Tatsumi is Singaporean director Eric Khoo`s ode to his comic idol and creative inspiration Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who is a widely revered figure in manga circles. Khoo has mentioned his fascination with Tatsumi`s work, having first chanced upon them decades ago when he was still in the army. Khoo has credited Tatsumi`s manga as a remedy for his periodic bouts of creative drought in the past, especially when he was still a cartoonist. No surprise then the loving care he puts into Tatsumi to meticulously retain Tatsumi`s signature gekiga visual style, keeping the animation here in 2D to do so.
Khoo adapts five of Tatsumi`s short stories Hell, Beloved Monkey, Just a Man, Occupied and Good-bye for the screen, interwoven with autobiographical segments of Tatsumi`s life, based off his memoir A Drifting Life. All the stories have a unifying grimness, with characters all gripped by emotional tribulation, but several stories are stronger than others, with Hell and Good-bye being our personal favourites for their gritty depictions of post-WW2 trauma.
Still, to say the middle segments were weaker would not be fair they were arranged in such a manner to parallel Tatsumi`s own life trajectory or to accentuate certain parts of his own life story. The five stories effectively charted Tatsumi`s evolution from his early creative mindset to his later fascination with sexually tinged material. But the editing did leave us lost at certain spots: some of the transitions from the segments of his story adaptations to the autobiographical interludes seem quite murky, and because quite a few of the segments used voiceovers narrated by the same voice artist, the dÃ