Review: Tatsumi

In his epic five hundred plus page manga autobiography A Drifting Life , Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the godfather of alternative manga(*1), talked about the profound influence cinema had on the stories he came to create, so it seems appropriate that his life and his stories should be made into an animated film.

Directed by lifelong manga and indeed Tatsumi fan Eric Khoo, the film treats the comic text, and the visual style of Tatsumi, as sacred, and the animators have gone to great lengths to make you aware that these animations are based first and foremost on ink drawings done on paper. Everything from the crosshatching, the monochrome shading, and he dotted printing effects of his first full length work Black Blizzard, are all lovingly recreated here. Not only this but the animation is deliberately rough in places, as Khoo wanted to be as faithful to the experience of reading these stories on the page as possible, which is why the movements and expressions are perhaps much more limited then your average animation, to good effect.

While colour is added to the events that happen in Tatsumi's real life, his fictional stories that are interspersed within the overall narrative are distinguished through the recreation of their colour schemes. So we get a mixture of moody purples and yellows, sepia tones, and black and whites. The general feel of these stories I could describe as being the manga equivalent of film noir. Some of the stories even incorporate deliberate cracks of age and haze around the images to add to the atmosphere.

The visual mood of course perfectly mirrors the overarching sense of doom in the stories, and like in film noir we are presented with the seedy underbelly of a supposedly affluent society. Like the 1950's crime comics we are treated to sordid sex and perversions, violence, and an easy escape at the bottom of a bottle. But one thing that Tatsumi has over those EC artists and writers is a heightened level of intelligence.

His plots have clever little twists that seem surreal but that also make perfect sense. He really seems to get at the absurdity of life and maybe it would be hyperbole to liken him to existentialist writers such as Sartre, Knut Hamsun, Jean Genet, etc. Even though his stories are short and sharp (and quite often bitter) on the screen they come across as having qualities of merit, this is indeed literature (in hushed tones).

These stories were formed out of a personal bitterness that Tatsumi himself reflects on in the film (it his own voice that narrates the events of his life). Post-War Japan finally brought itself out of hardship and started to experience economic growth, a growth that Tatsumi felt personally that he and thousand others like him, were not entitled to. Tatsumi tells us that he 'vomited out' these frustrations in his stories. Bleak allegorical tales about the dull thud of progress and modernity in an increasingly overpopulated world where no one communicates face to face must seem pretty prophetic when we look back on them now. But these were written and drawn mostly in the seventies!

The additional layer of sound is also a very important one. In the story Beloved Monkey, we are immersed in the maddening noise of the factory, we feel it thudding around us even as our hero leaves the factory out onto the sickeningly overcrowded streets of Tokyo. The moronic and slightly idiotic voice of the American G.I in 'Goodbye', all these details suspend our disbelief that this 2D world of paper figures is anything less than real life.

The one thing this film could not do sadly was capture the great width and breadth of Tatsumi'sautobiography, but on reflection I realised this was not such a bad thing after all. I thought originally that this film showed a rare example of the limitations of animation but I think I was probably suffering from the old 'read the book before I saw the film' tunnel vision. I wasdisappointed by the omitting of huge chunks of his life story (although starting with the books ending, and the death of Sensie Tezuka, was a nice touch) but realised considering the pacing of this film was a tad on the slow side at times, this mammoth tale was probably best kept between the pages of a book. With 'A Drifting Life' you could dip in and out whenever you liked, and it was easy to pick up. At around about two hours in length, putting anything else in might have stretched it to bursting, and certainly a film consisting only of his life events might have been a bit boring. Intersecting his fiction into the film became a key device in the plot anyway, by helping to explain a lot of Tatsumi's own mentality when it came to life and manga.

Tatsumi is a master storyteller, a master of his craft, and upon reflection Eric Khoo has done him proud and hopefully opened up a whole new audience to his work.

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(*1) Or as he and his colleagues came to christen it 'gekiga' (meaning 'dramatic pictures')

Book cover of the week

When I think about what makes a great book cover, I often like to think of the package as a whole: how it feels in your hand, the quality of the paper, how convenient it is to carry around(*1), the smell, all the kind of things that make me wonder why I still haven't won Most Eligible Bachelor award five years in a row.

Therefore manga therefore has always caused a bit of a knee jerk prejudice to surface in me. The manga section of bookstores like Waterstones are often packed full of multiple volumes of a pulpy throwaway quality with huge Japanese text on the front and characters that resemble something off Drag

onball Z or Streetfighter that tend to make my bad taste monitor go off the chart.

