000104 - Tezuka Exhibition lecture & Death Note DS game

There's a touring gallery exhibition called "Tezuka: the Marvel of Manga" that opened at the National Gallery of Victoria today. I decided to go along and attend a FREE lecture on Japanese Anime, Cartoons and Comics by a Mr. Shimizu.

I was about 5 minutes late for the lecture because I had a brain-fart and thought it was being held at the other NGV at Federation Square. D`oh! Anyway, I only missed the introduction of Mr. Shimizu. The lecture was pretty interesting for the first 30 minutes or so but dragged on quite a bit when he started discussing anime. It was good that he had quite a sense of humour, saying how there's thousands of kilometres of manga produced in Japan today if you laid them all out and literally voicing the Tezuka manga pages' sound effects! The translator or interpreter, however, didn't seem that amused herself though, in fact she seemed really nervous and translated well ahead at times (she was reading notes rather than translating off what was spoken).

I liked seeing all the really really old stuff that Osamu Tezuka had worked on when his mangaka career began. Mr. Shimizu also showed the Tokyo apartment building where other now famous mangakas followed Tezuka to break into manga in the post-war torn Japan at the time. This reminded me of one of my favourite movies, The Manga Apartment, which I've yet to locate a DVD of since watching it on SBS TV a while back.

Anyway, I had to leave before the lecture actually finished because I had a meeting with a friend in the city.

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They're making a Death Note DS game! I want it!!

That is all.

Next up: Supanova Sydney `06 summary (this time for sure)