Taken by itself, the image of Kanzaki Shizuku contemplating the color of the wine embodies the dramatic. It’s a simple and benign act made into an action shot. A huge splash of white showcases the glass of wine by erasing everything around it, save Shizuku's hand. The line formed by the accentuation of the glass and Shizuku’s hand continues through his arm and links the reader's eye to a strong white line a little further downward. Thus the reader's line of sight is redirected to the raised glass, implying swift motion. The reaction shot in the following image compounds on the effect of this action. The angle and position of Shizuku's bent arm points to the next panel of an astounded Watanuki Suzuka, who looks on in slack-jawed amazement (note the superfluous "!" surrounded by naught but white in a word bubble). All this implied action and disproportionate accentuation lends to the manga's sweet, humorous irony. Drinking wine, after all, is never that exciting to watch. However, Drops of God is illustrated as to infuse action where there is none, thereby creating a compelling read out of an everyday act as simple as observation. 

One such mission, T35 or "Center River," uses the Fog of War mechanic, which obscures enemies a certain distance away from the player, thus making it difficult to react to the opponent's moves. Like, really difficult.

Case in point: I deployed some footsoldiers, captured a few cities, and set up a tank or two. BOOM, out of nowhere the enemy started bombarding me with rockets and artillery shells from ... somewhere in the Fog of War. Then giant "war tanks" (the most powerful land units in the game) emerged from the fog, barrelling down upon my base and supporting the infantry units that would eventually overtake my headquarters.

Every permutation of moves I tried, every strategy, met with defeat. The most frustrating times were the ones when I felt like I was about to win, only to be struck down by a surprise volley of long-range rockets and anti-tank attacks that drove me back to my base! I simply turned the game off in anger quite a few times.

I searched online for ways to beat the mission, to drive into the heart of the blue team's side of the river and take their HQ. Forum posts provided some nice tips, but my lack of Advance Wars experience made it difficult to fully implement a lot of their strategies. The parade of failures continued.

One more time. One more time. I sent troops across the river and tried to take the island in the center. I set up rockets in major cities. I pushed across the southern bridge with a tank. After dozens of attempts these sorts of things had become second nature. The enemy came at me on the island, and then I made the one important change to my strategy: I sent some decoy troops along the northern bridge, as someone had suggested in a forum post. Instantly the CPU redirected its troops to fight in the north, and my campaign to take the island in earnest had begun.

After over an hour of plugging away at this slow fight, producing units constantly to keep up with the enemy's barrage of attacks, I finally made it across the southern bridge. By redirecting the blue team back and forth with false threats of capturing cities, I managed to sneak an infantry unit into the headquarters and capture it once and for all. A week of frustration and anger and failure ended in glorious victory, and I was reminded of why I dedicated so much of my time to something so frustrating.

Winning is awesome.

Snapshots is a monthly column here at Ani-Gamers in which one of our writers describes and analyzes a particular moment from a piece of media. To read previous entries, click here.

Here Tezuka begins to experiment with full black page backgrounds and a cinematic zoom effect, with each successive panel getting smaller and smaller (or larger and larger) to simulate a film camera. After one such zoom out and another zoom in, we have moved in both time and space to Lyon, France. The year is 1939, and Lamp has sold his father-in-law's scientific research to the Nazis. As if Acetelyne Lamp's typecast villany isn't established enough, Tezuka has now convinced us that he is not a man to be trusted. His wife is heartbroken.

Zoom! Cut! It is now seven years earlier, and Zephyrus is introducing her boyfriend, Lamp, to her father amid a field of flowers. He would like to marry her, and her father happily acquieces. Zoom in on butterflies, cut to two arms in a bedroom, the lights dimmed. They are in Nice, in the winter of the same year. For two pages here Tezuka shows us the intimacy of these two lovers with nothing more than a series of horizontal panels, framing their arms as they talk. Lamp is having financial difficulty and wants to sell Zephyrus's father's research. Her arm shrinks away from his.

More black panels bring us to Lyon in 1940, where Lamp informs his father-in-law that, on the Nazi's orders, he is sending him to work for them. In a page exclusively composed of vertical panels, Lamp moves from the bottom of the panel to the top, and we see him speaking down not only to Zephyrus's handicapped father, but to her as well. He is an ambitious, ruthless man, completely in control of the situation.

Another cacophonous black page takes us from Zephyrus's father's suicide to the birth of a baby to Locarno again, in 1940. Canted shots of trains show Zephyrus's frantic flight.

Finally, we come to rest in 1943, on a small island near Guadalcanal. A caretaker rushes back to Zephyrus's bedside, watching as she relays her final words to her daughters. They must destroy money, law, and men in order to get revenge on the father who destroyed their lives. Zephyrus passes, and we zoom away from her crying children and finish the story on one final black panel.

In just 24 pages, we see the beginning, middle, and end of a marriage, with time and space jumbled up in the subjectivity of memory. In the hands of a clumsier manga artist, such temporal and aesthetic changes would surely be confusing, but it is a testament to his genius that Tezuka is able to tie it all up into a fast-paced, digestible, and entertaining package.

This post is a part of the Osamu Tezuka Manga Moveable Feast (MMF), a week-long celebration of the manga work of Osamu Tezuka, hosted by The Manga Critic. Check out the extensive archive for this week's MMF at The Manga Critic.

The show presents itself with an equal dose of black comedy and social commentary, similarly to Kon's own Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika. This tendency to mix the seriousness of the situation — a runaway machine originally intended to act as a caretaker for the elderly — with its inherent silliness manifests itself in what is easily the most spectacular turning point of the entire film.

Dedicated nurse-in-training Haruko has been trying to rescue her patient, the elderly Mr. Takazawa, from inside the Z-001 machine throughout the movie, but has run up against stiff opposition from the two bureaucrats in charge of the project, Terada and Hasegawa. As the two men board a helicopter to track the movements of the Z-001, Haruko hops in next to them, despite Terada's fierce protests. Meanwhile, we realize that Terada legitimately cares about the elderly as he berates Hasegawa for not letting him know that the Z-001 was actually a military prototype.

Suddenly Haruko spots the Z-001 speeding along a monorail track, and Terada orders the helicopter to go in for a closer look (never a good idea if Bubblegum Crisis is to be believed). As they approach, Terada throws open the door to yell out at the machine over a megaphone, but Haruko quickly attempts to jump out of the helicopter, screaming desperately to get the old man's attention.

What happens next is a brilliant expression of the essential messages of the entire film: Terada, who has been working to arrest Haruko throughout the story, grabs her before she can fall out of the helicopter, and holds her to keep her from jumping out again. She calls him a pervert, in typical anime style, yet Terada's immediate response to latching onto her is not to blush or get embarrassed, but to yell "You idiot! You'll get yourself killed!" In this brief moment of crisis, Otomo deftly shows the passion with which Haruko will protect her patient as well as the strength of Terada's conviction that all human life is sacred.

To cap it all off, the helicopter hits some trees while Haruko and Terada struggle, throwing the man out of the vehicle and toward the Z-001. Haruko immediately screams for Mr. Terada, only to see the machine reach out and grab him. (Indeed, even after he is safe aboard the Z-001, she tries to keep the helicopter flying low so they can safely extract him.) There is a cascading series of split-second acts of kindness in just these 45 seconds of film, all of which express a more optimistic twist to this ostensibly dark portrayal of the human condition.