OSAMU TEZUKA’S BUDDHA: THE GREAT DEPARTURE (Japan, 2011)
Directed by: Kozo Morishita
Starring the voices of: Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Masato Sakai, Kiyokazu Kanze

Osamu Tezuka is the Godfather of Anime, a Walt Disney who never sold out for cash, and his award-winning, eight-volume manga of the life of Buddha has long been a dream project for filmmakers in Japan. Now, almost four decades after it was written, it arrives as a powerful animated movie from Tezuka’s own production company and it’s a muscular, sweeping, emotionally wrenching film. Eventually this will be part one of a trilogy of animated films, but it works just fine as a standalone movie.

While you’d expect the life of the Buddha to be a sanctimonious sermon about non-violence, preached by people with milk for blood, BUDDHA: THE GREAT DEPARTURE is nothing of the sort. Tezuka’s manga wasn’t just concerned with the Buddha but with the web of characters who crossed paths with him over the years, telling the story of all India instead of the life of one holy man. There’s Chapra, a calculating lower caste refugee who tries to climb out of poverty by saving the life of a general in the Kosala army, which just massacred his village. There’s carefree Tatta, a street urchin who refuses to grow up and who can possess animals. There’s Bandaka, a cynical swordsman hired to teach the Buddha how to fight. Because before he was the Buddha, he was Siddharta, a spoiled, pampered, sheltered prince whose father wants to toughen him up so he can go fight wars.

BUDDHA: THE GREAT DEPARTURE is told in grand strokes and ringing tones. It quietly gathers power as it tracks these characters over the course of 15 years, and before you know it you’re caught up in a sweeping emotional journey that sees everything they ever loved destroyed and all of them cast out into the wilderness where they must achieve enlightenment or die. Life is suffering, and that’s a lesson this animated epic knows all too well. The poor suffer, the rich suffer, animals suffer, everyone suffers. And by the end, you’ll agree with Siddharta when he screams, trying to escape an ocean of dying humanity, “There must be another way!”