Blackjack was and continues to be for me in many ways a definitive anime film. It doesn’t have the distinction of being the first anime ever made, nor the first I ever saw. The manga it is based on isn’t the first ever written, although it comes directly from the body of work by Osamu Tezuka, the ‘God of Manga’. It’s not as action packed as anime in the vein of Akira, nor has it the psychological depth of something like Perfect Blue. It does in fact have an odd fifties quaintness about it, as if the characters could never say anything harsher than ‘darn’ and extreme forms of expression made in giant bipedal machines and/or with ludicrously large weapons of immediate-area destruction would be completely out of the question. There is little about it that is cute, scantily clad, or otherwise winsome. Blackjack, when you actually think about it, seems to lack almost every single element that has made anime the popular entertainment medium it is.
But you’ll notice I said ‘almost’.
Not necessarily anime at its finest, it is rather storytelling at its finest and that makes all the difference and then some. Not that this should come as a surprise. Anyone who knows even a little about Osamu Tezuka will know that the impact he made on the comic industry in Japan was nothing short of revolutionary. Influenced by very early Disney, Tezuka’s stylistic legacy has lived on for decades in the large, doe-eyed faces of both human and non-human characters, but what made even more of an impact on the art form was the conventions Tezuka took from film, effectively turning a strip into a storyboard. Ground zero of this then radical departure from established comic forms was New Treasure Island (1947), and specifically the first eight pages of the one-hundred and eighty page story. Against all tradition, these first eight pages were dedicated to a single, simple and almost completely unrelated scene – a car arriving at a wharf carrying the protagonist bound for a boat about to sail.
It might not sound like a big deal now, but it was to manga what the introduction of colour technology was to black and white film. The use of cinematic techniques like panning and close-ups in these first eight pages, the frame by frame progression of the action drawn out over time, was so dramatic in its visual style and narrative power Osamu Tezuka is today quite accurately thought of as being almost single-handedly responsible for the form of modern manga, and by extension anime. Blackjack not only brings this fact to mind, it could be presented in court as evidence.
A medical drama it may be, substituting the uneasy fascination with the human body exposed for what it is – a machine of tissue and tendons, chemicals and cells – for the gratuitous blood-splattering violence of other action-genre anime and replacing the sword and gun with the scalpel, but is gripping nonetheless. In effortless Hitchcock-ian degrees, the mystery surrounding Supermankind, the inexplicable death of Blackjack’s young patient and the purpose of the insistent woman caller carefully, perfectly unfolds. The doctor himself is satisfyingly mysterious, a genius out of grace, the implacable hero harbouring a near fatal weakness, his young ward Pinoko who seems to understand what lies beneath his seemingly mercenary facade. The apparent villain, Jo Carol Brane, herself only really a victim in the end, is nasty enough to hate yet damaged enough to almost feel sorry for and races Blackjack towards his fate with the best of intentions in the most callous of ways. The main device of the story, the moral questions surrounding humans playing god are personal rather than preachy, permeating almost all aspects of the tale, from Ms Carol’s intensely traumatic upbringing to Blackjack’s natural surgical skills. At what point does one distinguish between helping life and controlling it?
Technically speaking, the style of the animation might seem a little primitive, closer to frame illustration than cell animation, yet the dramatic strength of the narrative makes this film not only better than one might expect but better than some of its more modern counterparts. Osamu Tezuka was himself a qualified doctor, and the director of this Blackjack movie (there have been seven OAVs released in the US in addition to the Madman released movie), Osamu Dezaki, who worked under Tezuka on Astro Boy, employed as Medical Supervisor another qualified surgeon, Akira Nagai, so there is nothing unbelievable or corny about the terminology bandied about. It is in fact this believability that gives the film a lot of its dramatic tension and makes the story so effective, without which nothing would really work.
Blackjack is inarguably a classic, a masterpiece of its genre. It exists to remind us, amidst all the technology we can possibly handle, the gun battles, fight scenes, car chases, psychic wars and larger-than-life characters, that the story is and should always be god.