Osamu Tezuka, “Jumping” (1984)
Boing! BOING! BOI-I-I-ING-G-G!!! Here comes “Jumping” by the legendary Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astroboy, who made a fair few experimental anime film shorts in a long career that spanned creating manga comics and animated series and full-length feature films. “Jumping” jumps well above its weight in cartoon kingdom for its innovative adoption of a particular first-person point-of-view to present a snapshot of the human condition around the world in just under seven minutes. An unseen child trudging, hopping and skipping down a dusty road in a sleepy country town makes a silent wish and suddenly discovers he can jump longer and higher than he ever did before. Each successive jump is higher and longer than the one before and soon he is leaping above trees and over entire forests. He bounds towards an industrial estate and jumps over tall chimney stacks puffing out thick black smoke. He somersaults over skyscrapers and lets himself go into free-fall down, down to the busy city street just to bounce up again before the traffic warden booking the driver for speeding can get hold of him. He flies through a steel tower, bounces onto wharves and ships and leaps onto distant islands and other countries.
But it’s one thing to wish for something and quite another to have that wish granted … and often you end up biting off more than you can chew as the child discovers. There are suggestions throughout the film that the child nearly comes a-cropper in most situations he bounces into: he lands in a hen-house, he finds a lost toy in a forest (which might suggest another child has gone missing) and he gets attacked by a magpie. In the city, he meets a man preparing to commit suicide, nearly tumbles into a crane’s maw and intrudes on a woman sunbathing in the nude. There are close encounters with a jumbo jet and a helicopter. Farther afield, the child is nearly speared by angry hunters and becomes a casualty of war in a foreign country. A bomb explodes and he tumbles down into Hell to meet two demons.
The plot appears at first to be very simple, featuring just rhythmic bouncing that gets bigger and longer and increases in pace and tension as scenes flash by faster and the child starts losing control over where he lands and where the next bounce takes him. There is no dialogue either, just background sounds and the sounds of leaping, flying and landing on solid ground or grass. At first people are surprised to see the child but later become hostile towards him. What had once been a simple, friendly, peaceful world becomes more aggressive, complicated and dangerous. A lot can be read into the minimal plot: some people may see a moral that you should be careful about what you wish or strive for as the result may be more than what you can handle; others may find that it’s only by seeing things as others do that the world opens up in all its richness and complexity. And why shouldn’t children dream big? – it’s by dreaming big that you learn about the big bad world out there and if you’re lucky, you come away wiser and thankful for the things you already have, boring though they might be.
The hand-drawn animation is exacting in the depiction of weather phenomena, rural and urban landscapes and technical details of objects, buildings and technology. Animated figures look very cartoony but until near the end this is not a drawback as they appear very briefly. If the film has a weakness, it’s that the demons the child meets aren’t at all fearsome but merely more cartoon characters. The encounter doesn’t come over as terrifying or intense in any way and the child is merely relieved when it’s all over, as if he’d just had a dream that went bad.
This is a worthwhile film for students of film and other creative art forms (such as writing fiction) to see how a very simple story with no dialogue and with just one main character whose point of view forms the whole plot can portray a complex theme or express a philosophy about life and humanity.