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Some manga travel well.
Death Note? The one about the kid with the fiendish notebook that kills people when you write down their names? The notion of a "Shinigami" death figure might be Japanese -- albeit of relatively recent vintage, and possibly inspired by European personifications of Death -- but the story speaks to people seemingly wherever it travels.
Or how about
Naruto? It may be about a kid going to ninja school (at first), but… it's also about
a kid going to ninja school, by which I mean it's unfettered youth wish fulfillment of the type you used to get from superhero comics. And yep: if you were sitting in your local Borders Ink and there was an earthquake, and you were buried in manga until you were dead, and then the coroner came and brushed the books away from your smiling face, those books he pushed away?
Naruto. There's a 30% chance. I calculated it myself, though I won't bore you with the details!
Some manga, though - they're more like
Mushishi. The brainchild of creator Yuki Urushibara,
Mushishi was an episodic series that ran in the monthly anthology Afternoon from 1999 to 2008. It concerned the many exploits of Ginko, a type of doctor-researcher-shaman prone to wandering a fantasy rural Japan from an indeterminate time period, puffing a cigarette in the good John Constantine manner. Ginko is one of a special few that can see
mushi, a strange form of life barely separate from the origin of all things. Mushi can interact with humans, typically altering their senses in odd and sometimes horrible ways; it's up to a mushishi, an expert, like Ginko, to sort these situations out.
As you can tell from the series' extended tenure in its home magazine, Mushishi was fairly popular in Japan. It won an Excellence Prize at the prominent Japan Media Arts Festival in 2003, and its publisher, Kodansha, gave it its in-house award for best general manga in 2006. More pertinently for our purposes, its first 26 stories were adapted into a television anime series (2005-06), which captured some attention in English (as subtitled by admirers) for its lush art direction and meditative style. Indeed, the anime is probably somewhat better than the manga, in that the short form of the comics stories left them especially disposed to adaptation, while helpfully covering for Urushibara's shortcomings as a storyteller; evocative sounds and careful pacing could cover for the manga-ka's tendency toward explication, while many hands could enrich her occasionally stiff drawings. Nothing was lost, everything gained.
So the anime was eventually released on R1 DVD, under the slightly modified title of
Mushi-Shi, and the manga also came to English from Del Rey, with seven out of ten total volumes released since 2007, which unfortunately might say something about the books' popularity; the publisher is now apparently planning to blow out the remaining three volumes as a 624-page omnibus in mid-2010. But right now (er, two weeks ago), anime publisher FUNimation brings another bit of the franchise, slowly rolling out to greet a small but appreciative North American fanbase: the 2006 live-action movie version. Directed by Katsuhiro Ōtomo. Yes,
that Katsuhiro Ōtomo
But then, I don't know, maybe it's been too long now, and not everyone remembers the stuff that used to
really cross over back in the day. Ōtomo started out as a manga artist, a highly influential one as the ‘70s moved into the ‘80s; he's generally credited with causing a temporary sensation for Western-influenced manga, measurably more ‘realistic' (if still distinctly
cartooned) than average, heavy in detail and mood. His grand masterpiece was
Akira -- c'mon, you remember the psychics and bikers of Neo Tokyo, Tetsuo and Kaneda! -- which he then adapted himself to theatrical anime form in 1988, a movie that became a veritable living definition of anime in the West for years after. It too was a small revolution of style, packing incredible amounts of labor and money into its runtime, filling out every nook and cranny of its world.
And then - well, Ōtomo finished drawing the manga, since he hadn't done that yet. He directed a rather campy live-action movie,
World Apartment Horror, in 1991. He oversaw a theatrical anime anthology,
Memories, in 1995, directing one segment. He wrote some comics and a storybook, and even drew a few short stories, including a memorably weird piece in
Batman: Black and White. But he wouldn't direct an anime feature again until 2004, and the long-in-the-making
Steamboy would recoup only half its production budget in Japanese theaters.
