Amazon Manga: Stories Are My Sanctuary
We helped Jeff Bezos launch Amazon Manga by celebrating the feeling that Japanese comic books can give you. Whatever your day has in store, you can always dive into different worlds with manga, rubbing shoulders with your favorite characters and advancing the story at your own pace.
We got crafty with it all, shooting everything in camera.
Having written the stories in tandem with up-and-coming artists, we printed out over 1000 manga frames of different sizes and broke them out into many layers on glass. This was to recreate the digital reading experience, so the viewer could dive into each manga frame making these black and white sanctuaries oh-so-immersive. You can watch Mack and the gang talking about everything from 2.5D to Moco cameras to being inside a phone.
We also brought manga sanctuaries to the Tokyo streets and skyscrapers. Each reader is immersed in a different genre, with all kinds of easter eggs and homages tucked away in there, from the onomatopoeia to the speech bubbles to the fried shrimp getting abducted. When it came to the placements themselves, we loved having weird and wonky media placements, as that’s what manga frames look like.
Falling in love is my bedtime ritual.
Next stop: another world.
When I open the book, I hear the chimes.
This is my serious face, but I’m cracking up inside.
As I turn the pages, energy flows through me.
During my break, I’m undefeated.
Director: Mackenzie Sheppard
Director of Photography: Oli Millar
Creative Director: Max Pilwat
Copywriters: Andrew Miller, Marina Danjo
Art Director: Shohei Kawada
Designer: Akane Yasuda