Veltroni fears the violence of manga, like the communists the militarism of Grendizer
If confirmed, the news would be tragic: a young North Korean returning from China was sentenced to death for having introduced the "Squid Game" series to the country of the red dynasty of the Kim through a USB stick. Example of brutal violence in reality that dwarfs the very fantasies of Far Eastern productions. And in the face of this ferocity, even the considerations that Walter Veltroni made in Corriere della Sera on manga appear a bit pathetic, profuse by a sweet smell of flowers from public gardens.
Walter Veltroni and manga… Did we feel the need for a Veltronian lectio on the oriental fantasy universe reproduced in strips? Perhaps not, even if one thinks that a positive indication comes from the article published at the beginning of November by Corsera : Veltroni has really renounced his quirinaling aspirations if he part pen in remains against a monument of Japanese culture. Manga is in Tokyo, as pizza is in Italy. We would be a little offended if a politician from another country said that pizza is bad. Veltroni with regard to manga says that those stories "always imbued with paroxysmal violence and therefore unreal arouse discontent". In a world where an immortal Communist dictator shoots a boy for the crime of a USB flash drive, perhaps “real” violence should arouse more apprehension; but in the secondary world of leftist culture, words are sometimes feared more than facts.
Veltroni concludes his article with ecumenism (is he still thinking about the Quirinale?): He specifies that in any case we must not fear the "East Wind" of comics read backwards and confesses that he is not in any case able to "give a distinctive judgment on the cultural phenomenon in progress ".
If, on the one hand, the suspension of judgment by the most cultured of left-wing politicians returns to raise questions about the need for that article, on the other it appears more polite to us than the dogmatic sentences of condemnation, real "fatwas" , launched by the communists at the end of the seventies when Ufo-Robot , Grendizer , Mazinger burst from the television screens … The Berlin Wall was still standing, the gerontocracy of the Communist Party dictated the law from Berlin to Vladivostok, but the Italian left feared "militarism Japanese "in cartoon.
In January 1979 on Repubblica the deputy of the PCI (but previously co-founder of that poetic and peaceful assembly that was Avanguardia Operaia ) Silverio Corvisieri warned against the enthusiasm for Grendizer who was at the same time "man, modern samurai and ultra-powerful space war machine "And urged" democratic parents "to be watched.
Other articles followed, even parliamentary interpellations even if the civil battle was lost: that children preferred Japanese cartoons to the narratives of Unity or Feltrinelli was perhaps the first creak in the moloch of royal communism.
The writer was one of those children that the Italian Communists had not managed to save from Japanese militarism … Years later I would have had the pleasure of interviewing … the voice of Daisuke in Grendizer and Hiroshi Sheba in Jeeg Robot : the Italian actor and voice actor Romano Malaspina. Twenty-five years had passed but the timbre of the "epic" voice was the same; it was enough to close your eyes and you were a child again in front of the heroes of your childhood.
The Marquis Malaspina, a refined intellectual, told me interesting things in the interview published in Giordano Bruno Guerri's L'Independente : “They made a parliamentary interpellation against me! It was really believed that cartoons would bring Italy back to barbarism… And yet – Malaspina was animated – every day I collected trunks of children's letters. They were love letters with drawings of little flowers. The children understood the sentimental aspect that I had instilled in my characters: they distinguished very well the romantic soul of Daisuke from his mechanical robot armor. And above all they understood the true message of the UFO-Robots which did not consist in a praise of violence, but in the idea that to defend the earth from its enemies one must be determined ”.
In short, Malaspina claimed the chivalrous soul of "his" characters. Then he told me other more goliardic things (including some broadcasts to his "personal enemy", the voice actor Ferruccio Amendola) that were not included in the interview. The most amusing of the parts left out was the memory of a doctor, of an austere medical luminary who had confided to him as in the evening, locked in his room with his wife, before the fateful impact he shouted at the top of his voice: "Space halberd!" and here the images of Japanese robots mingle with the notes of "Gianna" released in 1978 as the first episode of Grendizer : the song with which Rino Gaetano talked about "a different world, but made of sex" and ended with a smile mocking and joyful the years of lead. Perhaps this is why left-wing intellectuals so feared Japanese cartoons, the television children of manga: because they divulged a poetic, chivalrous narrative, completely free from the slogans of communist cultural totalitarianism; because they helped to turn the page with respect to the years of ideological fury with a "space halberd" that the doctor used to make love and not to make war!
Walter think about it.
The post Veltroni fears the violence of the manga, like the communists the militarism of Grendizer appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/veltroni-teme-la-violenza-dei-manga-come-i-comunisti-il-militarismo-di-goldrake/ on Sat, 27 Nov 2021 03:45:00 +0000.