Yet Ōtomo was soon on to the
Mushi-Shi movie, scripted by his frequent collaborator, Sadayuki Murai. Those sweating from memories of the famous acts of plot compression in
Akira can dry out a little; the screenplay does an interesting job of knitting four of Urushibara's separate stories into a mostly coherent whole. Or, at least, you get the feeling that your eventual confusion is largely Ōtomo's intent.
You see, this movie
Mushi-Shi seeks to give Ginko's travels more of a pleasing arc, even while preserving the mystery of the mushi; this is actually something of a reversal of Urushibara's approach, which rarely leaves a critter unexplained or a plot thread dangling. She's more a teller of fables, positing the efforts of a man searching for a mysterious rainbow as a metaphor for navigating the flow of life as it sweeps you along. This plot is present in Ōtomo's film, but as a through line - the man is introduced fairly early on, spending much of the picture's 131-minute run time acting as a viewer identification/comic relief figure. Likewise, the story of Ginko's origin as a silver-haired wanderer is initially cut up into flashbacks peppered onto the first hour, then combined with elements of a totally different story regarding failed rice crops and expanded into an entirely new direction so as to create a type of semi-antagonist for Ginko to deal with.
In this way, Urushibara's tale of a silver-haired woman who takes in poor orphaned Ginko, only to vanish into the black depths of a devouring mushi with a separate, blinding white mushi in its center, a balanced state of things allegorical of the inevitability of death, becomes more of a push and pull between wanderlust and security, healing and consuming, parent and child, light and dark, as Ōtomo shows the woman's return as a tar-caked agent of (literal) darkness screeching in the befuddled head of white-clad Ginko. These concerns color virtually all of the film, from its opening depiction of a horned child's treatment -- changed from the manga into a parable of confronting a parent's loss -- through Ginko's interactions with a younger mushishi who calms mushi by writing down their stories. That was probably my all-time favorite of Urushibara's stories, an altogether terrific thing about soothing the wounds of society by shifting the focus of narratives from conquest and victory to coexistence, which is essentially the core theme of the series; Ginko is a good mushishi, because he understands that these odd and sometimes freakish creatures are life inside a system of life, and must be shown respect.
The movie retains some of that feel, if lessened by its desire to give Ginko more of a dramatic struggle, one that doesn't amount to much beyond realizing that helping people is nice (there's a rightly biblical curing of the blind!) and getting back to understanding the grand operation of nature. The addition of a vaporous theme regarding the passing of the old times raises only a few hints of melancholy. On more of a nitty-gritty level, some of Urushibara's visual conceits don't translate nearly as well to live-action as anime, with lead actor Jô Odagiri looking somewhat awkward with silver hair and stubble, and the various wispy CGI mushi becoming caught between the alternating detail and abstraction of the manga's art.
On the other hand, the broader visual look is quite good, with dozens of vast natural scenes depicted in toasted colors, as if the film print had become spoiled just a bit. Moreover, Ōtomo
hangs on these scenes, allowing minutes to pass sometimes with no dialogue whatsoever. This is far from the sensory battery of his anime; it's as if the property appealed to him as a means of surrounding characters in nature rather than sci-fi detail. As such, his
Mushi-Shi, for all its efforts to tie Ginko to a singular story, seems like the most reflective of the franchise's parts.
And in the end, Ōtomo does understand Urushibara's grand theme of letting one's self go before the aspects of nature that cannot be changed. There is an all-new, all-different final confrontation between Ginko and his accidental mentor at the film's end, but there's none of the apocalyptic noise of
Akira or
Steamboy, or the manga
Domu. Instead it's only the meeting of a calmed young man and a sad, anxious soul, the former acting with grace to quiet the latter, as an expression of interdependence. They both return to the trees and water, fading away, as do all things and human endeavors. The elusive Ōtomo might realize that better than most.
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
