Anime, Manga and Traditional Japanese Art Come Together at an Upcoming Auction—From Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave’ to Miyazaki’s ‘My Neighbor Totoro’
The sale places pop culture artifacts in conversation with Japan’s rich visual traditions. According to Christie’s, these items “trace the enduring resonance of motifs, techniques and narratives rooted in Japan’s past”
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Christie’s will auction off a trove of anime, manga and traditional Japanese artworks this month. The sale, titled “Anime Starts Here: Japanese Subculture Imagines Tradition,” is the first New York auction dedicated to these art forms. The items range from an original print of Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave to a 1989 film poster for My Neighbor Totoro.
“People today see manga and anime as serious art—not just entertainment,” Takaaki Murakami, head of Japanese and Korean art at Christie’s, tells the Observer’s Elisa Carollo. “From the beginning, manga and anime reflected the mood of society.”
Manga is a genre of Japanese comic books and graphic novels, such as One Piece or Naruto. Meanwhile, anime is a style of Japanese film and TV animation; well-known examples include the series Neon Genesis Evangelion and Hayao Miyazaki’s popular Studio Ghibli films. Both art forms have attracted millions of fans worldwide.
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“Many of our collectors today grew up with manga and anime, and they are collecting what they know and love,” Murakami tells Artnet’s Vivienne Chow. This collecting market has become quite lucrative. In February, a social media influencer’s rare Pokemon card sold for $16.5 million at auction.
Along with commercial success, anime and manga have attracted the attention of museums in recent years. Last month, the de Young Museum in San Francisco concluded an exhibition titled “Art of Manga,” which presented manga as a “powerful medium for visual storytelling, highlighting themes across genres, from friendship to sexuality to the human condition.” Additionally, an ongoing exhibition at the British Museum explores the history of Japan’s samurai warriors, including how they’ve been depicted in anime and video games.
The term “manga” dates to 1814, when the artist Hokusai—best known for his stunning woodblock series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji—began publishing a series of illustrated books called Hokusai Manga. However, these books featured a collection of sketches rather than cohesive narratives.
Quick fact: What is Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji?
Created around 1830, this series of 36 woodblock prints shows Japan’s Mount Fuji from numerous angles and in a variety of weather conditions.
“They were originally instructional materials for his students and didn’t follow a narrative storyline. But the dramatic compositions and dynamic brushwork created a strong sense of movement,” Murakami tells the Observer. “What’s exciting is how contemporary manga and anime both inherit and reshape this tradition. You can still see Hokusai’s sense of motion in modern works.”
Manga as we know it today appeared in the wake of World War II. Artists like Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, “developed a number of conventions of modern manga (such as the large eyes prevalent in the medium) and began telling a variety of stories through his manga,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
Anime began in the early 20th century but took off in the 1960s. Murakami points out that anime often reflected events in Japanese culture and politics throughout a tumultuous 20th century. Astro Boy, which began as manga, was developed into a black-and-white cartoon that premiered in the 1960s. Per the Observer, the titular character “embodied hope during postwar reconstruction and a strong belief in technology.”
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The upcoming Christie’s auction explores “the visual dialogue between Japan’s classical artistic heritage and the subcultural movements that have shaped contemporary global culture,” according to the auction house’s website. “These works trace the enduring resonance of motifs, techniques and narratives rooted in Japan’s past—sources that continue to inspire some of its most influential modern expressions.”
Items for sale include manga drawings by Tezuka and original anime cels (transparent sheets containing frames of animation) from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The auction house is selling such items alongside works of traditional Japanese art, including an original print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave, which is expected to fetch up to $60,000, and a vintage movie poster for Godzilla (1954) that could sell for up to $30,000.
While both Christie’s and Sotheby’s have sold manga and anime artworks in Hong Kong, those auctions were “contextualized primarily through the lens of modern visual culture and market reception,” Murakami tells Artnet. With the upcoming New York sale, the auction house aims to situate “these works within Japan’s longer artistic lineage, a conversation that connects contemporary subcultural art to the country’s classical heritage and visual traditions.”
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