Tatsumi

Filmmaker Eric Khoo's biographical profile is an animated tribute to Tatsumi, a significant writer-illustrator of Japanese manga who, beginning in the late 1950s, turned away from fantasy and child-oriented material to create a raw, realistic graphic-novel genre he called "gekiga," which might be compared (at least for its taboo-breaking impact) to underground "comix" in the West. In 2009, Tatsumi wrote and illustrated his own memoir, A Drifting Life. Tatsumi's personal history as a struggling artist (although proclaimed a manga prodigy and approved by the legendary Osamu Tezuka, his family still suffered financially) is interlaced with cartoons based on five of his gekiga created in the 1970s as a caustic reaction to a Japanese economic boom that never seemed to benefit the lower classes. The stories-within-the-story depict (almost always in monochrome palette) desperate and doubting postwar Japanese individuals embroiled in dire dilemmas ranging from murder to pornography to prostitution. A bold, provocative film featuring graphic animated sex, nudity, and violence, this is recommended for both foreign film and art-oriented collections. (C. Cassady)