Wuhu feature
Text | Cute and charming villain character
In 1976, the American literary historian Morris Dickstein wrote in his book "The Gates of the Garden of Eden – American Culture in the Sixties" that looked back at the past sixties:
"Growing up is the first time you have a feeling of irreparability and irredeemability. We realize that for every road we take, there must be many other roads that have not been taken, and many roads will never be taken. The mixture of the sweet and bitter talents of adulthood is always different from the impulsive passions of youth, but the path of experience does not necessarily end in vain and frustration, just as the vision of youth is not necessarily limited to naivety and hope. ”
In the book, he divides religious thought into two categories, one is the tragic religious thought of the birth, and the other is the utopian religious thought of the world. The American culture of the sixties, and even the American culture as a whole, seemed to him to have arisen under the latter tendency.
In that era, Americans were "obsessed with occult arts, admired Eastern religious warlocks and meditation, and attained a short nirvana through drug use, polymorphism, or rapid therapy," which was the result of the transformation of "utopian religion into secular humanism." In this belief, it is believed that moral and spiritual victory can be achieved by improving the enjoyment of the senses.
Here, the latter tendency is connected to two levels: the former Eden and the future utopia. The Garden of Eden points to salvation, the desire to be born in the former tendency, precisely because the entry into the world is too deep, so it wants to go back; while utopia is forward-looking, it wants to break the present and establish a heavenly kingdom on earth, so it is necessary to go.
"Akira" seems to be a wonderful footnote to this discussion.
Its forward-looking and allegorical nature has not lost its glory to this day, and with the help of this article, it is hoped that more glory will be transmitted to more people.
Katsuyo Otomo,
A genius cartoonist who appeared like Ghost
It can be said that Japanese manga and Osamu Tezuka are inextricably linked, and Katsuyo Otomo was able to enter the manga world thanks to Osamu Tezuka, starting from his obsession with "Astro Boy" and "The Emperor of the Forest", he buried the shadow of manga in his heart.
Osamu Tezuka is the originator of modern Japanese manga, and for the first time brought film techniques into manga, using film thinking and techniques in composition, story structure and performance methods, and telling stories in a cinematic way. Kazuhiko Shimamoto's manga "Manga Berserk" jokes that all Japanese manga are copied by Osamu Tezuka.
It's just that Katsuyo Otomo's success is more based on the "betrayal" of his opponent, Osamu Tsukasa.
After entering middle school, the realist style of drama painting became popular, and compared with Osamu Tezuka's cute style of simplifying the complex, the drama painting focused on using extremely complex brushstrokes to outline more realistic characters.
From right to left, looking in turn, the rightmost one is a photo, the second is a hard-pen sketch, the third is a simplified light and shadow on the basis of the second sketch, but it is still unqualified as a comic; the fourth is the mainstream drama painting style in the 1950s and 1970s, which simplifies the light and shadow compared with the sketch, and the expression of the characters is more exaggerated and vivid; the fifth is more suitable for illustration of children's drawing books; the sixth is not only the character image, the action has a certain degree of exaggeration, and the picture elements are also simplified. It was the typical juvenile manga style at that time.
In addition to the more realistic characters, in the play paintings, you can often see the style of gradually changing perspectives from the overlook, as well as the way the picture is processed similar to the film lens, as well as the elements of the props full of realism.
If Osamu Tezuka changed the social status and creative methods of manga, then the emergence of drama painting is to elevate manga from a simple children's book to a level of art that criticizes social reality.
But whether it's Osamu Tezuka's story manga or an alternative experimental style of drama drawing, neither of these expressions can satisfy Katsuyo Otomo. Because their narrative styles are the same, they must use a lot of dialogue to advance the story.
The rigid way of expression is contrary to the ideal manga in Otomo Katsuyo's mind, and he firmly believes that there must be a more impactful way of comic expression, with the help of the beginning and end of the story, bringing the audience unprecedented shock and impact.
At the end of 1971, he wrote his debut novel,"The Little Girl Who Sold Matches," which was submitted to the girl comic strip magazine Ribon magazine without a response;
The three largest japanese girl manga pieces: Shueisha's Ribon, 讲谈谄谈谄创杂创杂杂创
In 1973, the work "Gunshots", adapted from the original work of french realist writer Prospere Mérime, was published in the manga Action, and the 19-year-old Katsuyo Otomo officially debuted.
Since then, a number of short comics have been published in this magazine, and I have continuously honed my comic level.
At this time, the Japanese manga industry has experienced decades of baptism, and it is time to bid farewell to Osamu Tezuka's American-Soviet fantasy style Eden and pursue its own neon-lit utopia.
In 1979, Short Peace was published. This can definitely be called an explosive event in the history of Japanese manga, and manga critic Yoshihiro Yonezawa even used "before Katsuyo Otomo and after Katsuyo Otomo" to divide the history of Japanese manga performance.
