Just as viewers enjoy the actual animation within an anime film, their promotional posters also make them stand out to fans. These artworks essentially represent the movie in a snapshot and play a significant role in attracting an audience.

Illustrators employ a variety of art styles, color palettes, and techniques to visually capture the essence of these stories. By utilizing chaos and color to exhilarate viewers or by bringing out emotion through simplicity and emptiness, these anime films’ posters are beautiful artworks in themselves.

10

Paprika

Warm, Bold, and Evoking a Sense of Uncertainty

A mix of surrealism, sci-fi, and suspense thriller, Satoshi Kon’s film Paprika follows Dr. Atsuko Chiba, a scientist and moonlighting ‘dream detective’. With her colleagues, they work on a device to help psychiatric patients, but in the hands of the wrong people, it could destroy people’s minds. When a prototype is stolen, Atsuko, under her code name ‘Paprika’, springs into action to recover it before irreversible damage is done.

Behind Paprika’s face, are little mementos seen throughout the film, amalgamated under warm tones sitting beneath her eerie smile. Matching its dream-state animation and setting, the art is unearthly, detailed yet disordered. The movie’s cluttered promotional artwork perfectly represents its ambiguity, blurring the lines between dreams and reality.

9

Berserk: The Golden Age Arc III – The Advent

The Darkness Hints at the Upcoming Tragedy

Serving as the violent conclusion to the Golden Age arc, the third movie of the Berserk series details Guts and the Band of the Hawk joining forces to rescue Griffith from Midland. The main poster portrays an imposing eclipse backing a thin figure, clad in helmet and bandages, kneeling in a pool of red.

The artwork is dark and intense, with rich crimson and overwhelming shadows. Alluding to a sense of agony, this dramatic poster for Berserk is a matching artwork for its infamous style. For a gruesome, brutal, and nightmarish film of old bonds reforged and rebroken, the cover art is a perfect reference for long-time fans while also alluding to the dreadful events about to pass for new watchers.

8

Angel’s Egg

A Beautiful Collaboration For this 80s Mind-Bender

Angel’s Egg is a psychological, dream-like drama, following a lonely young girl who scavenges a post-apocalyptic cityscape while protecting a large egg. After meeting a mysterious boy, discussions about the egg and humanity ensue for a visual depiction of faith and existentialism.

Similar to the movie’s animation, the promotional art is airy and wistful, like smoke passing with the wind. The film was a collaboration between artist Yoshitaka Amano and director Mamoru Oshii, perfectly combining their dreamy, illustrative styles. The prints are cohesive with somber tones and soft yet crackled textures, overall evoking a feeling of simple nostalgia for this 1985 fantasy.

Angel’s Egg will get a remastered high-definition edition, so there is no better time for anime fans to add this masterpiece to their collection.

7

Neon Genesis Evangelion: End of Evangelion

Bold and Emotional for a Fan-favorite Franchise Coming to a Close

Gearing up again, watchers follow the teenage pilots and their Evangelion mechas working to protect humanity from grave threats. The film serves as an alternate ending to the final two episodes of the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series, concluding the psychological, sci-fi, and dystopian coming-of-age story.

On theme with the rest of the saga, Neon Genesis Evangelion: End of Evangelion’s promotional art posters are graphic with deep coloring and striking figures, both metal and human. The piece is highlighted with bright whites, contrasting its deep coloring in the mind-bending setting. This poster is infamous amongst anime fans for a great reason, perfectly encapsulating the 90’s classic.

6

Vampire Hunter D

A Dark, Romantic Illustration for a Supernatural Fantasy

Vampire Hunter D, set in the distant future, details the re-emerging human population being terrorized by the race of vampires known as the Nobility. As the tyrannical vampire Count Magnus chooses Doris Lang to be his bride, she seeks out the mysterious vampire hunter known only as D to defeat the Count and save her fate.

The film’s posters seem as though covered in a haze, illustrated with exaggerated silhouettes, long lines, and deep blacks. Fitting the elusive main character to his fantastical style, Yoshitaka Amano’s collaborative artwork is perfect for the dark romanticism overarching the supernatural genre.

5

Ghost in the Shell

Bold Sci-Fi Artwork that Questions How to Define ‘Humanity’

Ghost in the Shell follows cybernetic government agent Motoko Kusanagi tasked with finding ‘The Puppet Master’, a threatening computer virus capable of overtaking human hosts. With her fellow agents, Kusanagi embarks on an action-packed journey with themes surrounding technological development, identity, and humanity.

This anime front-runner’s art is easily recognized with the protagonist taking center. Her cyborg characteristics are on display, and her otherwise womanly body is exposed to the viewers, extending the question of how society socially defines the ‘human’ identity and where it is lost. The art is cooly colored and shaded, opposing the otherwise voidness it carries, greatly fitting the sci-fi genre.

4

Akira

Art That Changed Anime Forever

Thirty-one years after World War III, Neo-Tokyo homes a motorcycle gang that accidentally gets involved with a top-secret esper child who escapes his keepers. This sets off a great change within one gang member, thus altering his mind and triggering a domino effect on the whole of society.

Based on the groundbreaking manga by Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira‘s art portrays dystopic destruction and the cyberpunk evolution of society. It is graphic, vibrantly colored, and stands out with its infamous imagery of the red motorcycle, the explosion, and main character Shoutarou Kaneda. While keeping the background cohesive, it draws attention to the center’s figure with the bold title looming over the image. The artwork of Akira drastically affected the world’s recognition of Japanese films, making a splash on the international stage and changing anime as a whole.

3

Grave of the Fireflies

Great Suffering Captured Simply

Following the World War II bombing in Japan, Grave of the Fireflies follows Seita and his four-year-old sister battling to survive through hunger, apathy, grief, and despair in the Japanese countryside. Simply depicting the battered children and a warplane hidden in the night sky, the illustration is highlighted by shades of red, a color signifying danger, pain, sacrifice, and courage.

Studio Ghibli’s art masterfully uses simplicity in one version of the poster, as black covers most of the illustration, yet the watcher is filled with a sense of dread and impending sorrow. The film’s promotional art is somber, hinting at the suffering seen in the movie detailing how Japanese people were affected in the war’s aftermath.

2

Belladonna Of Sadness

A Descent into Darkness Masked by Beautiful Colors

Belladonna of Sadness follows the beautiful peasant woman Jeanne. After she is raped by the local lord on her wedding night and scorned by her husband-to-be, she makes a pact with the Devil to get her revenge.

Perfectly capturing the energy of this 1970s film, the posters’ art is psychedelic, erotic, and supernatural, lightly lined and filled with an array of pastel pigments to give a watercolor effect. The collection of art pieces is mysterious and tinged with drama, suiting this psychological fever-dream film about depravity, rebellion, and the occult.

1

Perfect Blue

Insanity Illustrated Beautifully in Blue

Pop star Mima wants to branch off into acting and modeling, but fans are reluctant to let her go. Encouraged by her managers, she takes on a role for a popular TV show, but some of her collaborators end up murdered. The young woman descends into guilt and paranoia as her stalker closes in in this renowned, frightening, and visually stunning psychological thriller by Satoshi Kon.

Touching on celebrity worship, expectations, and identity, Perfect Blue is another film exalted in the anime community. The promotional artwork is visually striking, using a cohesive color palette and simple yet attractive composition in each. Whether the blues are spirited or subdued, they mingle perfectly with shadow, creating a bold and graphic piece. Instantly drawing the viewers’ eyes, the posters masterfully combine the madness and distortion of reality seen in the film.