Lastman

The main character gets this very motivation when an unknown person kills his mentor. It seems like Richard is in time to focus on revenge, but instead he dives into the fantastic secrets of his deceased friend and becomes the guardian of his adopted daughter. Moreover, she has an unusual gift that gradually turns her into a monster.

As a result, Richard must complete three tasks at once: win a magic artifact in a combat tournament, destroy a dozen demons from a parallel dimension, and take care of the girl. In addition, he strives to succeed on the love front. Time is running out, there are a lot of questions, but not all of them have answers.

Due to the abundance of emotions, genres and sources of inspiration, the animated series “Lastman” It looks like a collage. The basis of this technique lies in the combination of incompatible elements and the creation of new meanings from scraps of borrowed material — pieces of others' or own paintings, photographs and books. Anything can become part of a collage.

The style flourished at the beginning of the last century and the short era of the Dadaists. Amazed by the scale of World War I and its senseless bloodlust, they rejected rationalism and transformed their own art. The complex world, which suddenly dimmed and had no future, was simplified to a mixture of magazine clippings, through which a clear idea could still be seen.

But it was obvious even to the shocked Dadaists that collage could be used not only in visual arts, but also in scripts, articles and poems. Today, Quentin Tarantino is actively using semantic borrowings, who is why he is called a “movie DJ”. And his film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is a collage of an entire era.

One of the most striking examples of collage narrative is Brian Lee O'Malley's “Scott Pilgrim” comic book. In it, the Canadian artist brings together childhood memories, pieces of his favorite movies, superhero comics, and the conventions of his favorite video games. Thanks to style and charisma, countless references have managed to create new meanings.

Long before O'Malley, Dave Sim, the author of the monster comic book “Cereb”, worked in the same style. He also constructed a story from bits of thoughts, hobbies, and the surrounding culture. And in recent years, “Cereb” has undergone a forced metamorphosis, as Sim lost his hands. That's why he collected stories about “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and naked “Batman” using comic book clippings and glue.

In the first season of “Lastman”, director Jeremy Perin, filled with optimism and love for life, told a fantastic story in Charles Bukowski's rough style. But it's about a pretty mundane city — about doorways, criminal cases, idle nightlife, bloody sports and ideas clothed in demons from another world.

Jeremy Perin brought together hundreds, if not thousands, of sources of inspiration that were also influenced by others' work, into a rough but consistent collage. This meaningful borrowing and the proximity of the incompatible gave “The Last Man” a unique style, tone, and message.

The first season exists in complete chaos. The characters die in agony, but with humor. The “bar” episodes, which remind us of Bukowski not only with alcohol but also with sentimental lustfulness, are balanced by magical realism, detective and explicit fantasy. Tragedy and tension are drowned in black humor, and action is drowned in visual jokes.

“The Atlanta” series is based on this mixture of reality and fiction (read our text). But Jeremy Perin turned out to be more radical than the confused rappers and, by the end of the first season, had destroyed the energy of the tabloid novel to pieces and turned the narrative inside out. He tore one collage off the wall, leaving room for something completely different.

On the one hand, throughout the story, Richard remains himself — a careless fighter, a charming lover and a new father. On the other hand, it varies slightly from segment to segment. This diversity is especially evident in the second season, which was subtitled “Heroes”.

As soon as Richard gains heroic determination and begins to act independently, not just adapting to the circumstances, the narrative breaks him mentally and physically, and then unceremoniously passes time forward. For an outside observer, this transition takes a moment, but for Richard, years go by and internal and external destruction is gradual.

In the second season, Jeremy Horau took the director's chair and made a clever move: after alienating the hero from fate and history, he almost completely took him off the stage. The fun and science fiction in the style of the eighties are over, and it's time to take a sober look at life, still represented by a kaleidoscope of funny and tragic images.

In the second chapter, the focus shifts to other characters, important and frankly secondary. Now they are the main characters, the same “Heroes” who turn from intermediate cartoons into living people closely connected to Richard.

Through “extras”, Jeremy Perin spoke about the new, darker adventures of the once funny boxer. This iteration of narrative collage, which has grown to an exorbitant scale, centers around different feelings and emotions. Richard has stopped fighting, and his old friends are forced to grow up to die with dignity in the snowy lands of a foreign world.

As Richard's character and scene change, so does the collage itself. Both seasons feel separate and evoke different emotions. The first one is like a set of short clips. Every second is worth its weight in gold and is used to maximum advantage, making it feel like the story is rushing to the end.

In turn, the second season, melancholic and heavy to match Richard, is in no hurry. Beauty and doom are measured sensations that cannot be felt in a hurry. The long episodes are covered with pseudo-documentaries in the style of Terrence Malick, and the aesthetics of doorways, bars and public toilets are fading into the background.

At some points, Heroes looks more like a set of side stories than a direct sequel to season one. But despite the differences in visual solutions, direction, storytelling structure and music, both parts are perfectly intertwined into a colorful but still complete collage.