Spotlight Anime: Tenrankai no E

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Osamu Tezuka, father of anime and manga as we know it, spent his 60s working on a series of experimental animations, exercises of imatgination and technique that can't fall unnoticed buy any anime fan. Using the animation as a tool of social critic, Tezuka shows us the best that the times had to give us, with results that are spectacular even today.

In this short movie, we are going to visit an exhibition with the background music of classicla music (but a little vanguardist). We pass by various paintings, many of them showing famous people, each with a distinct style, and suddenly we can look at some specific ones and imagine the story behind them. Criticizing everything, modern for the times but still current, from the destruction of nature to plastic surgery, passing through an impressive sequence about war, we can see short moments of sublime animation, different, without rules and making use of a whole imagetic that travels through the styles current at the time.

The story that impressed me the most was the gardener at the electronic garden, that, with a touch of the childness that the cartoons had as stigma at the time, touches the issue in a poetic way, with a touch of sadism.

The sequences are very vivid, eben though the colour palette is reduced, which makes all sense taking in account the historical period in which this was made.

It's a movie that everyone can see and that it's really worthwhile, both in historical terms as in artistical terms. The geniality of Tezuka is not on the popularity given by animes like Astro Boy or Kimba, but on little things like this that, being free from the tv conventions and censorship, get through the fences of political correctnessc and create something fundamentally unique.