Manga

British Museum, London

Manga

An immersive experience enabled visitors to inhabit the dynamic world of manga, where reality and fantasy are often blurred.





Housed within the British Museum’s ‘Manga’ exhibition, the ‘Bookstore’ was a recreation of the oldest manga store in Japan. Visitors stepped into a space that looked and felt like the original Tokyo shop, imagining they were participants in the drama, energy and power of manga.

For this, NewAngle created a short animation showing how manga is a compelling world of visual storytelling that constructs an immersive world for the reader to inhabit, with narratives driven by images rather than words.

The animation was projected onto three large-scale screens. It featured illustrations from Professor Munakata’s British Museum Adventure, a bespoke manga story created by Hoshino Yukinobu set in the museum. NewAngle took six scenes from the book and brought the artist’s illustrations to life using 2.5d parallax and motion graphic techniques. A dynamic soundtrack added to the energy and sense of involvement.

The ‘Manga’ exhibition received nearly 2,000 visitors a day in its opening year and was the British Museum’s most popular show of 2019.

A 3D visualisation of the ‘Bookstore’ created during the design phase allowed us to plan the media around the space.