Remembrance of Giannalberto Bendazzi (1946-2021)

 Remembrance of Giannalberto Bendazzi (1946-2021)

 by 

John A. Lent

 

I first met Giannalberto Bendazzi when I picked him up at the Philadelphia International Airport, April 8, 2002, but I knew of his contributions to animation studies for years. He was staying at my home for a few days. On the drive to my house, Giannalberto began talking about his wife. I chimed in about mine, just having been divorced--a second time, no less. Then, out of nowhere, Bendazzi tells me he takes his wife to the beach every week. Things can’t be that bad if he does that. Not so, he snapped back; he took her there hoping the sharks would get her. A sample of the dark humor he was capable of.

For the next few days, we talked about everything--of course, animation, a book he invited me to co-edit, our Italianness, and, of course, his wife. We spent a day in New York City with Oscar-winning animator and professor John Canemaker and others, had a potluck dinner at my house with Temple University colleagues and graduate students interested in animation, and visited the nearby Brandywine Museum and its Wyeth family collections. Bendazzi also lectured on animator Alexandre Alexeieff to a large class of film students at Temple University after which he described as a listless bunch.

About a month later, we met again at Penn Station in Manhattan. Bendazzi wanted to fill me in on a huge book project he was planning with mutual friend, Keith Bradbury of Australia. They had invited me to join them in co-editing a 16-volume, tentatively titled, Understanding Animation:  An Anthology of Documents and Sources. Indiana University Press showed a keen interest in publishing the books to be extended over ten years. As far as I know, the project did not come to fruition; Giannalberto wrote us in April 2003, saying he wanted to put it on the “back burner.” Keith suggested that he and I continue, but this did not materialize either. I think Bendazzi wanted time to continue where his 1994 groundbreaking Cartoons left off, organizing what was to be the three-volume Animation:  A World History. He asked me to write the sections on Taiwan and India, and coordinate with the collaboration of Hassan Muthalib, the Southeast Asia part, including Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Animation:  A World History hit snags along an eight-year journey, about which Bendazzi lamented to me. John Libbey Publishing was commissioned to bring out the volumes, but needed a co-publisher for an American edition. Multiple publishers, including Indiana University Press and University of California Press, rejected the proposition, complaining the book was too large. Focal Press, affiliated with Taylor & Francis, eventually published the nearly 1,100 pages in three volumes in 2016.

I saw Giannalberto twice more, when we had dinner at the Milan airport Oct. 24, 2002, during a layover I had enroute to Lviv and at a comics and animation conference in Jilin, China, in September 2006. We kept up a correspondence at our lazy paces; his emails were personal at times, philosophical some times, sad and happy, humble and proud, but usually, peppered with some sarcasm and much wit. When I sent him a review I wrote of his work, he replied:  “I received the review, made three somersaults and sent it to my publisher. We have a very well-coordinated opinion of each other:  I tell him he is an idiot, and he behaves so” (May 22, 2017). On one occasion, he labeled his publishers “slow as a snail,” another publisher as “the worst bunch of screw-ups on the planet,” and bemoaned the “geological times” of another publisher.

He could also tangle up emotions as in this Sept. 18, 2014 email:

 

you bet that I will come to see you!

After the publication of the book, I will be travelling around to present it, and get some rewarding appraisal. Actually, I don’t give anything for appraisal=vanity. Appraisal is a substitute for love. I wrote all my books in order to demonstrate that I am honest, intelligent, in other words, worth [sic] to be loved.

Mine was a lifelong search for this thing, but I didn’t succeed.

I’m 68 and I’m alone.

I have no complaints:  I did my best, with sincerity.

I’m deeply devoted to animation, for its qualities but also because it is underloved. So I do my best to promote it and enrich the number of its loving specialists.

I always felt at home with animators from every country of the world because in general, they are sensitive, kindhearted, altruistic.

In other words, loving and lovable people.

Thank you for listening. I realize that this confession is almost embarrassing…

Your faithful,

Giannalberto

 

Giannalberto was always humbly thankful. When, on June 22, 2019, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Universidade Lusόfona of Lisbon, that he said was “the first that an animation scholar ever received,” he sent many of us a note saying,

 

I thank all of you for the affection and teaching you have given me, in many ways, over many years of career. This result would not have been possible without you. I hope (I believe) that this is one more step in the ascent towards a generalized conception of animation as an art.

