Like his most famous hero, the space corsair Harlock, Leiji Matsumoto has never lowered the flag. The mangaka and prolific animation author died on February 13, at the age of 85, announced the Toei production house, Monday, February 20. He leaves behind a boundless spatial pantheon, populated by free and dark heroes and built on a career of more than sixty years.
Matsumoto was born on January 25, 1938 in Kurume, Fukuoka Prefecture, on the island of Kyushu, in southern Japan. Fourth of a family of seven children, he developed a passion for drawing very early on, published as a teenager in local newspapers and magazines. And released his first manga at 15, The Adventures of a Beefollowing an editorial design competition.
But, when he was younger, it was the job of an aviator that made him dream. Like his father, an Imperial Army pilot and World War II veteran. Young Matsumoto’s vocation was quickly thwarted by sight problems. “In high school, I also wanted to become a mechanical engineer, but the family’s modest economic situation meant that they could not afford to send me to university.explained the author in March 2019 to the World. As I was earning some money with my published drawings, I decided to give up my dream and go to Tokyo to draw to help my family. All I had in my pocket were my brushes and the one-way ticket. »
From a line of samurai
Amazed by American cartoons, moved by Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the wind and captivated by Osamu Tezuka, the manga master for whom he did some minor work, the young man began his career in the late 1950s by drawing shojos, mangas for young girls, often bluettes. Beginnings that he does not like to talk about too much. It is however in these first boards that he will develop his characteristic feminine silhouettes, slender and sensual, which prefigure his diaphanous heroines like the adventurer Emeraldas or the mysterious Maetel of Galaxy Express 999. Features that he borrows from his muse, the actress Marianne Hold, with whom he fell in love as a teenager when he discovered her in Marianne of my youthby Julien Duvivier, a 1954 film.
“Until I die, even as a skeleton, I will continue to fight for my goals” Leiji Matsumoto
In Tokyo, he befriends the designer Miyako Maki, manga pioneer and future inventor of the famous Licca-chan, the Japanese Barbie. He married her in 1961. At the same time, he sought to emancipate himself artistically and abandoned his birth name for the pseudonym Leiji. “Akira is a common name that didn’t have enough impact. As my mother comes from a line of samurai, so I chose to call myself Leiji which means “infinity fighter”.he told the Monde. This is how he signed in 1968, Sexaroid, his first major success but also the prologue of his work of science fiction for adults. Very inspired by the drawing of Jean-Claude Mézières and by Barbarella by Jean-Claude Forest, the comic strip tells the adventures of a secret agent gynoid.
A decade of 1970s followed for the author, who became a star mangaka and one of the conductors of Japanese space opera. In 1974, in an epic saga where humans are endangered by an alien invader, he transforms the Yamatothe main battleship of the Japanese Navy sunk in 1945. This cult saga in Japan, one of the first animation blockbusters reinvented many times, is still less known in France than Captain Harlock (“Harlock” in the original version), the space pirate sailing on theArcadiawhich young French people discovered on the program “Récré A2” in 1980. Leiji Matsumoto was also one of the first mangakas to make a name for himself in France, when Japanese animated series surged after the success of Grendizer.
Death’s Head and War
Less serious than his favorite pirate who claims freedom without mercy, Leiji Matsumoto nevertheless wears the symbol, a skull, on the cap he wears and which he never gets rid of, not even when he is made a knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in October 2012: “This means that until I die, even as a skeleton, I will continue to fight for my goals. The idea is not necessarily to scare but to show determination. It is also a symbol of freedom. »
Leiji Matsumoto carries pacifist messages in his stories, where the enemies are not faceless brutes or humanity
In 1977, he gave Harlock his own series but wrote two other important ones: Queen Emeraldas whose heroine is the female counterpart of the pirate, but also Galaxy Express 999, which tells the adventures of Tetsuro, a human who boards a space train with the help of a beautiful and secretive alien with long blonde hair, Maetel. The latter is also the sister of Emeraldas; because in the galaxy on the verge of rupture fantasized by Matsumoto, all the works and the fights are linked.
A theme runs through the designer’s bibliography: war. “I was 7 years old when the Second World War ended in Japan”, he regularly reminded, he who is a native of the island which is also home to Nagasaki. Marked by the bombardments and the return of his father at the end of the conflict, Leiji Matsumoto carries pacifist messages in his stories, where the enemies are not brutes without a face or humanity. “One thing my father made me realize at a very young age (…), it’s that behind the victims, the enemies, there was a family that would be devastated. »
Besides the space sagas, his fantastic new comics (24 stories from a long time ago, in 1975) and stories imbued with westerns (Gun Frontier in 1972), Leiji Matsumoto wrote several war stories, little distributed in France, like The Cockpit (1975) et Cockpit Legend (1999), denouncing the absurdity of the conflict through the tragic fates of Japanese and American pilots during the war.
Return to favor with Daft Punk
The 1980s will be less favorable to the author who must try to put order in a huge production and a “Leijiverse” made complicated by the multiplication of characters and certain concepts which allow him to justify inconsistencies from one comic to the other. Starting with the “Toki no Wa”, an idea that is dear to him and that wants time to form a loop. The Ring of the Nibelungen (1989), his reinterpretation of the famous Tetralogy of Wagner space opera version and great synthesis of his masterpieces, struggles to convince. The series is however avant-garde, considered as the first manga diffused on Internet since 1997. The notoriety of the mangaka is eclipsed in Europe in particular; the fighter of infinity then begins a crossing of the desert. Until his collaboration with Daft Punk.
At the request of the electronic music duo, he took part in an animated feature film in 2003 (Interstella 5555) in which he puts his imagination at the service of the album Discovery, released two years earlier. The resounding and international success definitively links the imagery of the “Leijiverse” to the characteristic sounds of helmeted musicians. Talkative, tireless and generous, the cartoonist will not hide his pleasure in returning to favor in Europe and traveling regularly to greet his fans. In 2013, he celebrated his sixty-year career at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.
However, Leiji Matsumoto was unable to realize “his ultimate dream”that of going into space to admire the Earth, and this, “it doesn’t matter if there is a return ticket”. But, he was not one to have regrets. As he liked to say, “time does not betray dreams”.
Leiji Matsumoto in dates
January 25, 1938 Born in Kurume (Fukuoka Prefecture)
1968 “Sexaroid”
1974 “Yamato, the Space Battleship”
1977 “Captain Harlock”
2003 Works with the group Daft Punk on the animated film Interstella 5555
2023 Died at the age of 85.