Fusako Yusaki

Fusako Yusaki was born in 1937 in Moji, a city in Fukuoka Prefecture that later merged into present-day Kitakyushu, Japan. Sources disagree on her exact birthday: Italian Wikipedia gives 5 September 1937, while Rai's Cartoons on the Bay festival gives 17 December 1937. Obituaries in October 2026 gave her age as 89. As a young woman she was drawn to sculpture, and to Italy, which she admired for the beauty of Siena and the masterpieces of the Renaissance.

Yusaki studied in the design department of Joshibi University of Art and Design in Tokyo, graduating in 1960. There she took classes with the graphic designer Takashi Kono, and an assignment to design television captions became, she later said, the starting point for imagining movement. She also founded a sculpture club, her first encounter with clay, and a sculpture she exhibited at the Nika exhibition won an award. Her graduation project was a play sculpture for a public garden in Setagaya. After working as an assistant at Joshibi, she won an Italian government scholarship and in 1964 moved to Milan to study sculpture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where she chose the sculptor Luciano Minguzzi as her supervisor. A Japanese account by the WIJA project dates her scholarship to 1967; most Italian sources give 1964.

In Milan Yusaki found that the large abstract concrete sculptures she wanted to make had little place in Italy, and she largely gave up sculpture. Her friend Ro Marcenaro, a pioneer of Italian television animation, pushed her towards animation, and she proposed clay stop-motion for the Fernet-Branca commercials on Carosello. Working with Max Squillace on the animation and with music by Franco Godi, she made 56 episodes from 1968 to 1978, built on the constant metamorphosis of shapes. The campaign won the Bagatto d'Oro in 1971 and a Bronze Lion at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes in 1972.

In the years after, plasticine was so firmly tied to Fernet-Branca in the public mind that other clients hesitated, and she turned to illustration, ceramics, tile design and educational films, including ten films on the lithosphere and earthquakes for the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. She made commercials for Marcolin, Zurich Insurance, Ariston, Saiwa, Ferrero Rocher and Pubblicità Progresso, and personal shorts including Pentalogia del mondo perduto (1972), Ominide (1974), Ama gli animali (1983), her only hand-drawn cartoon L'incredibile Usil (1985) and Rotondo quadrato triangolo (1986).

Around 1990 she returned to children's television with recurring characters for the first time: Toki Doki, a Swiss and Japanese co-production; Talpy, 60 one-minute episodes for Japanese television; Peo, the little blue dog of Swiss television's Colazione con Peo; and Naccio e Pomm for NHK's Petit Petit Anime. For Rai she animated the titles of Glu Glu (1999) and L'Albero Azzurro, and appeared in some episodes of the latter as Zia Fusako. Later work included the Peo art series Peo gioca con i grandi pittori (2011), Peo si tuffa nell'arte and Peo e i maestri della pittura (2012), and Polis (2010), about a blue squirrel exploring European cities. She contributed one of the clips to Kihachiro Kawamoto's collective film Winter Days (2003) and taught stop-motion and three-dimensional illustration at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan for many years.

Yusaki lived and worked in Italy from 1964 until her death and became an Italian citizen. For decades her base was Studio Yusaki in Corsico, on the south-western edge of Milan, which she ran with Agnese D'Amico, whom she met while studying at Brera and who became her central partner in managing the studio after it was founded in 1973. Friends remembered her humour and her lively, inventive Italian. She remained close to the generation of Milanese animators who worked on Carosello, including Bruno Bozzetto and Osvaldo Cavandoli, and recalled with delight how Cavandoli made jam for his friends and always asked for the empty jars back.

Yusaki saw plasticine as a metaphor for human life: malleable, always changing, growing up and growing old, born from the earth and returning to it. She insisted that the work should be done with joy, and that the patience stop-motion requires comes only from passion, since every second of film needs 25 separate frames. While she used digital tools where they helped, she believed that creativity through handling real materials would be rediscovered, and she spent her later years sharing that craft with children, students and teachers.

Yusaki is remembered as the artist who popularised clay animation in Italy and as a pioneer of metamorphosis, the technique of turning one form continuously into another. Her Fernet-Branca spots are among the best remembered animation of the Carosello era, and her characters Peo, Talpy and Naccio e Pomm reached children in Italy, Switzerland and Japan. The Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo holds the complete series of her films, and her work is also in the collection of the Museo Interattivo del Cinema in Milan. Rai marked her death by making a collection of her work available on RaiPlay.

Bagatto d'Oro for the Fernet-Branca commercials (1971). Bronze Lion, International Advertising Festival, Cannes (1972). Gran Premio Lucca 16 and Premio Fantoche at the Salone Internazionale dei Comics, Lucca, for Ama gli animali (1984). Premio Fantoche for best story film for Rotondo quadrato triangolo (1986). Avon Cultural Foundation woman artist of the year (1989). Pulcinella Award, Cartoons on the Bay (2001). Career award, International Festival of Art Cinema, Bergamo (2004). Pulcinella Career Award, Cartoons on the Bay (2008). Cartoons on the Bay Hall of Fame (announced 2021). She also sat on the juries of the Annecy (1989), Hiroshima (1990), Zagreb (2000), Espinho (2002) and Wissembourg (2003) animation festivals.

Selected television series: Toki Doki (1989 to 1990), Talpy (1992 to 1994), Peo (1997), Peo in Svizzera (1997 to 2002), Naccio e Pomm (2001 to 2016), Polis (2010), Peo gioca con i grandi pittori (2011), Peo si tuffa nell'arte and Peo e i maestri della pittura (2012). Selected short films: Pentalogia del mondo perduto (1972), Ballata dell'omino stanco (1973), Ominide (1974), Termituomo (1975), Ama gli animali (1983), Convergenza (1984), L'incredibile Usil (1985), Rotondo quadrato triangolo (1986), Buongiorno (1988), Stagioni senza parola (1991), Gioco di forme (1998), Gioco di numeri (2000) and Gioco di colori (2001). Television titles: Glu Glu (1999), L'Albero Azzurro (2001) and Colazione con Peo (2001). In 2005 NHK broadcast a documentary about her life in Italy, and she gave many recorded interviews and talks, including at IED Milano, the Ca' Foscari Short Film Festival and the Kotatsu Festival.

Fusako Yusaki died on 6 October 2026 in Corsico, near Milan, where she had lived and worked for many years. She was 89. Bruno Bozzetto made the news public on social media, writing that her laugh, her warmth, her wonderful slips of syntax and above all her company at dozens of festivals would stay forever in his memory. The critic Marco Giusti wrote an obituary for Dagospia the same day, and Rai paid tribute to her for accompanying generations of children on journeys into fantasy. The cause of death and funeral arrangements have not been made public.