Thank you, Giannalberto (June 26, 2019)

 

That was Giannalberto Bendazzi as a human being:  kind, frank, intelligent, and accommodating. He usually called me a friend which I was appreciative of and honored by.

As for Giannalberto Bendazzi as a scholar, his accomplishments provide the answer. That he was a pioneer in animation studies and one of the field’s most outstanding representatives and promoters is undisputable. He took the route to a career in animation as so many of us have--via training and employment in other disciplines; his was law, which he studied but never practiced. Instead, he became a film critic and in the 1970s, began easing his way into animation, especially its history, a virgin topic outside of coverage of Disney, Fleischer, and other U.S. studios.

Giannalberto wrote books, monographs, and articles on various animators, such as Quirino Cristiani, Italian-born Argentine who created the world’s first animated feature, Osvaldo Cavandoli, Bruno Bozzetto, Alexandre Alexeieff, and others, as well as his best-known compilations, Cartoons:  One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation and Animation:  A World History. He held teaching stints at Università degli Studi di Milano (2002-2009), Nanyang Technological University of Singapore (2013-2015), and Griffith University in Australia; lectured and presented papers in Italy, U.S., China, Singapore, and elsewhere, and co-founded ASIFA-Italy (1982) and Society for Animation Studies (1987).

His death, at age 75, on Dec. 13, 2021, left a huge void in the profession of animation studies and in the hearts of those of us who had the privilege of knowing him, that will be difficult to fill.

An Obituary & Remembrance of Manga Historian Shimizu Isao

Shimizu Isao,  2015 Japan Cultural Affairs Agency Award winner

by Ronald Stewart 

Shimizu Isao, a giant in manga studies scholarship (and founding International Editorial Board member for IJOCA) left us on March 2, 2021 at age 81, after a battle with prostate cancer. Shimizu was astonishingly prolific. Over a period of roughly fifty-years from when he began to publish on manga history, he penned and/or edited in excess of 100 books, but this was just part of his legacy.

Born in Tokyo in 1939, Shimizu had toyed with the idea of becoming a cartoonist or animator after graduating university, but found himself instead doing editing work between 1963 and 1984 for publishers in the heart of Tokyo’s Jimbochō secondhand book district. His growing interest in satirical prints and cartoons, particularly those of the Edo (1600-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) periods, as well as comics history in general, led to him haunt those used bookstores. He managed to amass a huge collection of historical comic art cheaply, at a time when there was very little interest in this material. His home overflowing with a collection that swelled to over two million items (magazines, clippings, books and prints) and became the Japanese Manga Archives (Nihon Manga Shiryō-kan). This collection not only enabled Shimizu to research, exhibit and publish using this material, but he also allowed other historians, museums and students access for their research.

The caricature used on his name cards and website

 

 

 

 

 

Public institutions had long ignored this kind of material as ephemera of little value. However, as Shimizu’s writing, talks and exhibitions began to draw attention to pre-war manga history, his collection and his expertise became sought after by more and more museums, galleries, libraries, universities, and the media, and became integral to a number of major exhibitions in Japan. These include, his early “Meiji Manga” exhibition at Machida City Museum in 1978, “300 Years of Japanese Manga” at Kawasaki City Museum in 1996, “Images of Meiji – The World of French Artist George Bigot in Japan” at Itami City Art Museum in 2002, and the “Grand Manga History: Tracing back to Edo” at Kyoto International Manga Museum in 2015. At the time of his death, the large “Giga – Manga” exhibition that he supervised – consisting of comic art from Edo satirical prints, called giga, to early popular comics of the 1930s - is touring a number of public and private museums throughout the country. He had also been involved in exhibitions and manga related events in France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Giga Manga exhibition catalogue 2020-2021

After Shimizu quit his editing work around 1984 to concentrate full time on researching and writing on satirical cartoons and manga history, he was employed as a research associate at Kawasaki City Museum for nearly two decades. In 2006, he became an advisor to the Kyoto International Manga which acquired a large portion of his collection. The “Shimizu Collection” there forms the core of the museum’s pre-war historical holdings. At both of these institutions, Shimizu helped foster a number of young curators and researchers active at various institutions today. At Teikyo Heisei University, where Shimizu worked as a professor for over a decade, more than a few students had an interest in satirical cartoons and manga history kindled by his lectures.

