The Western image of manga comes from the thick volumes of knicker-flashing schoolgirls and lurid s.f. teenage boys pore over, and the anime (cartoon films) which adapt them. Singaporean director Eric Khoo’s animated adaptation of five stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, framed by details from his graphic autobiography A Drifting Life, reveals a radically different medium.
Next time you glance up at the stars, spare a thought for your Christmas tree. It’s probably topped by a star, but some of those in the sky might just be the spirit of the tree itself. By helping free the spirits of the trees in a forest, the Doctor transported the symbols of Christmas into an adventure that only he could have instigated. The combination of Christmas, the World War Two setting, Matt Smith’s vitality and a family uncertain of their future ensured this nostalgic fantasy was an instant seasonal classic.
The war is ongoing and Christmas is almost here. Madge Arwell comes across a strange man in a strange suit, whose face she can’t see. She helps him find a police box. She has also received the telegram telling her that pilot husband Reg is lost. Afraid to tell her children, Cyril and Lily, she doesn’t want this to become the Christmas that breaks their hearts. Keeping the secret, she takes them to a country mansion for the holidays and finds a caretaker who’s turned the rooms into a crazy, Willy Wonka version of what comes with Christmas. The caretaker is the Doctor, returning to thank her for helping him out.
He’s also left a present, a large box, in the living room. It’s irresistible for Cyril, who opens it early. In his dressing gown, he steps in, entering a snowy forest. In turn, they all enter, discovering the gift isn’t what the Doctor thought it was. It’s not Narnia. About to be harvested, the spirits of the forest’s trees need help escaping their fate. Madge is the key and, in full-on protective mother mode, she comes to the aid of Cyril, Lily and The Doctor, giving the spirits their release.
Matt Smith’s Doctor was at his most paradoxical. Manic, charming, eager to please, isolated and jumping in without weighing the consequences, he was forlorn, yet enthusiastic and magnetic. Thankfully, Claire Skinner’s Madge Arwell was there to pull everyone out of danger before it sucked them all in irreversibly. Holly Earl’s Lily Arwell was level-headed, her quizzical acceptance of all that came along exactly what you’d hope for in any kid that comes across the Doctor.
As Cyril, Maurice Cole was a delight (pictured left). From the Milky Bar Kid on, any boy in oversize, milk-bottle-bottom-lensed round glasses is going to be a classic. Alexander Armstrong has been perfecting the what-ho type for years, so he was perfect. Bill Bailey, Arabella Weir and Paul Bazely as the bumbling, uncertain operatives monitoring the harvesting of the forest tempered the impending peril.
Despite the borrowings from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the strongest reference was the great Powell and Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death, released in 1946 as the meaning and effects of the War were being digested. The film was central to the process of understanding. Alexander Armstrong’s Reg Arwell explicitly brought David Niven's Peter Carter to mind, as did the scenes of his lost, doomed plane and his unexpected return to earth. The Doctor became A Matter of Life and Death’s guide, Maris Goring’s Conductor 71. The trees became the film’s angels – as well as stars, angels also crown a Christmas tree.
There were no Doctor Who perennials: no Daleks, no Cybermen, and virtually no role for any companions (Amy and Rory were seen at the end). The modern series isn’t tied to its history. The wooden King and Queen created by the forest were never going to be adversaries. The Doctor and Doctor Who renew themselves just as the programme bowls onwards. Six years and three Doctors after it returned to the TV schedules, The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe was further confirmation that the series is in a constant state of renewal.
However Doctor Who has evolved, the question of which of his predecessors Smith most closely evokes inevitably bubbles up. This Christmas, the lonely, can’t-get-it-quite-right, slightly patrician Doctor offered a subtle nod to where it all began. Was he a souped-up William Hartnell? But as ever, the Doctor will move on, leaving such thoughts behind.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe
Graham Sutherland and George Shaw have two things in common. They are both painters and both are associated with Coventry: Sutherland made his famous altarpiece work – a tapestry – for the city’s rebuilt cathedral, while Shaw grew up in Coventry’s Tile Hill, a housing estate that’s become familiar to us through Shaw’s beautiful and melancholy Humbrol enamel oil paintings.
The Cranes Are Flying begins with the literal rush of young love, as Boris and Veronica skip down a street, giddy with endorphins. They could be infatuated young Americans in the rock’n’roll year of its making, 1957. But this is Moscow in 1941, as a radio announces Russia is at war, and Boris (Alexei Batalov) volunteers for the front.
The archaeological documentary is becoming the obligatory format for tackling legendary tales of the British at war. Someone seems to recreate the Dam Busters raid every six months, the wrecks of battleships HMS Hood and the Bismarck have been tracked down in the ocean depths, and Time Team have excavated various subterranean artefacts from the Western Front.
There’s a scene in Theo Angelopoulos’s The Travelling Players where those gathered in a square hear “the wind of freedom is blowing” being sung. The wartime Nazi occupation is over. Greek, Russian and American flags are aloft. A bomb goes off. In asking whose freedom this was, Angelopoulos had chosen his moment carefully. The film was released in 1975, a year after Greece held its first election since the Colonels took power with American backing in 1967.
I had misgivings before watching Britain's Greatest Codebreaker last night on Channel 4: the advertised mix of drama and documentary tends to send a signal that neither half is sufficiently well done. And within a minute, it was clear that this was such a chimera: over-dramatic voiceovers for the documentary part, Ed Stoppard acting to the back row in the drama part.
What if D-Day had failed? Even at a remove of nearly 80 years, it is strangely arresting to hear a BBC radio announcer giving details of how the Nazis have taken over Oxford and Swindon but are being met with resistance in Coventry and Leicester. Amit Gupta’s directorial debut, an adaptation of co-screenwriter Owen Sheers’s own first novel, begins promisingly enough.
Because Humphrey Jennings was a director of documentaries, he is never spoken of in the same breath as the greatest British directors of the past - Chaplin, Hitchcock, Powell, Lean and Reed. Another reason is that his career was short, compressed into the 16 years before his death at 43 in 1950 from a cliff fall in Poros, Greece, where he was scouting locations for a film about postwar healthcare in Europe.
The human spirit won't be easily vanquished, or so we're led to believe from Cool Hand Luke, which in itself should provide succour to those trapped at this stage adaptation of the novel that inspired the movie - still with me? - in the days and weeks to come. Marc Warren works hard in the role of the famously fettered Luke Jackson that brought Paul Newman a 1967 Oscar nod, and the Hustle star deserves credit first off for getting his American accent down pat.