Superflat

[6] Superflat artists include Chiho Aoshima, Keiichi Tanaami, Ayako Rokkaku, Mahomi Kunikata, Sayuri Michima, Yoshitomo Nara, Yuko Yamaguchi, Aya Takano, Yusuke Nakamura, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Sebastian Masuda, Fantasista Utamaro and Takashi Murakami.

[9] In his book, Tsuji critically analyses works from Edo period painters and explains how the picture controls the speed and course of its observer's gaze, creating an interaction between the surface and the viewer with a zigzag motion.

It is mentioned that the juxtaposition of foreground forms extending horizontally across broad compositions and two-dimensional surfaces is another feature that Murakami has adapted for his own theory and contemporary subject matter.

In his manifesto, Murakami takes Yoshinori Kanada as a prime example of an animator whose work contains a compositional dynamic that resembles that of the “eccentric” artists to a startling degree.

[9] A connection can be made of modern-day animation back to twelfth- and thirteenth-century Japanese handscrolls, where the narrative is composed across multiple sheets of joined paper, read from right to left, providing the observer once again a two-dimensional 'flat' space and composition where the gaze leads the viewer through the story.

[10] A different factor that played a role for the emergence of Superflatness was the bursting bubble of the Japanese economy in the 1990s, where Japan was led into uncertain territory and a loss of its sense of security.

Michael Darling explains that "rabid consumerism and the slavish following of fads, especially in fashion, have further contributed to a culture of surfaces and superficiality, representing still another facet of the Superflat concept".