Tatsumi

A visually stunning animated portrait of the Japanese manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi. As a 12-year-old, Tatsumi begins to draw. With an absent father and a sick brother, he works like mad to get his manga printed and earn some money for his poor family. Without hope for the future, he lives in the realm of his imagination until he is finally artistically acknowledged for his work a few decades later. In the 1950s he develops the gekiga-style of Japanese comic art, prints his artistic manifesto on 150 postcards and sends it to the newspapers. Directly translated, gekiga means "dramatic pictures". Unlike ordinary manga largely aimed at children and young people at the time, gekiga allowed a more experimental design.

Eric Khoo’s new animation Tatsumi follows the artist’s life as he himself depicted it in his manga memoirs. Fragments based on five of Tatsumi’s stories are intertwined with the biographic material. Khoo’s visual expression stays true to Tatsumi’s dark and twisted drawing style, and the five stories provide unique insight into the great world of the artist. At the same time, the biographical approach highlights the life of one of the most important mangaka in modern Japanese history. mft

Special screening of Tatsumi at the Deichmanske Library on Grünerløkka Saturday October 8 at 1 pm. Director Eric Khoo will be present at the screening and join a panel conversation with Hans Ivar Stordahl.