Tatsumi – review

In this animated movie, Eric Khoo, a Singapore film-maker, pays tribute to the manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who in the 1950s created a new kind of serious Japanese comic, the "gekiga". The film artfully combines, though sometimes rather confusingly, scenes from Tatsumi's life story as told in his graphic autobiography, with five tales in the adult gekiga manner. All of them have tragic or ironic endings, and the most remarkable is "Hell", an unforgettable tale of a Japanese army journalist who becomes famous for his photograph of the shadow of two people who perished at Hiroshima. Believed to be a son massaging his mother, the image was in fact of a killer strangling a woman at the very moment the bomb exploded.