Results tagged “Osamu Tezuka”

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When I heard work had started on live-action film version of Osamu Tezuka’s MW — easily the bleakest, most nihilistic work ever produced by a man not conventionally known for his dark side — I was skeptical. How were they going to do justice to a story that features an antihero so repellent that discovering he engages in bestiality is one of the lesser shocks we get pummeled with?

They haven’t. The movie is a stripped-down rounding of the bases in Tezuka’s graphic novel, where a lot of details have been condensed or omitted entirely in favor of doing justice to the angry core of the story. This has not been a catastrophic decision, because the movie they made from those details isn’t a bad one. It looks great, it’s entertaining to watch, and it contains just enough of the troubling elements of the original to be worth it. It’s just that, as with all such adaptations, it’s impossible to not compare it detail-for-detail with the original.

Bits and pieces from this week's AICN Anime, including a couple of shout-outs to yours truly (thank you, Mr. Green).

Somerset, New Jersey's AnimeNext will host Kenji Kamiyama, director of Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex and the to be released by FUNimation Eden of the East ... Black Lagoon creator Rei Hiroe (also known as doujinshi artist Tex-Mex) will be at Anime Expo for the premiere of the new anime OVA Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail.

See the trailer for the latter here. Kamiyama is also responsible for the excellent TV adaptation of Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit.

Catsuka reports Studio 4°C has developed a short adaptation of Masamune Shirow's battle of religions, Orion to be shown at the Short Shorts Film Festival in Tokyo this June. Batman: Gotham Knight's Yasuhiro Aoki directed the 3D work.

Orion (see the link above for a review) was not one of my favorite of Shirow's works, but it at the very least stands out by dint of being so impossible to follow and insanely over-designed that you can't help but marvel at it.

Kinji Fukasaku's son, and director of Battle Royale II will be supervising a 3D converted re-release of original Battle Royale movie.

... get that man away from the camera now.

A UK DVD of live action Sleeping Bride has been released Synopsis: From Osamu Tezuka, godfather of manga, and Hideo Nakata, godfather of J-horror, comes this quirky romance between a boy and the comatose girl with whom he falls in love.

Tezuka + Nakata = sold. Any chance of a US release?

DC Comics has announced that it will be shutting down its CMX manga division

Part of me wants to tag that #andnothingofvaluewaslost, but I know better. CMX had some good titles in the middle of a great deal of dross, although I hope with them out of the picture the more dedicated players like Dark Horse and Del Rey will step up that much more.

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This is the last volume of Black Jack, the manga. It is also not the last volume of Black Jack, the manga. Not the last volume that Vertical, Inc. will be publishing in English; and not the last of such stories that was originally published in Japan, either.

It’s complicated. So much so that at the end of the volume, the editors have to step in and explain why there will be more Black Jack even though the final story does feel very much like a sign-off: there was such a clamor for more Black Jack that Tezuka filled orders for more stories in the series, on and off, for half a decade after it was officially shuttered. To that end there are several more volumes to come, which explains why the ending we get is a non-ending — and why it might be best to start there and work my way back through the book.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

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There are two ways to talk about Astro-Boy, each a little incomplete, so I must speak of both. Way #1 is as an Osamu Tezuka fan, seeing his work adapted for the big screen for a primarily English-speaking audience. Way #2 is to just see it as something created for and marketed to younger viewers. The first way, for me, lies disappointment. The second way … well, it’s a little harder to say since I’m not seven anymore.

And yet I can see kids in the single digits enjoying this immensely, while their parents at least don’t feel like they need to nap with their eyes open. It has energy and spirit and its heart in the right place, although I know I’m forever doomed to see it as a gateway to the main event: the original comics, and of course everything else Tezuka did. It’s not like we could expect them to make Ode to Kirihito, but it’s also not like choosing Astro-Boy means they settled for lesser source material.

