Tokiwa: The Manga Apartment

Tokiwa-so, a rundown house in Tokyo, hosted many of the most important postwar artists-creators who invited the contemporary manga, or Japanese comics. While Osamu Tezuka and others turned Tokiwa-so into a mythic site of creativity, Ichikawa penetrates and questions this heady utopia through Terada Hiroo, whose baseball manga pursues an older, more innocent style, and Tsuge Yoshiharu, whose complexities prefigured the new world of manga we know today. Thus, Ichikawa combines nostalgic documentation/recreation of 1950s Japan with a sometimes wistful evocation of different routes that this emergent art form might have followed. —Hong Kong International Film Festival