressive film.
Additional Artwork
Image Source: B-Club #39
Notes
- The Spiral Zone “toys” occupied that particularly strange middle-ground commonplace in the 1980s where they weren’t quite full-fledged toys and not quite models. Some pieces came on sprues, the toys themselves were “fiddly” to say the least, and they were promoted as being a good base for customizing. Hence, the Age of Dragons photo story.
- A fear of empty spaces. In other words, Nue’s designs were too crammed full of detail.
- He doesn’t mention the specific work but presumably, he meant the Crusher Joe movie.