Tatsumi

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Tatsumi
Directed by Eric Khoo
with Tetsuya Bessho, Motoko Gollent, Yoshihito Tatsumi
2011


Tatsumi’s ideal audience would be a manga reader. Yet, the movie has something to offer even to those who are new to its world.
The feature opens with a prologue-homage to the manga artist Osamu Tezuka: the hero who animated Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s desire to become an accomplished artist when he was still a teenager. From there the narrative unfolds on different levels. The narration of Tatsumi’s life is interwoven with some of his stories, as well as with Japan’s history of recovery after Second World War. Two growing trajectories are sketched: as Tatsumi finds his voice and style as an artist, Japan rebuilds its economy and society, while the characters of the stories somehow lay in between the two.
Cinematographically Tatsumi feeds into a genre which is becoming more and more distinct, placing itself next to Persepolis (2007) and Waltz with Bashir (2008). What these movies propose is a very distinct type of animation which set them aside from the smooth wonders of the most advanced Pixaresque digital animation, as well as classical Disney’s cartoons. To respect their graphic integrity, they resort to a fragmented, simplified, yet inventive animation which works as a reminder of the representational nature of the image. In this way the artist is always present: he leads you through the story by (his) hand.
In Tatsumi this is all the more compelling since it is the artist’s voice which partially narrates the story behind the images, as if he were there with you, turning the pages of his works, as well as of his life. Each level of narration has its own graphic language: simple lines and colours accompany the life of Tatsumi; brown paper and black ink the history of Japan; denser and varied hatchings the stories written by the artist along the way. The all pervasive graphic quality of the film somehow reflects the functioning of the artist’s mind, who, since a child, obsessively translated his perception of the world into drawn images.
Yet, the variety of styles does something more than translating the virtuosity of Tatsumi’s pen. Through juxtaposition, it tangibly shows how deeply graphics make – rather than illustrate – the story, setting its tone, its pace and its mood. In fact where the film fails, it succeeds at the same time: it leaves you wishing you had read the books, rather than seen their animation.
In its plot, however, the movie captures an important moment in the history of manga as a genre. With his stories, Tatsumi created a new type of manga: the gekiga. The stories featured in the movie are far away from the colourful world of monsters and superheroes that one normally associates with mangas. They depict the misery, the tragedies and the banality of normal life; their characters are so human that they sweat, they pee and they bleed. If not for a specific interest in manga, Tatsumi is worth seeing for the stories it features. They will take you into a Japan that you might not know, touching on some issues which go beyond culture, history and comics books.
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