DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga, Father of Anime
The Smithsonian has assembled an excellent career retrospective of Osamu Tezuka, generally acknowledged as the greatest innovator in Japanese anime and manga, hence the title of the series opening tomorrow at the Freer. Influenced early on by Walt Disney, there is some bitter irony in the fact that his greatest reach into American culture was via a work that was never credited to him: Disney’s blatant rip-off of Tezuka’s Kimba the White Lion, in The Lion King.
Kimba doesn’t find his way into the nine programs that the Freer will screen over the course of the next month, but many of Tezuka’s other famous works do, including the enduring and well-known Pinocchio-as-android story of Astro Boy. A big-budget American CGI version of little Astro is currently tanking in theaters, but you can see the real deal on a big screen at the kick-off of the retrospective tomorrow, as the Freer screens four original Astro Boy shorts. Manga scholar and Astro Boy expert and essayist Frederik Schodt will be on hand to talk about the program. Schodt will reappear throughout this weekend’s Tezuka programs, along with a number of other speakers who have studied and written extensively on the subject.
The Astro Boy program screens tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Freer, with the rest of the Osamu Tezuka series continuing until December 13. All programs are free.
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Guerrilla Film Fest
The GFF took a breather last year, but is back in 2009 under the banner of the Washington Film Institute. This year the festival, which tends to favor ultra-indie and underground fare, screens 20 shorts in four programs over two evenings, tomorrow and Saturday. There is also a reception each night that runs from an hour and a half before the first program starts, and continues until 10:30 p.m.
Tomorrow and Saturday at the Goethe-Institut. Programs begin at 7:30 and 9 p.m. each night. $16 for each program, which also includes admission to the reception on Saturday.
