snarp | Entries tagged with a: tezuka osamu

I was looking at the animated movies meme. I am a failure as a nerd; I've only seen about 10% of this stuff. I haven't even seen all the classic Disney. Yet somehow, I have watched everything Ralph Bakshi ever made. This is how you know Mom raised us wrong.

I saw Unico and the Island of Magic, plus a few shorter Unico cartoons, when I was pretty tiny, and as Tezuka's stuff did for a lot of people, it permanently altered my idea of how stories ought to be told. I realized a couple of years ago that, when I read books set in the woods, despite the fact that I was kind of raised in woods, the setting I see is the one from Unico. When I first read A Wizard of Earthsea, the end of the world was Kuruku's end of the world. I suspect that I was psychologically primed to become obsessed with manga long before Yukito Kishiro took over my brain; after all, most manga artists were hit by the same cultural virus I was.

Crossposts: http://snarp.livejournal.com/327977.html

Not Manga

Ash, by Malinda Lo
Bisexual Cinderella undergoes uninteresting torments, solves the primary plot problem too easily, and selects the sensible corner of her love triangle.
Spin State, by Chris Moriarty
Someone named Moriarty thought it would be a good idea to cross Crystal Singer over with The Continuing Time, and they were right.

Also contains Cetagandans, physics, and a mostly non-white cast.
Does My Head Look Big In This?, by Randa Abdel-Fattah
A funny and generally non-preachy YA novel about an Australian Muslim girl figuring out her cultural identity. There are a few clunky bits where the author’s desire to educate trumps her sense of how dialog works.
Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, and Calling on Dragons, by Patricia C. Wrede
Oh, Suck Fairy, why must you visit so much of my library? I used to love these books.

Manga

Angel Nest, by Erika Sakurazawa
Sweet, slickly-drawn short story collection. The title story, about a recently-divorced woman who finds her empty apartment invaded first by an angel, then by her ex-husband’s teenaged mistress, is the best.
Between the Sheets, by Erika Sakurazawa
Depressing, slickly-drawn story about dysfunctional people messing up each other and themselves, which Tokyopop shouldn’t really be marketing as gay-positive. None of the characters are particularly likable.
Ode to Kirihito, by Osamu Tezuka
Osamu Tezuka punches you repeatedly in the stomach.
MÄR, by Nobuyuki Anzai
This manga follows the Shounen Jump formula so closely that, during the three years of its publication, it is written that Yoshihiro Togashi would frequently look over his shoulder in puzzlement and fear, wondering what ghost it was that he felt stepping on his heels. (If Togashi ever got out of bed then, I mean.)
Flame of Recca, by Nobuyuki Anzai
Anzai’s first major work, which strays from the formula occasionally, with some good results and some bad. Compulsively readable up to the end of the tournament arc, but Anzai has major issues with women, and there’s way more fetish stuff than you want to see in a kids’ story.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

A professor I had described the difference between Western and Eastern culture this way: Western culture believes that history points forwards. It is bringing itself towards some end point, honing itself into something purer and in some way perfect - though perfection may mean destruction. Our world is a story, and we are certain that it will end, the way all stories do, with a new sort of equilibrium established.

History is different in Eastern culture, he said. Once there was a golden age, but it is over now; and things deteriorate. They are continuing to deteriorate, often gracefully, and beautiful things are found in the ruins, and at times some facsimile of the golden age is established for a while. But it always falls apart again, and each time it returns a little coarser. There is no endpoint in sight, only a constant tumbling of the pieces of that perfect civilization, thinning out. Time seems to be getting wider. It’s not going anywhere.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

Sensei just discovered Tezuka's Adolf (he says it's my fault) and thinks it is the most cracktastic Japan-thing this whole week. He didn't say "cracktastic," though. We need to teach him the word, I think it encapsulates the essence of what he looks for in his Important Modern Japanese Literature. Sensei is a good teacher for this particular batch of Japanese majors, because he clearly went into the field for all the wrong reasons.

I read a bunch of Astro Boy in Pittsburgh last summer, where the library actually had manga that you could actually look at without needing to fight the bookmobile to the death out back. Since that's not true here, and since Tezuka obsession seems to be something I go through around late summer every year (year-before-last it was Unico), I ordered the first five volumes off an Amazon seller the other day; they were really cheap, $5 each including shipping.

They came today, and I took the Pluto-arc volume to work with me. I quickly realized why they'd been so cheap - Astro Boy had been mutilated.

Someone stabbed Astro Boy

I don't know what kind of a sick bastard stabs Astro Boy. Hasn't he had a hard enough life already? Leave that kid alone.

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Entries tagged with a: tezuka osamu

Why I am insane.

One-to-two sentence reviews!

Why Bad Things Happen To Cute People: rambling Tezuka-Urasawa essay

'He did a manga about HITLER! Tezuka! HITLER! I thought of you.'

Astro Boy

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