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.