In this one-shot book, Katsuyo Otomo uses a systematic manga technique that distinguishes it from Osamu Tezuka, depicting empty mirrors through realistic techniques, characters and landscapes have the same texture, realistic and three-dimensional painting style, making it possible to make the world in manga works more uniform and impactful.
This unique style gave other writers the desire to depict the story in a more delicate way, coupled with the wave of science fiction fever and animation fever after the 1970s, the tendency to refine the world setting in the work gradually formed. This tendency was later more thoroughly revered by Shiro Masamune.
No matter how many times you see it, you will be shocked by the fineness of Katsuyo Otomo's mechanical and environmental design.
Until now, there has never been a second person who has drawn manga so meticulously, compared with Osamu Tezuka's predecessors and contemporaries of manga artists, Katsuyo Otomo is no longer ahead of the times, he is completely outside the Japanese manga industry.
In the same year, the manga "Fireball" was published, and Katsuyo Otomo stepped into the field of science fiction for the first time. He summed up the experience and skills in the previous comics, combined with his unique understanding of science fiction, and threw one of his brains into the comics, carefully drawn picture arrangements and meticulous plot shaping, which received rave reviews in the industry as soon as it was launched. Coupled with the publication of SF magazines such as "Comic Fantasy" and "Comic Again", Katsuyo Otomo became the latest cutting-edge writer of the New Wave.
In the same year, katsuyo Otomo's two major works of career, "Children's Dreams" in Action Deluxe (1979-1981) and "Already an Atmosphere of War" began to be serialized in the manga Action (1979-1981).
The reason why these two works are important is that they have a literary nature as comics.
At the heart of literature is poetry, embodied in comics, behind the elaborate narrative the author's otherworldly perspectives, values, and environmental shapings.
In addition to the above in "Children's Dreams", what is more rare is that the narrative blank space and "meaninglessness" give readers the imagination space that readers can usually have when reading books, and the cleverly designed and cleverly switched sub-shots make this feeling super doubled!
"Children's Dreams" is handled with the same suspenseful style as a textbook
These two manga brought the Japanese manga industry like an earthquake and tsunami, and the media reported on them one after another under the title of "manga that profoundly changed Japanese society". The former won the 4th Japan SF Awards, and Katsuyo Otomo became the first manga artist to win this award.
In the documentary Naoki Urasawa, Kazumi Yamashita said of Katsuyo Otomo that "he was particularly shocked" and that "even if he said that he was broken, he could not convey the sense of impact he was subjected to at that time";
B station BV number: 3706691, interested partners can go to see the next full set, quite shocked
Kazuhiko Torishima, the editor of Dragon Ball, recalls reading Katsuhiro Otomo's works as a student, and his first reaction was "How can it be so powerful" and then think, "If it is so powerful, it must not last, right?" ”
This sentence has become a proverb, Katsuyo Otomo is going to do animation!
In the 1980s，
Epoch-making work
And that face that is out of place with the times
Fast forward to June 1982, when the cyberpunk blockbuster Blade Runner landed in Japan. Unfortunately, the United States collided with Spielberg's "E.T. Aliens" in the same period, and the propaganda strategy in Japan was even more messy, and the slogan was even written wrongly - "In 2020, the Legion of Replicants declared war on mankind". Misrated as an SF action movie, the film was hastily removed from the shelves less than three weeks after its release.
Six months later, Kodansha's Young Magazine published a science fiction manga titled AKIRA, also based on SF action movies, on December 20.
The cover of the first issue of "Akira" in the "Young Magazine" series, is it very blurry to look at the picture? No doubt it was designed that way!
Both belong to the "futuristic" science fiction, the same time and space background, the same messy metropolis, the same destructive, violent content.
I have no way to verify whether Katsuyo Otomo saw "Blade Runner" in the cinema in 1982, and I can't guess how Katsuyo Otomo felt when he first saw "Blade Runner", but in the hearts of science fiction fans, the two works that are like the status of "Bible" met with the audience in the same year, and locked the start of the story in 2019, which has to be said to be God's will.
Beginning in 1983, Akira continued to be released at a rate of one volume per year. It brings together katsuyo Otomo's entire memories of the Showa era, including World War II, Japan's defeat, the Tokyo Olympics, and the Student Movement, and he pours decades into this manga these major events that have affected the fate of Japanese society and his own thoughts.
In addition to the content, Katsuyo Otomo made an unprecedented innovation in the form of manga in "Akira", compared with the increasing and oppressive techniques of his predecessors, he did the opposite - using a drawing method without any dialog box, giving the reader a shocking visual presentation that is immersive in the film. For example, in the scene of the Tokyo building collapsing due to an explosion in the manga, Katsuyo Otomo used eight pages of screens without a dialog box to show the tragic scene.
