Message from lclark

[Anonymous]

The front page of the LA Times's Calendar section for June 6, 2007 features an article, "Anime instinct," devoted to Osamu Tezuka, the Japanese artist who was the founding father of both manga and anime, quite a disitinction. I was not aware of Tezuka and his work before reading the article. Of course I am not a major fan of manga or anime. Aside from two films by Hayao Miyazaki that I admire greatly (Princess Mononoke and Swept Away), most anime films I have seen leave me unimpressed. Akira and Cowboy Beebop, two favorably-reviewed anime films (the latter a series for Japanese television), seem to me clever but derivative variations on American biker and cop movies. In most non-Miyazaki anime, and in all those manga books students keep lending me, from the blood-and-sex Battle Royale series to the teenage-girl stories peopled with dreamy underwear-model heroes, what I find sadly missing are the visual beauty and emotional power that infuse the classic Japanese films of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Ichikawa and Kobayashi. That having been said, however, I still find it astonishing that an artist as important to manga and anime as Walt Disney was to classic American animation should be so little-known in the west. (Further reading in the article gives rise to the disturbing speculation that Tezuka's comparative anonymity in the west may well have a lot to do with Disney's dubious heirs, especially creative-coporate predators Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg.)

The San Francisco Asian Art Museum is trying to increase Tezuka's name-recognition and an awareness among American manga and anime fans of the legacy of this pioneering Japanese artist by means of a major exhibition, "Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga," on display through September 9. Apparently Tezuka, who died in 1989 at the relatively young age of 61 (perhaps from overwork), had been approached decades ago about the possiblity of an exhibition of his original manga panels but rejected the idea, saying that he would produce new artworks for such an exhibition but that his original working panels, "cut and glued and covered in correction fluid," were not suitable for presentation at an art museum. But the prolific Tezuka, busy with other projects, never found time to create new artworks for the proposed exhibition, and the original working panels are now on display in San Francisco (the only US stop for this major international tour which originated not in Japan but the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia) The exhibition does not generate the typical feel-good atmosphere one might expect from a display of comic-book panels. "This is a very sad exhibit," according to Australian artist Philip Brophy, the show's curator. "There is not a lot of fun stuff." Since one of Tezuka's earlier projects was a manga version of Crime and Punishment, it is easy to imagine just how "unfun" the exhibition might be. Of course Tezuka's life, along with that of his entire generation in Japan, was shaped by catastrophic events. Born in 1928, he grew into young adulthood in the grim environment of post-Hiroshima, American-occupied Japan. His first hugely successful anime character was Astro Boy, a human derivative of Mickey Mouse with an upswept hairdo that is a visual homage to the ears of the iconic rodent. Astro Boy's name in Japanese, however, is Mighty Atom, and that lets us see the dark side of Tezuka, an ardent pacifist who used science-fiction to protest all forms of warfare, and especially nuclear warfare, as did the creators of the Godzilla (or Gojira) movies.

His other immensely successful manga character was Kimba the White Lion, and thereby hangs a tale (no pun intended). Kimba's epithet in Japanese is Jungle King. Both Kimba and Astro Boy became stars of popular anime for Japanese television, later imported by American television producers, who demanded cuts in certain sequences because they felt the violence would disturb American viewers' delicate sensibilities (and also, perhaps, collective American guilt). It does not take much imagination to see that Kimba the Jungle King is clearly the prototype for Disney's The Lion King. The good people at Disney deny this imputation vigorously, of course, according to the article. But surely if an American comic-book artist had created Kimba, any show-business attorney worth his or her salt would have slapped the Mouse House with a substantial copyright-infringement suit and most likely won a sizeable out-of-court settlement for the aggrieved artist. Tezuka apparently never attempted litigation, no doubt too busy with producing art that was not only commercially viable but deeply personal as well. Manga became widely populr in Japan in the late 1940s, according to the article, because it was inexpensive to publish and purchase. But the popularity of this dark art form almost certainly reflected the deprivation, humiliation and deeply-suppressed anger of postwar American-occupied Japan. The fact that it has now become an international genre, especially popular with American teenagers, also reflects the different but no less dark character of our own times.

Leigh Clark
Monroe High School[Edit by="lclark on May 25, 9:54:02 PM"][/Edit]