It is always a relief then to see this kind of material handled well. My feeling about formats means I have always had a preference for the hard or paperback graphic novel over the comic book. There are exceptions to the rule of course, if something good is done with the design, and the paper is of good quality. But generally I like comics

to be treated as books, as something worthwhile, not to be thrown away, an object of value and quality.

Certain publishers have taken this approach both to graphic novels and to manga. Drawn and quarterly did this with Yoshihiro Tatsumi's autobiogra

phical tome A Drifting life and some of the reprints of Tezuka's more adult/alternative looking work is pretty nice. In fact most 'gekiga'(*2) reprints are treated with respect to match their content.

Penguin aren't a publisher that are first and forthright known for publishing graphic novels but the ones that they have published (amongst them Ma

us, a collection of comics from Raw magazine, some great work from Indian comic artist Sarnath Namerjee) are of high quality. I suppose it helps that as a company Penguin have a history of fantastic design behind them and they known how to best to treat a book.

The 14th Dalai Lama, a manga biography by Tetsu Saiwai is certainly no exception. The design is simple yet effective, from the slightly raised and elegant text to the limited palette of colours and the sparing details on the back and the spine. This book, despite the very typical manga visual style contained within(*3), demands to be taken seriously. The way in which the acknowledgements, author bio, and bibliography are laid out within the book give the story a scholarly and authentic grounding. It also reminds me in its thinness and design of another line of books that Penguin recently designed of slightly obscure eastern European modern fiction and essays such as War of the newts by Karel Capek and The Elephant by Slawomir Mrozek, although the designers were slightly more inventive and witty with these covers.

And sadly I note, it's one of those books that feels great to hold (yes I do need to get out more)

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(*1)Although this isn't a given, some of the nicest looking graphic novels (i.e Craig Thompson's Habibi) could be used to kill a man

(*2) Meaning 'dramatic pictures' a termed used to distinguish itself from regular manga)

(*3) It makes effective use of the unusual juxtaposition of slightly slapstick and hyperbole emotions and Manga iconography with a serious underlying plot such as in the classic true story of Hiroshima, Barefoot Gen by

Comic classics: Barefoot Gen-Keiji Nakazawa

If you have certain prejudices towards manga like I used to have this book should turn that all around. OK so a lot of manga is kiddie-fare dominated with big eyes and generic cutesy or ultra violent sleekness, and they do have an uncomfortable fixation with prepubescent girls and giant penis tentacles, but scratch under the surface and you'll find some works that manage to pull off subtlety and moments of almost cinematic brilliance. Barefoot Gen the majority of the times isn't one of those manga, but it still works. It is precisely the juxtaposition of Laurel and Hardyesque slapstick violence and general over the top gestures against the absolute senseless horror that is going on that makes this graphic novel so effecting. In fact I can say this is the only graphic novel that has caused quite a profound emotional response from me. The story is the autobiographical tale of the artists survival of the Hiroshima bombing, the events leading up to it, and the events that followed. Like most mangas this book was serialised into a multitude of volumes (I think ten in total) but it is the first volume concerning events leading up to, just after, and during the bombing which I am looking at here. The start of the book is mostly concerned with Keiji's families struggles to have enough food to survive, a struggle which is constantly made worse by their fellow Japanese. The reason for their families ill treatment is that their father is a pacifist and outspoken in his opposition to the war, which means that the family are marked as traitors and used as scapegoats by the local police force and opportunistic neighbours. The families eldest son goes off to join the navy to distance himself from his 'traitor' father but soon realises firsthand the madness and the base hypocrisies of war, and especially of the behaviour of those in roles of higher command. Throughout the book it is Keiji and his younger brothers good will love for their family and charitable nature (even though they themselves are so often without food) that adds a real warmth and humanity to this unique and compelling story. All of this makes the impact of the books ending all the more intense. After the bombing Keiji comments that the victims 'look like monsters' and is this exactly how they look. With skin dripping from their bodies and hollowed out eyes, they do look like something from early EC horror comics, thus cementing home the unbelievability and horror of this real life event. Keiji Nakazawa wrote this book as a strong and outspoken anti-war, and anti-nuclear weapon statement and in 1976 a group of Japanese and non-Japanese people formed Project Gen in order to translate his work around the world and spread its message. This book remains as powerful and relevant today as it was when it was first published.

For a great little article about how to get over your Mangaphobia click here.