In the lavishly illustrated Manga Kamishibai: The Art ofJapanesePaper Theater (Abrams), New YorkTimes writer Eric P. Nash finds precedent for kamishibai in illustratedBuddhist scrolls for instructing the faithful and woodblock prints that keptpictures and words integrated, unlike the divorce between image and text in thepost-Gutenberg West. And yet the illustrations show (and Nash admits) that Japan’s visualheritage was only one ingredient in the rack of influences that gave rise tokamishibai and its successors, manga and anime.
Kamishibai was primarily Western in form, if oftenJapanese in content, and the principal inspiration was often cinema. Settingsfrom Hollywood costume dramas found their wayinto these Japanese stories and some compositions resembled tracking shotsfrozen into a single frame. Other kamishibai artists adapted the Sovietcinematic montage model to their hand-painted panels. The art was incrediblyeclectic in sources. One panel pictured in MangaKamishibai suggests a kabuki Caravaggio cartoon. Impressionism, Cubism andExpressionism all left their marks. The picture stories anticipated manydevelopments in American and world pop culture, including masked superheroes adecade before Superman. Did the “jidai” samurai become the Jedi in a galaxyfar, far away?
Nash describes what the images can’t show, thecontext of kamishibai on the streets of Japanese cities. Summoned by clickingsticks, the neighborhood children gathered to view these painted stories ofbrave kids and villainous adults, rockets and robots, damsels in distress andcliffhanging derring-do. Like movie theaters, most of the revenue came fromselling candy to the rapt audience.
Growing up during World War II, Japan’sseminal manga artist was surrounded by kamishibai. In The Art of OsamuTezuka: Godof Manga (Abrams), anime scholar Helen McCarthy persuasively argues forTezuka as “the chief architect” in the postwar development of manga and anime.With his television shows “Astro Boy” and “Kimba the White Lion,” Tezuka didmore than anyone to expose anime to the outside world. Aside from artists, heinspired generations of Japanese scientists and technicians.
Even had his influence been narrower in scope,Tezuka’s career would be worth examining. Prolific and insatiable, he was theauthor of vast sagas in comic book form; his characters became a repertoirecompany acting in various settings, often in a self-aware, meta-manga context.Informed by everything from other manga artists to Metropolis, Fantasia and Pinocchio, Tezuka’s stories addressedprofound themes such as discrimination and dwindling natural resources, natureand nurture, selfishness and altruism and the definition of humanity.
