Apollo no Uta
Apollo's Song

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Apollo’s Song – Spoiler Free – Recommended

TLDR
Story – 7/10 – 7 x 0.275 = 1,925
Art – 7/10 – 7 x 0.2 = 1,4
Characters – 6/10 – 6 x 0.225 = 1,35
Enjoyment – 7/10 – 7 x 0.3 = 2,1
Total: 6,775 -> 7

Story – 7/10
... Apollo’s Song is Tezuka’s take on mental health and the impact that love and trauma harbingers in the education and future of children.
In Apollo’s Song, we are quickly introduced to Shougo, a kid suffering from childhood trauma who loves to kill animals that show the minimum affection towards each other. He is, because of this, quickly admitted to a mental hospital. His overall mental state and the delusions he suffers due to the treatment he is subjected to are narrated through a series of short stories.
In fact, most of Apollo’s Song is made in this short story format – it can even be seen as a collection of short stories about love – where we see the main character falling in love, or at least having romantic feelings towards another. This is rather seen as a punishment – we know for a fact that he sees this as a punishment from the treatment that he gives to the animals he kills. In this, this story is more than mental health and trauma: it is a story about his redemption and atonement for his sins, a redemption filled with struggle and pain.
The story is also fast-paced, as we jump from short story to short story.
The short stories in themselves are not uninteresting, although they don't grip the reader as they ought to or as normally as Tezuka does.
There is also some moral ambiguity that Tezuka imprints upon the main character: he does evil things (like killing animals that show any affection), but he does not call Shougo a bad person: just a traumatised child with many issues to resolve.

Art – 7/10
The art style is your typical Tezuka: somewhat minimalistic and cartoonish but highly functional and with a firm personality and watermark. Landscapes are a sight to behold, as usual. Characters are easily told apart and page flow and the cadence of the panels is well done. Although, it isn’t, graphically speaking, his best work.
It is also quite graphical, with nudity, electro-shock therapy, and some gore – the killing of animals.

Characters – 6/10
Characters aren’t the main focus of Apollo's Song, as the main objective is clearly to make us think about love and the protagonist's character arc – his redemption story. In this sense, we only have access to the background of the protagonist and some minor characters that only exist to interact with Shougo.

Enjoyment – 7/10
Enjoyment isn't all that high in Apollo’s Song, although it isn't a bad story, and it is somewhat coherent, the short story format that the manga uses divides our attention between the true story – the main plot – and the several subplots of the manga. In this sense, although the execution was good enough for us to clearly distinguish a main plot from the rest and for us to see that a common thread connected the stories, it is still somewhat lacking. It isn't, however, his best work as a mangaka, although it is by no account bad. He still does a work that makes the reader think about what love is and moral agency; moreover, some stories, especially the one dealing with the holocaust, were particularly interesting. For these reasons, it still deserves a non-enthusiastic recommendation close to a mixed-feeling stamp.

Tribulations of love are often immense, yet in this work, they're of cosmic proportions. Our -- sort of -- villainized hero is sent on a metaphysical journey which serves as a punishment for his atrocious sins.

It is a blend of psychopathy and sexuality which is supposed to explore love as the primary theme. Not the romanticized form of it much, but more like a raw view of it, even atavistic at some parts. Given the time in which it was written, it is to be expected, albeit probably won't accommodate some of the more open-minded masses of today.

The overall pace is chaotic, conveyance ... of desired themes is done without any superfluousness to it, albeit the narrative structure has its hiccups. Panel to panel transitions are not ideal and conversational fluidity tends to suffer due to clunky translations. Tezuka's art is mostly clean and polished, however, it has to be noted that it's a period piece by contemporary standards.

Side characters serve as mere mechanisms to roll the plot forward. On the other hand, the development of the main character is done somewhat believably. Despite that his chances for redemption are already spoiled at the very start, it pertains to the overall pessimistic tone and stays loyal to the source material Tezuka drew inspiration from.

An effective piece, honestly. Whereas that same effectiveness is heavily determined by one's belief system.

By all appearances, Osamu Tezuka worked himself into an early grave. His last recorded words were a plea to a nurse, who attempted to take his pen, to let him work. Even so, he left behind a significant body of unfinished material, and it's tempting to suggest that he should have paced himself a little more, and that to do so would've made for a happier life. But there is at least one particular reason why he had to rush: he was elevating his medium. He and some of his contemporaries saved manga from being restricted to the narrow subject matter and audience ranges that ... western comics and cartoons are stuck with.

In that light, Apollo's Song can be described as "literary - for manga." It's an examination of such themes as love, tragedy, and trauma, but it's tonally rather cartoony. Tezuka's art style is cutesy and low-detailed, and the characters act in the style of a comedy or a melodrama. Immediately upon meeting him, the trustworthy doctor figure straps Shogo down and administers electro-shock therapy. The scene clearly plays out this way not because it's the most artistically accurate or believable thing, but because Tezuka wants to get the introduction out of the way as quickly as possible.

And to give credit to his writing, he does convey information in an efficient, fast-paced way. It's never slow or dull to read. When combined with the short length, it's easy to imagine a lot of readers finishing the manga in a single sitting.

Tezuka certainly did have a genius for narrative structure. Shogo's curse causes him to experience an infinity of lives defined by tragic love. These stories fade in and out as his true life progresses, transcending time and nationality. And it's not just a framing device for an essentially episodic series: Shogo really experiences - and remembers - these extra lives, and their relevance to the plot runs deeper than you may initially think.

But they also serve to examine the theme - love - from different angles. There isn't much consideration for genre and Tezuka examines not only human love but that between animals and even robots. Fittingly for a story like this, Tezuka makes liberal use of nudity in his artwork. Of course, given Tezuka's sensibilities and art style, it remains mostly tame. One might even call it tasteful. Certainly it has relevance to the stories: Shogo and his lover wear fig-leaves, like Adam and Eve, in one story, and in another the mechanization of the future reduces his body itself to a physical, reproducible commodity unworthy of considerations such as privacy.

One particular attribute which defines character writing in "literary" work is that malice and evil are used very carefully - they require a precise psychological explanation. With some exceptions, Tezuka manages that here: Shogo's violence in reaction to love comes from deep negative associations with his mother's meaningless romantic endeavors - and her cruelty toward her son. That's enough to make him an engaging protagonist, and the emotional heart of a series of effective little stories, one of which in particular is strong and memorable. Although the ending is a bit unduly pessimistic and it's over the top - even contrived - at times, there's enough depth and entertainment value in this manga for it to stand beside the glory of its creator.