Yusaki, Fusako

Fusako Yusaki was born in 1937 in Moji City (now Moji Ward in Kitakyūshū City) in Fukuoka Prefecture. She resides in Milan, Italy. While enrolled in the Department of Design (now the Department of Design and Crafts) at Joshibi University of Art and Design, she attended classes taught by graphic designer, Takashi Kōno. She has said that an assignment to design a television telop (text or images superimposed onto footage for broadcast) served as the starting point for imagining the movement of animation. As a part of her extracurricular activities, Yusaki created a sculpture club, which was her first encounter with clay. Her sculpture displayed at the Nika Art Exhibition received an award. Later, while working as an assistant at Joshibi University, she studied abroad in Italy at Milan’s Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in 1967 as an Italian Government Scholarship Exchange Student sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. Here she met Agnese who was a student at the time (Agnese would later become Yusaki’s central partner in managing and operating her animation studio, Studio Yusaki, established in 1973). While living in Italy and working on television commercials, she became renowned for her metamorphizing animations. At Italy’s international television animation film festival, Cartoons on the Bay, Yusaki received the Pulcinella Award in 2001 and the Pulcinella Career Award in 2008, and was later inducted into the festival’s hall of fame in 2021.
In Japan, the television animated special directed by Yusaki, Naccio and Pomm (Italian: Naccio e Pomm, Japanese: Natcho to Pomu), became popular airing in the “Puchipuchi Anime” broadcast slot on NHK in 2002. Moreover, she contributed to Winter Days (Fuyu no Hi, 2003) directed Kihachirō Kawamoto as one of the thirty-five participating animators who each animated a stanza of the renku poem of the same name by Matsuo Bashō from Basho’s Seven Anthologies (Bashō shichibushū).
In addition to producing work, Yusaki continues to be vivaciously active leading workshops for children and appearing in talk shows during her visits to Japan.