He has designed characters for video games and for animated television shows as well as painting for books, comic books, and museum exhibitions. Over the course of his career, Amano has produced a number of works based on material from folktales and fairy tales.
These have appeared in exhibitions, collaborative publications, and published collections.
Amano's first major work based on folklore was his book Budouhime (Princess Budou, 1996), which was inspired by the eponymous Princess of China from the tale “The Adventures of Prince Camaralzaman and the Princess Badoura,” included in Andrew Lang's 1898 collection of the Arabian Nights. In collaboration with the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen, the material from this book was adapted into a twenty-minute computer animated film shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999. Additionally, Amano expanded his original work into 1001 Nights, a full series of paintings and lithographs inspired by the Arabian Nights. First exhibited in Los Angeles in 1998, these paintings grant a dreamlike, ethereal quality to the tales, with characters floating languidly through empty space.
In 1996, Amano also published Yousei (Fairies), a book that takes its subject matter from British legends on fairy creatures, including an adaptation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. While the book does not deal with explicit folktales, it does use Victorian and Edwardian folklore on the existence of fairy creatures, such as the connection between fairies and gardens evidenced in the Cottingley fairy photographs of 1917. Amano's fairies are small creatures with distinct resemblances to plant life. Amano's next prominent work involving folktale material was The Dream Hunters (1999), a collaborative project with Neil Gaiman. This book, an extension of Gaiman's popular Sandman series, is told in the style of a Japanese folktale, featuring a fox and a tanuki (raccoon dog) engaging in a contest of trickery. While the plot of this story is not a direct adaptation of a specific folktale, Gaiman and Amano both draw heavily on folkloric sources for this work. And although much of Sandman series is in graphic novel format, for this book Amano worked with large paintings and lithographs, creating something closer to an illustrated storybook than a comic book.
In 2000, Amano released Marchen, in which he included works inspired by several folktales.
M€archen featured Amano's renditions of both European and Japanese fairy tales, including “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Snow White,” and “Kaguyahime” (“Princess Kaguya”). Amano illustrates each of the traditional tales in his distinctive art nouveau style.