1995 Poster for a public lecture

Shimizu was also involved with the creation in 2001 of the Japan Society for the Study of Cartoons and Comics (Nihon Manga Gakkai) and was a member of its inaugural board of directors. This remains the only national society for this field of study in Japan. However, Shimizu no doubt felt slightly marginalized, for the vast majority of the society’s more than 350 members are interested first and foremost in post-war and modern narrative comics expression (rather than Shimizu’s first love of satirical cartoons and pre-war comics history). Moreover, for the limited number of younger scholars who now actively research early manga history, Shimizu’s long view perspective on this history - a perspective built upon earlier manga histories which connects comics to a centuries-old humorous art tradition - had become the subject of criticism. Nevertheless, while Shimizu’s books are primarily aimed at a general audience, many of them are, and will remain for many years to come, essential reading for any scholar of manga. In Yoshimura Kazuma and Jaqueline Berndt’s 2020 book Manga Studies, which introduces thirty foundational books in the field to Japanese readers, Shimizu’s 1991 classic Manga History (Manga no Rekishi), is at the top of the list as a “first step into Japanese manga history research.”

Bigot Sketch Collection 1 - Manners and Customs of Meiji 

Shimizu’s earliest books were two self-published cartoon collections in the early 1970s. The first grew out of his fascination with French artist Georges Ferdinand Bigot who produced satirical cartoon magazines while living in Japan at the end of the nineteenth-century. The other book was a rare collection of wartime political cartoons. These two interests, Georges Bigot and wartime cartoons, along with Edo period humorous prints, Meiji period satirical magazine cartoons and cartoonists, manga pioneer Okamoto Ippei, early postwar comics, and newspaper comic strips, were themes he would revisit throughout his career, revealing surprising new discoveries each time. Shimizu wrote or edited eighteen

Manga Shonen and Akahon Manga

publications on Bigot, many of which have been reprinted multiple times; his 1992 book Bigot’s Japanese Sketch Collection (Bigōt Nihon sobyō-shū) has gone through an incredible thirty-one printings. Among his other publications that are highly regarded are his 1989 book on the early postwar magazine ‘Manga Shōnen’ and akahon manga books, his 1997 book on Hasegawa Machiko’s Sasae-san comic strip, and his 2008 book on the pioneering story manga artist Yokoi Fukujirō. For scholars of manga history, his chronologies of manga publications, manga dictionary, and his reprints early satirical magazines, in particular his 1986 series Manga Magazine Museum (Manga zasshi hakubutsukan), are indispensable references. His self-published journal Satirical Cartoon Research (Fūshi-ga kenkyū), 48 issues between 1992 to 2005, is an important resource for scholars of political cartoons.

Shimizu’s efforts to preserve, record and bring manga’s early history to a broad audience earned him the 1986 “Special Jury Award” from the Japanese Cartoonists Association and in 2015 a “Special Achievement Award” from the Japan Agency for Cultural Affairs. It is no exaggeration to say Shimizu’s achievement in making material available through his collection, exhibitions and publications has made it possible for a new generation to conduct pre-war manga history research today.

Pages from Fushiga Kenkyu journal showing research on Shonen Puck

My own research on early manga history was sparked by Shimizu’s publications on Meiji satirical cartoons, written in highly readable jargon-free prose. I had the good fortune to meet him a number of times over the years beginning in 1995 when I attended one of his public lectures. He acted as chair in 2002 for my first academic paper in Japanese on Frank A Nankivell and his student, Japan’s first career mangaka Kitazawa Rakuten (for more details, see Fusami Ogi’s interview with Shimizu in IJOCA 5(2) 2003). The last time we met was at another talk public talk in 2018 on Rakuten. As always, I was amazed by his encyclopedic knowledge of not just Japanese, but also foreign cartoon history (He could be described in Japanese as an ikijibiki or a ‘living dictionary’). His curiosity was also insatiable, and his eyes would sparkle whenever he a conversation turned to manga and cartoon history research. While my own take on the history of manga development has come to diverge from his over the years, his work continues to be important for me. On the bookshelves of my study, I keep over fifty of his books close at hand as a constant source of information and inspiration. I, like many others, felt his ever-inquisitive mind would continue to provide us with more research, discoveries and exhibitions. Rest in peace Shimizu-sensei, and thank you. 

Some of Shimizu Isao's many books on my bookshelves

A version of this will appear in print in IJOCA 23-1.