Proto Anime Cut presents drawings of the most important directors and illustrators of Japanese animated films. The action-packed hero stories and the visionary science fiction of Japanese Anime are set in impressive worlds that are constructed in painstaking detail. Looking at the creative processes, the filmmakers appear as architectural dreamers who operate with virtuosity at the borders of credibility, fiction and utopia. The exhibition focuses on the development of these arenas of action and narrative scenarios. Numerous background paintings, storyboards, drafts, sources of inspiration and film excerpts provide insight into the working methods of the most successful animation artists of the last two decades. Proto Anime Cut presents them for the first time in Europe.