[TATSUMI is now available on home video.]
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
For a sister site of this blog I was doing Blu-Ray reviews of Japanese "anime," but they haven't been running my material lately. I think it's because the webmaster moved to Austin to take a job-of-the-kind-they-don't-have-in-Cleveland (in other words...a job). And being an Austinite, he's now too cool to deal with the likes of me now.
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
For a sister site of this blog I was doing Blu-Ray reviews of Japanese "anime," but they haven't been running my material lately. I think it's because the webmaster moved to Austin to take a job-of-the-kind-they-don't-have-in-Cleveland (in other words...a job). And being an Austinite, he's now too cool to deal with the likes of me now.
(Hey, I
understand, no problem. If our positions were reversed I'd do the same. Yes,
call me `Tex' Cassady; I helped co-found the SXSW Festival. I've lived in this
beautiful state capital for ages; remember my funny cameo in SLACKER? No, never
heard of Cleveland. Isn't it that awful town in Iowa that some ballplayer named Jim
LeBron left behind?)
So
because I'm flatlining in my anime-reviewing non-career, I won't get to
recommend to the "otaku" fandom the Asian animated import TATSUMI.
Which will be okay by those Shinjuku-schoolgirl-fetishing weirdos doing cosplay;
this movie has as much to do with that universe as Superman or Spider-Man does
with AMERICAN SPLENDOR. AMERICAN
SPLENDOR is a fine comparison, fact. This 2011 feature does for Yoshihiro
Tatsumi what the acclaimed American film did for the late Harvey Pekar -
although animation dominates here far more than does brief live action.
Tatsumi
is a significant writer-illustrator of Japanese "manga," or comics who started out as a kid, like so many
Nippon young boys did, drawing in imitation of "Astro Boy" creator and
"god of manga" Osamu Tezuka. But, beginning in the late 1950s,
Tatsumi turned from fantasy and childish material and created a raw, realistic
graphic-novel genre he called "gekiga," that might be compared (at
least for its taboo-breaking impact) to underground "comix" in the West.
Tatsumi's
personal history is rendered here in stark, mostly monochrome animation - not remotely the style of commercial anime - as a
struggling artist (though proclaimed a manga prodigy and approved by the
Tezuka, his family still suffered financially). His autobiography - drawn, to
coin a term, from his 2009 graphic memoir A Drifting Life - is here interlaced
with short cartoon narratives based on five of his gekiga he said
he created in the 1970s, as a caustic reaction to a Japanese economic boom that
never seemed to trickle down to the lower classes he knew so well.
The
stories-within-the-story depict desperate and doubting postwar Japanese
embroiled in dire dilemmas. There's a photographer revered for his
atom-bomb-casualty snapshot who discovers his image was not what the world
thinks it is. There's an artist obsessed with
pornographic graffiti. There's a jaded prostitute being romanced by an
American serviceman, while her drunken war-vet father mooches off her. If it
were rated by the MPAA, I tell you, this film might receive an NC-17, as much
for the gut-punch themes as sex, brutality and nudity. Tatsumi claims that the great
Tezuka fell down a flight of stairs and gave the excuse that he got distracted
by being worked up in a state after reading the gekiga.
Yoshihiro
Tatsumi, cynical though he is, seems to have made it through Japan's cycle of
economic boom-bust-radiation poisoning with a decent marriage, nice family and
strong peer-recognition in the graphic-lit scene, much like Harvey Pekar (or
Robert Crumb, another genre relation). I don't doubt he wishes he could have
a bit of that Pokemon or Yu-gi-OH! money to get him through the tough times,
however. But if doesn't have TokyoPop Publishing putting his stuff out there on
a mass basis, along with action figures, he's got TATSUMI now, to represent his
singular vision to the western world. This should'a-been Austinite says check it out. (3 1/2 out of 4 stars)
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