Joann Sfar The Rabbi's Cat 2

Annotation

The Japanese graphic novel here receiving its first English-language edition was radically different from mainstream manga in looks, content, and procedure when new in 1970. It remains so, though Veronique Tanaka’s Metronome (2008), while structurally and stylistically less adventurous, shows related cinematic influences. To intensify a simple, easily understood, universally sympathetic story of love battered by poverty and mercurial youthful emotions, Hayashi employs the extreme viewing angles, jump cuts, and visual allusions of French New Wave movies and the interpolations of fantasy to evoke the characters’ moods that Fellini exploited so brilliantly in 8½. Turn the page from a lovers’ clinch or one lover’s emotional funk, and a Hiroshige-like wave, a Godzilla poster, or a building corner with phone lines out of Ozu’s great films of urban middle-class matchmaking appears to both point up and gently mock the protagonists’ passions. Such commentary images are realistically rendered, while the protagonists are barely more than wavy outlines with thatch hair and black-patch clothes. Everyone won’t like it, but this is a genuine work of art.