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The timing of this book could not be more, well, timely. I spent most of last week, from the Sunday of the 7th through the following Sunday, nursemaiding my missus and her broken ankle. Despite that, she was determined to make as much use as possible of her three remaining limbs even if she ended up breaking them, too. Her nerve (the psychic kind) and determination were enough at one point to make me blurt out: “Black Jack would have loved you as a patient.”

I had to explain that one to her.

Some of you in the back of the class already know this, I’m sure. I shall repeat myself, as it bears repeating. What Black Jack loves more than almost anything else (save maybe suitcases fulla yen bills) is a patient who meets him halfway — someone whose will to live and determination to be healed is as strong as his own will to save their sorry ass. It’s something common to many people I’ve known who stand out so far in their field or are so far at the top of their respective game that they don’t feel like there’s anyone else around. When you have someone, anyone sharing your slice of stratosphere, however fleetingly, you feel that much less like an aberration and a … well, a freak.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

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So why, you might ask, am I now reviewing volume 8 of Black Jack when I was only just reviewing volume 9? Happenstance, mostly. Somehow I ended up missing volume 7 in a mail mix-up, although when that comes in I’ll be sure to fill in the gap. For now, I’m walking backwards.

And as I did with 9, I’ll say the most important part first: This is one of the better volumes in the series. That doesn’t come from the cleverness of the conundrums Black Jack gets to untangle, or because he’s extra-dexterous in the operating room this time around (because, when is he ever not like that?). The reason the better stories in Black Jack are the better stories is because they serve all the more to underscore how Black Jack stands apart from the world he’s torn between serving and exploiting.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

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I’ll put this part behind me right away. As Black Jacks go, volume 9 is only fair. That makes it an okay part of a great whole — but that doesn’t dilute the quality of the whole. It simply makes the good parts of this series all the more worthy.

It also doesn’t mean volume 9 should be ignored. In fact, reading it compelled more thought about the series and the way I’ve approached manga in translation than most anything I’ve laid eyes on in months. The reason? This is the first volume of BJ I’ve read in Japanese long before the English version ever landed on my doorstep.

I hadn’t planned to do it that way. Insights are never planned. Late last year, in New York City’s Book-Off, I ran across a used copy of the untranslated volume 9 for the whopping price of $1. I needed no persuasion. At that price, any book would have been worth it; this one, doubly so. I slapped down my credit card, ran home, and that night read it cover-to-cover with my electronic kanji dictionary close at hand. But somehow I’d grown so used to Black Jack as a translated work that I couldn’t help but feel I’d only read half the book — that the other half was Vertical’s own yet-to-be-released edition, which now sits to my left as I type this.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

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Somehow in between drawing enough manga to fill an entire bookshelf — and that’s no figure of speech — Osamu Tezuka also found the time to create animated films. What’s probably most surprising to learn is that they were not adaptations of his manga work; he left that job to other people. On his own, he created animated work that was as eclectic and experimental as the manga he created for his own left-field magazine COM. The man was large; he contained multitudes.

Few people outside of Japan or the film-festival circuit have ever seen those films, but Tezuka has become a more familiar name in English over the past decade, and so there’s now a market for a DVD anthology of that work. The Astonishing Work of Tezuka Osamu (last name first in the title, as per Japan’s naming conventions) compiles thirteen of Tezuka’s short animated productions (total time, two and a half hours) along with a half-hour interview with Tezuka itself. Even fans of Tezuka’s work in all its breadth might not recognize most of this as his product if his name wasn’t on it.

The bad news: Vertical's excellent edition of Osamu Tezuka's MW is now out of print. My rave about it is here, and I still smile at this part:

... [in] those last couple of pages, where having already yanked the rug out from under us not merely once but several times, Tezuka finally just tears out the floor itself.

Now the good news: Vertica'ls reissuing it in softcover early next year. Go get it if you missed it the first time.