A nuclear explosion in the Akira comics
This storytelling technique, like a movie storyboard, has been inherited and carried forward by later generations of cartoonists. The most typical example is Yuhiko Inoue's suffocating sense of pro-matching with nearly 74 pages of no dialogue in the final stages of Shonbei vs. Yamano in "Slam Dunk Master": Kaede Ryukawa took the lead in launching a reversal - Eiji Sawaki chased the quasi-kill - Sakuragi Hanamichi shot back in zero seconds.
On page 16 in 24 seconds, Shonbei surpassed Sanno's 1-point key ball, with no lines in the ultra-long storyboard, and Yuhiko Inoue extended the essence of the Otomo Katsuyo manga storyboard to the extreme
It was also in this year that Katsuhiro Otomo served as the head of the personnel and participated in the production of the animated film "Battle of illusions", which was originally based on the manga of Shotaro Ishimori, and took this as an opportunity to enter the ranks of animated film production.
It has to be mentioned that manga and animation are two completely different fields, and many good manga artists can draw classic works that have been handed down to generations, but may not be able to supervise animation. However, for the talented Japanese manga industry, genius always stands at the apex of the times. Manga has excelled, and anime has excelled, and until now, there have been two characters in Japan: Katsuyo Otomo and his apprentice Imatoshi. (Imatoshi's achievements in animation are higher, and I will talk about it separately if I have the opportunity)
In 1984, in addition to working as a human designer in an animation commercial for Canon Cameras, he also accepted the work of a split-shot original drawing, and then immediately after directing a "Fortification Suspension Order" in the unit animation film "Labyrinth Story", he received an invitation from the producer to produce an animated film "Akira".
Released in Japan in 1987, Labyrinth Story is an experimental anime consisting of three short stories, "Labyrinth Story", "The Man Running Wild", and "Order to Stop the Fortifications", each part of which is very different in style, somewhat similar to "Cosmic Curiosity"
At that time, the Japanese animation SF trend was at its peak, and this year alone, "Valley of the Wind", "Fuxing Kid" and "Chrono Fortress: Can Remember Love" were released nearly at the same time, and "Neuromancer", which was regarded as the standard of cyberpunk, was also released in the same year.
Even today, "Chrono Fortress: Can Ever Remember Love" is a classic, and the sophistication of hand-drawn paintings is unimaginable to modern audiences.
But even so, in the 1980s, with a budget of 1.1 billion yen that broke the record for Japanese animation production, the newcomers to the animation film took care of the director, screenwriter, and character design, and it is hard to imagine how crazy it is even today.
Even crazier than that is one shot and one painting, and from this there are more than 170,000 original paintings, 783 scenes and 2212 shots.
As we all know, the general animation production of the usual one-shot, one-shot two way: one beat one needs to draw a new picture every frame, so as to form smooth details and a clear appearance, of course, the production cost is also more, generally used in the production of larger, film-level projects; and one beat two in 24 frames per second only need to draw 12 frames, the effect presented is more concise and fast, there will be more jumping between postures, for the audience can still be smooth viewing, production costs are relatively reduced by half, Commonly used in TV shows or small budget productions.
In "AKIRA", Katsuyo Otomo perfectly blends one shot one and one beat two. The following scenario is an example:
Playing at a slow frame-by-frame speed, observing the pause of the three motorcycles, it can be seen that the speed of the motorcycle can be adjusted from slow to fast by switching from one beat to one beat two.
Fortunately, such a huge and meticulous work can be completed, thanks to the huge number of animation enthusiasts who have been cultivated by the animation boom in the past few years, there are enough non-industry creators who have emerged in a group during this time, Such a group of Fukushima, Inoue Shunyuki, Keiko Nobumoto, Kitaro Takasaka, Makoto Niki, Eiko Tanaka... It was with their help that Katsuyo Otomo was able to smash a scarlet, violent, and bloody future for 1.1 billion yen at any cost, setting off waves around the world.
But before Akira became a breakthrough work, Katsuyo Otomo didn't even expect much from it, "I remember the first time I met with a manga publisher, I thought it would only do ten episodes or so, and it would be finished soon": cinematography was even more so, "I was very miserable after watching the initial film of the movie, and went home to tell my wife that the movie did not work."
In the present, Katsuyo Otomo has risen to the height of the god of the dead house, but from the perspective of animation practitioners at that time, he was more like a tyrant and a father who had nothing to do.
