Review No.98:Tatsumi

It's quite interesting sometimes to watch a film about a world in which you know very little and so far the best example has come in the form of classic music documentary In Search of Haydn however the next film on the list comes fairly close .Tatsumi is a biographical cartoon of the life of renowned Manga artist and writer Yoshihiro Tatsumi who started his work in post-war Japan and moved his artwork into a different direction creating the gekiga genre of comcs which were strictly for adults. We saw parts of his life from an uneasy childhood with a disabled brother to a father who disapproved of his work and onto going to live in the city and having troublesome relationships with women. These sections are all drawn in colour however the film is also interspersed with five of Tatsumi's most famous stories which are used to illustrate his life most of them being presented in some sort of monochrome fashion. The first is 'Hell' telling the story of a war photographer working during the dropping of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb whose image of a mother and child becomes world famous until he realises that he may have got things wrong. Then there was two stories about the mundane nature of life 'Beloved Monkey' told of a factory worker who lost his arm while 'Just a Man' was about a manager reaching retirement age realising he'd done little with his life. 'Occupied' was the most autobiographical of the comics as it followed a children's comic book artist who became entranced with adult images namely crudely drawn pictures of women on toilet walls. The artist then brings us up to the present with 'Goodbye' the only one of these cartoons not drawn in the present before the final reel in which we leave the cartoon world and we see the only live action piece of the film namely the artist smiling back at us.

I've seen some odd films while conducting this project namely The Nine Muses and Patience After Sebald with Tatsumi seemingly fitting in with this bunch of niche works however I found it was more than that. While not on the level of say Waltz with Bashir or Persepolis in terms of autobiographical animations films I think this is a pretty special tribute to Tatsumi that his life story has been turned into one of his own cartoons. I'm not sure if it's a life that warrants its own film and apart from the odd family squabble plus his realisations that his comics were more suited for adults most of it passes with little incident. As far as the five stories were concerned they were all fairly bleak and I have to I struggled to watch some of them however of them 'Hell' was certainly the most shocking and involving although my personal favourite was 'Occupied'. I thought the idea to combine Tatsumi's stories with biography was an intriguing one and one that did work however at times I found my interest in both of them lapsing a bit as things got more and more dark.

Verdict: An uneven comibnation of real-life and comic book stories this film is sometimes engaging and other times needlessly bleak so far that reason I'll give it a just above average 6.5/10