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They called Osamu Tezuka the God-Emperor of Manga for a reason: he produced a whole bookshelf's full of work in his lifetime, and had as much impact on the art of comics as any one man has had in any country. That said, it's still possible to derive a mediocre product from his work (much as Romeo and Juliet was turned into a screeching, unwatchable mess by Baz Luhrmann).

Jungle Emperor Leo was adapted from one of Tezuka's comics, and while a great deal of his spirit is present in it, it doesn't quite work. Not nearly as well as the outstanding Metropolis, certainly, which brought us a great many sights unseen and visions undreamed of. The vision of Leo is slightly more mundane — animals and men conflicting in the jungle — and it's also hamstrung by storytelling problems that dilute a great deal of what it could have been.

AICN Anime gave me a shout-out for my piece about the very, very bad Black Jack remake manga. (Search on "Serdar") and you'll find it on that page. Thanks, Scott!

Truth in advertising.

Ever get the feeling you’d been cheated?

There’s a clutch of words that when uttered in the presence of fans can elicit near-homicidal reactions. One of them is censorship: if there’s even the suggestion that a title of theirs has been “cleaned up” (shilling for dumbed down) for its domestic release, they’ll blow out the windows. Case in point: the manga version of Tenjho Tenge, which tanked in sales once word got out it had been bowdlerized to keep it from going into “mature audiences” shrinkwrap. To be honest, the Comstockery in question wasn’t all that bad, but it was the principle of the thing that ticked people off, and rightly so. Why pay for what you know to be damaged goods?

But there’s another word also capable of unleashing whole hectares of fan-wrath, depending on the context and the circumstances. That word is remake, and in a way it’s even more problematic a word than censorship because it cuts both ways. It isn’t inherently evil. Sometimes a remake can revitalize a dated or flawed piece of material, and give it a whole new gloss. The current remake of Evangelion might fit into this category, depending on your level of attachment to the original (and that deserves to be an essay unto itself).

And sometimes a remake is just a really bad idea. Such as, for instance, taking the best of Osamu Tezuka’s original Black Jack manga and having a new artist redraw them.

I could not have made this up if I wanted to.

Roger Ebert's Journal: Archives

"The Hurt Locker" represents a return to strong, exciting narrative. Here is a film about a bomb disposal expert that depends on character, dialogue and situation to develop almost unbearable suspense. It contains explosions, but only a few, and it is not about explosions, but about hoping that none will happen. That sense of hope is crucial. When we merely want to see stuff blowed up real good in a movie, that means the movie contains no one we give a damn about.

The first ten minutes of the film are online as well — linked from the article above — and if they don't make you contemplate buying a ticket, something is terribly wrong.

Something that came to mind as I was reading this: a parallel between the protagonist of Locker and Tezuka's Black Jack. Both seem to thrive on risk, albeit in different ways. Black Jack throws himself at one impossible case after another, convinced of his ability to find a cure or bring a patient back from the brink of death. Most of the time, he's right. Sometimes he's wrong, and when that happens it hits him like someone clubbed his kidneys with a cricket bat. The fun's over.

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In a fight between you and the world, bet on the world.
— Attributed to Franz Kafka

Except that some people like that sort of thing. They get a charge out of bucking the odds — the worse the odds, the bigger the thrill. They’re the embodiment of that Adidas ad tagline Impossible Is Nothing, and it doesn’t matter if the endeavor in question is soccer, mountain-climbing, chess, kickboxing or the unlicensed practice of medicine. You see where this is going.

Truth be told, it’s not just the fact that Black Jack is a risk-taker. It’s that he’s beaten these odds before, can do it again, and doesn’t like people telling him otherwise. Through volume six of Black Jack he faces one medical Iron Man triathlon after another, from brain transplants to brain tumors — but the real reason he flings himself so heedlessly at such outrageous jobs is to stand in stark contrast to everyone who settles for having no hope. His biggest resentments are reserved not for those who want to stick him in prison and make sure he never practices again, but for quitters and cop-outs of all stripes … whether they’re rival doctors or his own patients.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

Or file this under "How'd I Miss This?" if you will. Another of Osamu Tezuka's creations, Swallowing the Earth, is coming out Stateside thanks to Digital Manga. I'd expected Vertical, Inc. to pick this one up — they've become a one-stop shop for all things Tezuka, anyway — but as long as it's done well and has a good translator at the helm (Camellia, is this one of yours?) I'll be happy.