In order to achieve "a sense of chaos in the work", more than 170,000 pieces of celluloid were used, and the background, mid-shot and foreground in each scene were painted on three different pieces by hand, "so that everything was set in the whole work like a mosaic tile";
In order to make the city add a warm feeling, the lights of the windows need to be colored individually, and 50 of the 327 colors used are specially modulated for the production of animation;
The taillights borrowed from Genesis have also become one of the hallmarks of science fiction films
Challenge to use a very avant-garde technique at the time: first dubbing, and then drawing the mouth shape of the animated character according to the voice, in order to achieve the effect of one-to-one correspondence between the mouth shape and the voice;
Through this almost brutal production requirements, "Akira" presents an unprecedented visual experience, the details and colors in the shadows are very delicate, the explosions in the animation, the color transparency and transition of various urban lights are very natural, the light and shadow effects are not at all like the eighty years of manual age can be made, even if you take it to the present to compare, there is basically no work to match.
On July 16, 1988, "AKIRA" was officially released in 90 movie theaters under Toho, and then translated as 6 Chinese was released around the world, and it topped the box office in its first week of release in North America, becoming Otomo Katsuyo's most prestigious animation that has never surpassed itself.
Red locomotive,
The offspring will always live under its shell
Before Katsuyo Otomo, Hayao Miyazaki was a pioneer in propelling Japanese animation to the world, and after Katsuyo Otomo, more and more creators brought Japanese science fiction movies to the world stage.
"Since the late 1970s, an important concept has emerged in Western science fiction, namely that Japan represents the future, and that Japan's weird culture represents an elusive future," writes Annalee Newitz, an American writer of cyberpunk fiction.
The destructive power of "Akira" like a landslide tsunami shocked the world, and countless anime masters often hung up on "Akira", and became a "bible" that could not be rebelled against in the house circle.
Kishimoto has repeatedly mentioned "Akira" as his anime initiation in interviews: "I felt an overwhelming power disparity in front of Akira"; the Wachowski sisters were directly influenced by "Akira" to make "The Matrix", which also discussed the relationship between humans and high civilization; and the picture of "Akira" appeared at the end of the MV of Mike Jackson's single "Scream".
Spielberg asserts that "American audiences will not buy it", and then "everyone knows", with the most gorgeous tribute in "Ready Player One";
Miyazaki made the most concise and appropriate evaluation of the unique style of "Akira", "A supernatural teenager stands on the ruins of Tokyo, and everyone says that it is Katsuyo Otomo."
Looking back on the film today, thirty-three years later, ordinary people are amazed that it hit the reality of the Tokyo Olympics and the large-scale epidemic, the failure of fiscal reform, and so on like a kind of prophetic book of advanced consciousness, often ignoring the irresistible charm of the film itself.
Katsuyo Otomo has built a forward-looking worldview and rich and varied lens language in the film, so that the audience can appreciate the charm of cyberpunk in advance, and the visual effects are full, and the connotations worthy of scrutiny are even more talked about.
The 2019 Japan in the film seems to be a replica of 1959 Japan: the disappearance of individual heroes, strong pessimistic tendencies, human beings are controlled by capital and indulge in the glitz of consumerism, individuals are passive and helpless in the face of great disasters, coupled with anxiety and fear of technology, trapped in the trap of neon lights and swollen into a bottomless pit, until the world can only expect God's salvation.
Akira, the "god" who replaced Zeus, appeared, but the redemption of the gods came at the cost of disaster, and Tokyo was once again destroyed.
Some commentators have joked that Katsuyo Otomo is essentially a disaster film director. He had an unusual interest in portraying scenes of disaster, with a two-hour animation that set the stage for the final half hour of "destroying the world"; with the other two works, Tokyo had been destroyed four times in his hands.
Katsuyo Otomo uses this extremely bloody and cruel way to construct a contradiction between modern science and technology and human development - human beings will be eaten by the scientific and technological achievements they admire at any time. Through the birth of Akira, the catastrophe caused to society, and the final departure, he fully explained his vigilance against war and all other forces far beyond the control of mankind.
This may be why Akira was able to take the world by storm in 1988: like the "human insignificance" in the Cthulhu myth created by H.P. Lovecraft, Otomo Katsuyo's pessimism goes a step further, "Human beings are not only insignificant, but even if they are given the power of God, they will eventually lead to self-destruction."
This kind of self-reflection on human nature from the entire human level coincides with the popular pursuit of the universe, truth and Zen in Western society, which immediately won the cold war victory and developed the material level to a new height, and things are bound to decline.
The utopia to which man aspires may exist, but only if there are no humans there.
When people were still immersed in universal values and could not extricate themselves, Otomo Katsuyo had already smiled slightly, riding the red motorcycle, and disappeared from the dust.
Speaking of this red motorcycle, I have to mention a small point, the most important symbol in the first road movie "Runaway Rider" is also a Harley motorcycle, for a variety of reasons, but out of selfishness, I still classify it as a man's romance!
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