La mort transfigurée dans les mangas animés d’Isao Takahata

Abstract

In a world of images like our own, the manga not only offers special access to the subterranean dynamics of contemporary imaginaries, it also provides a veritable reflection on the world in its own right. Composed of disparate elements, the manga reflects (on) the anxieties and torments of our day and age, but also the way in which this age seizes on the future. Consequently, the figure of death occupies a central place among these imaginaries. Most often dominated by an apocalyptic vision of a world given over to chaos and destruction, the figure of death has consistently haunted manga production. In this concert of the end of the world, the work of Isao Takahata appears both original and unusual. A paean to impermanence and fragility, his work sounds out as an invitation to reinvent immortality under the stimulus of perceptible experience. What makes life so precious—and the teleologies of power so insipid, Takahata seems to say—is not consciousness of finitude, but rather of the infinitude of the perceptible and what it brings in tow : the possibility of dialoguing with death.

Keywords

• Mangas
• Death
• Imaginary
• Perceptible Experience
• Apocalypse