Drawing on reality: "Tatsumi"

Singapore's Eric Khoo first revealed his interest in hybrid forms of cinema with 2005's Be With Me, an oddity that sought to combine the fictional stories of a lovelorn security guard, a pair of teenage lesbians, and a widower struggling to get over the death of his wife, with - most memorably - a strand featuring Theresa Chan, a real-life teacher of the blind who was herself blind. His animated follow-up Tatsumi is, likewise, many things at once: a post-War history of Japan, a biopic of the animator Yoshihiro Tatsumi, originator of the adult form of anime known as gekiga, and an adaptation/greatest-hits sampler of Tatsumi's work.

Adult, in this instance, doesn't mean demons with phallic tentacles prying up the short skirts of wide-eyed schoolgirls, rather a series of comics that came to reflect the concerns of Japanese society as it sought to rebuild itself in the wake of WW2. Like the movers and shakers at Studio Ghibli, Tatsumi is of the generation that grew up in the shadow of Hiroshima, yet where Miyazaki and co. were to celebrate the resilience of the natural world that survived and even flourished in the aftermath of the bomb blasts, Tatsumi's oeuvre is largely urban, bleaker and inward-looking, assiduously mining its creator's own neuroses.

Take "Hell", the first short story animated here, in which a photo taken of two assumed A-bomb victims becomes a record of a crime scene, and the photographer has to weigh up whether any further harm can be done in coldbloodedly adding another one to the 200,000-strong death toll chalked up in the heat of the original blast. Tatsumi has a Cryptkeeper-like fondness for baroque twists-in-the-tale, as evidenced by "Beloved Monkey", a story of post-industrial alienation featuring a factory worker who loses an arm in an accident only to be blamed for the firm's dip in productivity; the fate of the pet simian he keeps is bleaker than perhaps any Western equivalent would allow for. Similarly, it would be hard to imagine Western comic-book artists hitting upon the precise sociopolitical circumstances that lead to the desperately grim pay-off to "Good-Bye", where an ageing soldier takes extreme measures to see his estranged prostitute daughter.

In the hybrid movie, the danger is that one element will retain less interest than the others. The linking biographical material - with an animated Tatsumi at home - is charming enough, but comparatively slight: the blankfaced hero, who looks for all the world like the offspring of Belleville Rendezvous' Madame Souza, has some humdrum struggles living with an ailing older brother, and with censors who insist his creations would be damaging to young minds. Yet Khoo makes the transitions - from Tatsumi's domestic life to his imagined universes - consistently revealing: we're always being shown where the artist gets his best and bleakest ideas from.

So it is that the film segues from the young Tatsumi's first, nervy responses to sexual intimacy to the story entitled "Just a Man", in which a worker vows to treat himself to a night of passion with a younger woman before settling down to "the hell of retirement" with his wife. The punchline is innately conservative, in that very Japanese way, yet its point is eloquently made: that we are all trapped within our bodies, whatever our age or desires. This recurring theme in Tatsumi's work gets graphically reiterated in the final tale, "Occupied", with its illustrator who rediscovers his mojo upon being confronted with explicit toilet graffiti. (Up until its punitive conclusion, it's Tatsumi's most Crumb-like fragment.)

Throughout, the mix of the biographical and the imaginary is smoother and more satisfying than it was in Be With Me, the animation offering an extra, jolting hit of nostalgia in returning us to the cross-hatching and dot-matrix colouring of the comics of our youth. In the closing moments, these images give way to live-action footage of the real Tatsumi hunched over his drawing board. The world around him may have changed, but this is the same man, working the same magic, with the same paper, pens and pencils. 2011 was not, all told, an especially illustrious year for animation; with Tatsumi, 2012 begins inventively, and really rather touchingly.

Tatsumi opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.