Naohisa Inoue

Naohisa Inoue was born in 1948 in Osaka. He graduated from the Kanazawa College of Art in 1971 and from 1973 to 1992 was a graphic designer and high school fine art teacher. He has been a freelance artist since 1993 and is presently a Professor of Art and Design at Seian University. On the occasion of his first Tokyoarea exhibition in 1994 paintings from The Natural History of Iblard at the Pinpoint Gallery in Minami Aoyama Inoue by then a big fan of Hayao Miyazakis films invited Miyazaki to attend not expecting that the renowned director would actually show up. But Miyazaki did show up and was impressed enough to not only buy a painting Upward Draft now hanging in the staff cafeteria at Studio Ghibli but to also invite Inoue to join the art team then being assembled for Miyazakis production of Whisper of the Heart being directed by Yoshifumi Kondou. Several of Inoues Iblard paintings were used during the Miyazakidirected CGI fantasy sequence in the film in which we get to see a couple of scenes from Shizukus first novel The Story Baron Gave Me. Inoue also voiced one of the musician characters in the film hes the one that compliments Shizukus nice vocal after their impromptu performance of Country Roads.