Tatsumi (film)
| Tatsumi | |
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Film Poster
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| Directed by | Eric Khoo |
| Produced by | Tan Fong Cheng Phil Mitchell Freddie Yeo Eric Khoo |
| Screenplay by | Eric Khoo |
| Based on |
A Drifting Life and other works by Yoshihiro Tatsumi |
| Starring |
Tetsuya Bessho Yoshihiro Tatsumi |
| Music by | Christopher Khoo Christine Sham |
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Production
company |
Zhao Wei Films
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Release date
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Running time
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98 minutes |
| Country | Singapore |
| Language | Japanese |
| Budget | $ 800,000 |
| Box office | US$9,880 |
Tatsumi is a 2011 Singaporean animated drama film directed by Eric Khoo. It is based on the manga memoir A Drifting Life and five earlier short stories by the Japanese manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi. The film is a Singaporean production with Japanese dialogue, and was animated in Indonesia.
The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival on 17 May 2011. It later made its box office debut in the Singapore box office on 15 September 2011. The film was selected as the Singaporean entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards, but it did not make the final shortlist.
The film follows the career of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, as he begins to work as a comics artist in post-war occupied Japan, meets his idol Osamu Tezuka, and invents the gekiga genre of Japanese comics for adults. Interweaved with the biographical material are segments based on Tatsumi's short stories "Hell", "Beloved Monkey", "Just a Man", "Good-Bye" and "Occupied".
Singaporean director Eric Khoo, who previously exclusively made live-action films but has a past as a comics artist, was first introduced to the works of Yoshihiro Tatsumi during his military service, and says that he immediately was stricken by the sadness and beauty of the stories. When Tatsumi's 840-page autobiographical manga, A Drifting Life, was published in Singapore in 2009, Khoo realised that Tatsumi still was alive and wanted to pay tribute to him. Khoo visited Tatsumi in Japan in October 2009 and received the permission to adapt the work to film. Production was led by Khoo's Singaporean company Zhao Wei Films. The budget of the film corresponded to 800,000 US dollars.
The visual style and storyboards of the film were kept tightly to Tatsumi's original drawings. Khoo said: "You see, Tatsumi loves cinema, and when he created this new movement of comics using strips with real characters, rather than the four-panel manga convention, he produced works that are like storyboards for a film. All we need to do is stretch them out to a widescreen format. And give them multi-planes, like layers, so there is more depth and feel. I also tweaked certain things, changed some of the sequences of the stories, so for the cinema his stories got a new voice."
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Wikipedia