Psychedelic Agit-Pop: The Animated Films of Tadanori Yokoo

Psychedelic Agit-Pop: The Animated Films of Tadanori Yokoo.” Pop Cinema edited by Glyn Davis & Tom Day (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2024): 94-114.

In the 1960s the social and political conditions of postwar Japan generated a frenzy of artistic innovation within a wide range of practices including theatre, cinema, literature, music, illustration, graphic design, dance, and performance art. As art historian Alexandra Munroe states, it was ‘undoubtedly the most creative outburst of anarchistic, subversive and riotous tendencies in the history of modern Japanese culture.’1 It was in this artistic climate that the renowned Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo first began to experiment with graphic design. Through blending Pop art, psychedelia and traditional Japanese aesthetics, in particular, ukiyo-e (a genre of Japanese art which has been considered proto-Pop), Yokoo created works that are playful, humorous, personal, and idiosyncratic. 2 In 1968, Yokoo’s friend, author Yukio Mishima, provocatively declared that Yokoo’s graphic works connected ‘a straight line through the sorrow of Japanese local customs (dozoku), and the idiotic and daylight nihilism of American Pop art.’3It was this particular aesthetic cocktail that landed him the reductive and Western-centric nickname of the ‘Japanese Warhol.’ At the time, Yokoo was at the centre of the Japanese counterculture, collaborating with pivotal figures in the scene including filmmaker Nagisa Ōshima, playwright-poet-filmmaker Shūji Terayama, playwright-director-actor Jūrō Kara, choreographer Hijikata Tatsumi, and musician Toshi Ichiyanagi. Although predominantly known as a graphic designer and painter, Yokoo also produced three short animations.

This chapter will situate Yokoo’s animated films in relation to his overall artistic practice, and the social and political context in which they were made. A brief analysis will be performed on all three of Yokoo’s animations: Anthology No. 1 (1964, アンソロジーNO. 1), KISS KISS KISS (1964) and Kachi kachi yama meoto no sujimichi (1965,堅々獄夫婦庭訓).4 Expanding on this analysis, a close reading will be provided of Yokoo’s most complex animation, Kachi kachi yama, a work that alludes to the revolutionary potential of popular culture. While working on his animations, Yokoo abandoned commercial graphic design. At this time, he began to pursue his own idiosyncratic artistic expressions, blending psychedelia and Pop art aesthetics, producing artworks that advocate for political change through expanding consciousness and through everyday actions rather than explicit political action.

  1. Quoted in Donald Richie, ‘Japan Shattered Stereotypes in the 60s,’ The Japan Times, 9 October 2000. []
  2. For a discussion of proto-Pop in the context of Japanese art, see Reiko Tomii, ‘Oiran Goes Pop: Contemporary Japanese Artists Reinventing Icons’, in Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri (eds), The World Goes Pop (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 95-103. []
  3. Mishima quoted in Ibid., 103. []
  4. Anthology No. 1 is also known as Tokuten eizō which has been translated as Privileged ImagesKachi kachi yama meoto no sujimichi has been translated as Creaking Mountain, The Couples’ Precepts and as Hermetic Prison – A Couple’s Home Education. See:
    Maria Roberta Novielli, Floating Worlds: A Short History of Japanese Animation (Boca Raton: CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 51.
    Doryun Chong (ed.), Tokyo, 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 212. []