Salute Your Shorts is
a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any
other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.
With Phil Mulloy’s films, it’s easy to see the gradual development of an artist. Even though he’d been working in the industry for years, Mulloy’s animation had a textbook level of gradual improvement that’s easy to follow from point A to B. By the time Osamu Tezuka began working in animation, he was already a widely popular manga artist and seemed to arrive fully formed. That he more or less singlehandedly invented a subgenre (IE: anime) is just one of the side effects of his genius. Mulloy has spent his career self-consciously maintaining work as an individual "artist." Tezuka, on the other hand, couldn’t help but do anything else, maintaining a superhuman output of works that ended up idiosyncratic and individual despite large amounts of outsourcing and many creative minds involved.
Regardless of his role as the progenitor of modern animation in
Japan, Tezuka still isn’t particularly well-known internationally, and
if he was it would either be for the Astro Boy television series or perhaps his epic comic biographies. Astro Boy
was, of course, an extremely important work that has been endlessly
copied and unintentionally became the first real anime. Tezuka worked
on an incredible number of other television projects through the years, but his
role was generally less of a director and more of an overarching guide.
TV earned him money, as he would himself admit, but he was too busy
managing the studio and writing his 120,000 pages of comics to be in
charge of everything.
Even in his comics, though, Tezuka’s works are extremely
cinematic; in fact this was his calling card. His works are composed
less of drawings than of still frames, shots that work in action
together and beg to be adapted—many of which have been, again and
again. He tended to work outside of daily comics, which were the
primary form when he began, and instead delved into long, sprawling
works that fit together like intricate film plots, with many characters
and storylines interweaving.
Tezuka was certainly big enough to attract both followers, who
flocked to his film-informed style, and detractors, who rebelled
against what they saw as a Westernized and Disneyfied version of the
art form. The odd thing about this is that while this is a valid
complaint of Tezuka’s more populist style, he was always an innovator,
and finding one specific style in his works is a difficult task. Astro Boy
became the first anime, but Tezuka, the father of anime himself, was
drawing differently dependent on his subjects and always kept one foot
making himself rich by pleasing the masses and another foot firmly
entrenched in more personal and experimental works.The Astonishing Work of Osamu Tezuka highlights the man's experimental films, featuring many of his odder and more heterogenous
works (though unfortunately it doesn’t give a particularly full picture
of his films in a greater sense). Even before Astro Boy truly
launched his animation career, Tezuka produced and wrote "Tales of the
Street Corner," an oddly moving work that focuses on day-to-day life in
Japan and how it ends up destroyed by war. Anthropomorphizing animals
and images on posters, it’s an intentionally more difficult work with
little story and no dialogue, instead emphasizing feelings through
music and imagery. The contrast between this and Astro Boy
couldn't be any greater, but Tezuka’s effortless character creation
makes the work as enchanting as any of the Disney works that Tezuka was
trying to emulate.
Of
course, movies like this didn’t make any actual money, but at that
point, Tezuka was rolling in the dough from his increasingly successful
manga, and was willing to support the effort regardless of how much it
would be ignored outside of the growing festival circuit. This was also
true of his other 1962 film, "Male," which is quite a bit more
idiosyncratic than "Tales of the Street Corner." The short focuses on a
Looney Toons-esque gag where events are being interpreted in the dark
by a man’s cats. The animation is both creative and, luckily for
Tezuka, cheap, due to its gimmick. "Male" takes this idea to a much
darker place than any American cartoons of the time ever would, as it’s
eventually revealed that the man has committed murder. It’s a story
about miscommunication between man and the rest of the world, with man,
as usual in Tezuka’s works, cast as the villain in front of innocent
wildlife.
"Male" looks nothing like "Tales of the Street Corner" which looks nothing like the Astro Boy
series that premiered shortly after the release of the more
experimental works and actually made Tezuka some money back on his
animation investment. While his earlier works did their best to make
both subtle and grand points about the world, Astro Boy is
ultimately a kids TV series, where artistry is second to making money
and just about every corner was cut in production on the road towards
success. Tezuka’s animated works were largely split between these two
worlds, without particularly mixing them like Walt Disney or Chuck
Jones.
