Likely the most interesting thing about Fujimoto‘s illustrations is their attempt to mimic film. Jokes are written as would be in a film script, the characters are moving supported by an inaudible soundtrack, and “Goodbye, Eri” goes so far as to base the entire manga on four evenly sized rectangular pages per page, like a storyboard. It’s enticing to write this style of manga off as nothing than a worse version of the medium it imitates—simply snippets of a film, no sound, no motion. As a friend of mine (likely disparagingly) summarised it: “His focus seems to be emulating films”
However, I don’t think that tells the whole story. Fujimoto is a huge film nerd who I bet constantly fantasises about seeing his work on the big screen, but that doesn’t mean he’s merely writing storyboards for the sake of a future adaptation. He loves film to the point his first serialised manga Fire Punch is fundamentally based on the theme of acting and cinema.
And just that is the catch.
Fire Punch is a deconstruction of acting, of adjusting your own values—at least on the surface—for the sake of the world which surrounds you, your whole life culminating on a grand stage; in short, it functions as a fundamental outline of the nature of film, or rather, what film means to people.
Through Fujimoto’s illustrative style, it then turns these thematic layers beyond the narrative itself, up to a meta-level. The characters become LITERALLY a part of the cinematic form of storytelling, metaphysically bending into shapes which befit the cinematic panelling. An examination of film not only through the immediate plot beats, but extending to the drawings themselves.
The next argument to be made from the disparagers, then, is that this doesn’t change the fact his works are mere imitations of film, and the meta-level of “being in a film” would have simply worked better if the characters really had been, well, in a film. Again, I don’t see it that way. By deliberately being a medium different from film, yet nevertheless being a commentary on film, it becomes MORE effective in its commentary than it would have been had it been another film in the first place. By being outside of film, Fire Punch directly forces us to confront its nature of imitating film.
When Agni has a clichéd superhero training montage that feels adapted straight from a movie, since we’ve all seen such scenes a thousand times, we are made to mentally include an imaginary soundtrack within the scene, which then abruptly cuts off when the scene comedically jumps to Togata making dick jokes, back to playing again when we get kicked back into the montage. We are unknowingly forced into creating an image of an imaginary film within our head, thereby FORCING us, the readers, to directly become a part of the creation of film ourselves. We are not only seeing Fire Punch examine film—by working our brain to fill in the blank spaces, we are examining film ourselves.
End of analysis, now to a tangent: It makes you wonder. Since all of Fujimoto’s works are drawn in this style, what about his works that aren’t centered around commentating film? Chainsaw Man, Goodbye, Eri, and Fire Punch are all supplemented through their cinematic form of panelling, but what about, for instance, Look Back, which recently received a film adaptation? Personally I believe the film is better than the manga – animation and most of all the incredible soundtrack give it a lustre which the manga lacks. Still, does that mean all his works, except those three mentioned earlier, will simply become irrelevant in the face of their superior adaptations? Honestly, I’m not sure. I can’t decide yet. Likely I will only be able to judge once the next adaptation of Fujimoto’s non-film-centric works rolls around. I need to see it directly, not just imagine it, to make proper judgement.
Fin.
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