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from Memories

Thanks to someone donating Memories and Domu to the local library they were my first exposure to comics outside of US superhero books and Alan Moore and David Lloyd's superb V for Vendetta. Where Moore deals with intertwining Machiavellian schemes, carried out with ambition and cunning by masterminds, Otomo's worlds are invariably about fallibility. His characters are often clueless, propelled by accident rather than design: a senile bully with psychic powers, a horny drop-out teenager fallen foul of the government thanks to chasing a terrorist to ask her on a date, a recipient of unasked-for powers that are slowly destroying him. The very studied banality of the protagonists make the fantastical scenarios he casts them into more plausible, as does his visual style--though to a certain extent Katsuhiro Otomo's 'style' as a whole is somewhat elusive, because the mammoth proportions of his larger works (dystopian sci-fi saga Akira stretches to 2000+ pages over about 8 years, leaving an average of less than a day and a half per completed page!) would have been impossible without a bevy of assistants rendering architecture and applying tone.

from Domu

A studied rebellion against the highly formalised and stylised Tezuka-derived manga of the 1960s, Otomo seems as much influenced by contemporary film and ligne claire as by japanese illustration or comics of the day. Rather than archetypal generic features, splash panels and plentiful speed lines he creates drama and tension with clean, empty space and low-key exactitude. The crucial distinction between totally empty and richly described space that he mines so deeply has influenced a long line of mangaka descendants, like Akio Tanaka's delicate hatching and tranquil, almost surgically precise drawing of isolated hands and feet in violent seinen karate drama Shamo. Shards of glass, collapsing buildings, shabby high-rise housing estates and monstrous mutations and all investigated with a fine, sensuous and relatively unvarying line, drawing the viewer into a deep, textured environment. Rather than emphasising characters his protagonists are minimised, made indistinct and thus made both sympathetic and integral to their world.

from Akira

Here is an interesting article about his technique as seen by a manga artist, and here a brief discussion of one of his earlier works.

In 1988 he adapted & directed an animated version of Akira, which along with Gainax's first feature Wings of Honneamise (a kind of alternate-earth re-telling of the space race) is one of the world's outstanding technical works in the medium of animation--reputedly some scenes in Akira were keyframed so densely that there was no room for in-betweening. It also sparked significant opportunities for animators; Koji Morimoto and many of Studio 4°C's other key talents, who would go on to animate Tekkonkinkreet, cut their teeth on Akira.

linoleum print, 2010