Jul 23, 2025
I love Tezuka, but this is probably his worst work I've read so far. The story is incredibly rushed and it often feels like he's adapting ten pages in two panels which makes any progression, most character interactions and even interior monologues feel unnatural and hard to follow. The narrative just doesn't work, except in a very rudimentary sense of squeezing in the entire outline of the source material into this adaption, which I guess can be seen as some sort of accomplishment in its own.
However, Tezuka is still Tezuka and there's still frequent appearances of his trademark (visual) humor that I love, and some
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creative and interesting visual sequences, like the visualization of the moth-and-flame analogy or the big chaos on the square at the very end of the book. Lots of stuff still works on its own, making the reading experience still pretty fun for any Tezuka fan, even if the narrative as a whole doesn't quite come together. Even Tezuka himself in the afterword says that from today's perspective he finds the manga to be 'quite a mess', but he's still proud of it for what it accomplished at the time he drew it (which was 1949 according to him, and some parts he literally did on a train). Especially since his goal was to get children acquainted with the source material and that he did it before the big manga trend of adapting classical literature started in the mid-50s. And I can't argue with that, but in 2025 I would only recommend this to hardcore Tezuka fans and people who aren't attached to the source material.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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