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There are moments when volume 5 of Black Jack is unbelievably disappointing. There are also as many moments, if not more so, when it is elating and exciting and challenging. In short, when it is the Black Jack — and the Osamu Tezuka — that we have come to expect and savor. It’s just that this time your mileage will vary. A lot.

It’s moments like this when I see why the original Viz edition of Black Jack — even if it was only two volumes — opted for the greatest-hits-anthology approach. Not everything from a person’s lifetime output is going to be equally good, and that applied to Tezuka as well. But Vertical, Inc. has pledged to stick with the warts-and-all approach to publishing Black Jack in English, all seventeen-something volumes of it. Still, one of the benefits of that level of completism is seeing how even Tezuka’s worst material was still at least interesting

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

With Titles Like ‘Planet 51,’ Computer-Animated Film Draws Smaller Players - NYTimes.com

Computer animation, once one of the most isolated corners of Hollywood, is rapidly becoming one of the most crowded. With the cost of computer animation coming down because of advances in technology and soaring box office receipts for family films, a broad range of new animation players are entering the multiplex.

The new CGI Astro-Boy gets a nod here, along with a picture. I can't wait for that one.

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The more I read of Pluto, the less averse I am to the idea of remakes. Or, rather, of an artist of high caliber having his work revisited by another artist in the same stratosphere. Osamu Tezuka is about as up-there as manga artists get, and Naoki Urasawa has been racing up the rungs of the same ladder for some time now. Pluto is Urasawa’s reworking of one of Tezuka’s best-loved stories from Astro-Boy (aka Tetsuwan Atomu), and the best thing I can say about it is that it does not for one moment feel like a “remake”. It stands alone.

The third volume is a frenzy of twofold plotting and character development, with a fair amount of page time occupied by Uran, Atom’s sister. Just as Atom himself stepped into the picture at the end of volume 1, Uran (short for Uranium, mayhaps?) popped in at the end of volume 2 — just in time to calm down a batch of escaped zoo animals. She’s as cheerfully blithe as Atom is focused and serious, but maybe that’s just her way of dealing with her peculiar sensitivity towards things around her. She’s the sonar to Atom’s radar: he can sniff out a robot that looks like a human, and she can sense disturbances in the Force, sorta-kinda, that bespeak of bad tidings for both machines and men.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

A new trailer is up for the CGI Astro Boy movie. Look fast for the cameo of Osamu Tezuka (sort of)!

AICN Anime made mention of the Eisner Awards for 2008, with some manga-themed material:

Best U.S. Edition of International Material — Japan
Cat Eyed Boy, by Kazuo Umezu (Viz)
Dororo, by Osamu Tezuka (Vertical)
Naoki Urasawa’s Monster, by Naoki Urasawa (Viz)
The Quest for the Missing Girl, by Jiro Taniguchi (Fanfare/Ponent Mon)
Solanin, by Inio Asano (Viz)

The one that people seem to be most hung up on is Cat-Eyed Boy, possibly because it's one of those titles people were not all that fond of to begin with. I know it's a "roots" title, but that doesn't mean it'll automatically garner an audience — but the award is about the quality of the adaptation and isn't strictly about the underlying material.

One could argue that it would be better to give recognition to better titles overall, but then you get into the more difficult question of what the award category is really for. I like the fact that at least one of the Tezuka / Vertical reissues made it to the list, since just having his stuff in English at all is a blessing.

I plan to check out Cat-Eyed Boy at some point; for all I know the conventional wisdom about it could be completely wrong.