JEAN-PIERRE CLATOT / AFP
Leiji Matsumoto (here in Annecy in 2011) died last week at the age of 85 from heart failure, the production company Toei announced on Monday February 20.
MANGA – “Harlock, Captain Harlock, from the depths of the golden night. » A credits that will have marked a whole generation of young French people in the 1980s and will have been Leiji Matsumoto’s greatest success. Legend of manga and Japanese animation, the artist died last week at the age of 85 of heart failure, the production company Toei announced on Monday February 20.
During a career of several decades, the mangaka had made himself known in particular for works of science fiction like Yamato, the space battleship (1974) or Galaxy Express 999 (1977). But it’s mostly the series Captain Harlock (Harlock in original version and in English), recounting the adventures of the space pirate with the barred face of a scar and the long black cape marked with a skull, which made him essential throughout the world.
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“Harlock is my most faithful friend”
Released in Japan between 1977 and 1979 and then adapted into a cartoon, this work was a worldwide success, notably broadcast on French television from 1980. “Harlock is my most faithful and oldest friend. He is my alter ego in his determination.assured Leiji Matsumoto in 2011 at the Annecy Animation Film Festival, where he came to present the trailer for the film Harlock, space corsair.
Born in 1938 on the island of Kyushu (southwest of Japan), this precocious genius, admirer of the great mangaka Osamu Tezuka, had published his first manga at the age of 15, The Adventures of a Bee, after winning a design contest. The artist had also said that he was inspired in his work by the atomic bomb dropped by the United States in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, when he was 7 years old and lived in Fukuoka, 300 kilometers away.
“It traumatized me but was inspiring, like all my youthful experiences. When I was doing the 400 shots, rock climbing, swimming in dangerous waters. Personal experience is essential for a creator, even of science fiction”he said.
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Recalling his very first trip to France or his flight to Rio de Janeiro aboard the Concorde plane, he said in 2013 that he had “already drawn all this in (his) manga, before having lived it. A kind of premonition”. This icon of pop culture had also signed in the early 2000s a medium-length animated film whose Discovery album by the French group Daft Punk provided the soundtrack.
Decorated in 2012 by France with the medal of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, Matsumoto had celebrated in 2013 his 60 years of career at the Festival of the comic strip of Angoulême, of which he was the guest of honor. . He had more recently participated in the Japan expo, a major exhibition dedicated to Japanese pop culture, in Paris in 2019 with another manga legend, his compatriot Go Nagai (Grendizer).
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