Tezuka’s experimental shorts, at least on Kino’s release, are split
between his earlier works in the '60s and ones he worked on just
before his death in the '80s. While Astro Boy was
just taking off Tezuka capitalized on the sudden growth of his
animation’s success with a series of more personal, or at least
interesting, short works: "Memory," "Mermaid," "The Drop," "Genesis"
and the wide-ranging "Pictures at an Exhibition." Each of these works
continued Tezuka’s fascination with changing art styles, with homage to
just about everything he’d seen in foreign animation combined but with
his own unique approach to storytelling. Tezuka was willing to be
bluntly sexual and explicit, as well as telling stories from an almost
first-person point of view. A defining feature of his experimental
works is identification with protagonists (who feel like projections of
Tezuka), whether it’s a boy who sees a mermaid or a man who’s lost his
memory. The films feel more human than previous cartoons, wistful and
contemplative rather than gag-based.
This isn’t to say that Tezuka’s earlier shorts could be
pigeonholed, as his works were multi-faceted. "Genesis," an odd
retelling of the Bible’s first book, acts as an interesting
counterpoint to Mulloy’s "Intolerance," where similar themes are
touched upon, though here without cynicism. The longest of these works
is "Pictures at an Exhibition," which showscases the fullest extent of
Tezuka’s stylistic ambition. Using the classical Mussorgsky framing
device, the work is composed of 10 smaller shorts linked by the suite’s
"Promenade Theme" and combines journalistic observation with technical
excess. Every short is drawn in a different style to fit with an odd
gag about a type of person before they eventually crash together in the
end with a wonderland of art styles. Maybe it’s because of cultural
differences, but the writing on the film doesn’t quite work. Its
artistic ambitions are grand enough, though, that it’s still a delight.
Tezuka’s earlier films found him striving to take animation in
new places, often more personal than anyone before him, but his later
works feature a maturity that more often looks outward at the world.
"Jumping" offers the greatest example of this, where a girl (though
she’s never shown) jumps continually higher and further, observing what
happens around her from different perspectives. Composed of only one
long take, its bigger view of things encapsulates the central theme of
these later works.
In 1985 Tezuka released one more gag-intensive work, the brilliant
"Broken Down Film," which goes back to Tezuka’s childhood watching
countless beaten up old film prints and tells a story about what would
happen if characters could react to the exhibition conditions. It’s
Tezuka’s take on "Duck Amuck," where the fourth wall is not just
broken, it’s taken out back and shot. Its hero suffers through
scratches, frames incorrectly positioned, jump cuts, etc. before using
them to his advantage later on. It’s not Tezuka’s most powerful work,
but is possibly his most fun one. Any cartoon that allows speech
bubbles to be used as weapons has to be doing something right.
With the 1987 works "Push" and "Muramasa," Tezuka seemed to be
developing cynicism shortly before his death, with each taking a dark
look at humanity and the violence and debris we’re wreaking upon the
world. Given, as always, new art styles, the two films are both
affecting and uncharacteristically dark. Tezuka’s unfinished
masterpiece "Legend of the Forest" combines the darker themes and
higher stakes of his later works with the playfulness that’s more
characteristic of his earlier ones.
Any fan of Fantasia should be delighted by "Legend of the
Forrest," which is a large-scale homage to that work done beautifully
by another master of the form. Set to Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony,
even characters from Disney’s musical are woven into its tapestry. But
the work’s true brilliance comes through in the way it combines its
formal elements with its story. "Legend of the Forrest" is an homage
not just to Fantasia, but to animation in general and tells its own
story through the history of animation. Represented by a squirrel and
his development, the movie begins by animating in the style of Emile
Cohl before moving through Disney, the Fleischers, Terrytoons, Warner
Bros., and even television-style limited animation. The squirrel fights
back for his homeland, which is being destroyed to make way for
industry, but is incapable of stopping progress from moving forward.
The story picks up again with the fourth movement, the
squirrel now long gone and an all-out war going on between the full
animation (24 frames/second with every cell hand-drawn) of the forest
and limited animation (12 frames/second with repeated sequences) of the
factories. It’s a heartfelt story and has clearly had a large effect on
Hayao Miyazaki, whose own works owe a lot to Tezuka. But the film is
also given a more subtle, personal undercurrent with Tezuka’s own
history. Tezuka was himself one of the pioneers of limited animation,
with desire for economical television animation getting the better of
his artistry and he was behind the introduction of double-animating
frames and many other tricks and shortcuts that became standards of
low-budget anime. Tezuka is criticizing his own financial an artistic
success and yet also fighting to give it a legitimate place within
animation history.
Unfortunately, Tezuka only completed these first and last
movements of his story before his death. Tezuka’s son Macoto Tezuka,
himself a well-respected director, is purported to be working on
finishing the middle movements, though whether this will actually
happen no one seems to know. Tezuka’s completed portions and the many other
works he produced are enough of a legacy to place him in the medium’s
hall of fame, though we would still be pretty thrilled if the film was
actually completed.