Another recommendation -The Dam Keeper-

The Dam Keeper #1 by Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi

For the last post, I wanted to mention about this graphic novel called the Dam Keeper. (I hope the library gets volume #2 and #3 soon!) The Dam Keeper is created by my favorite artists, Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi. It is a full-color graphic novel about a lonely pig who protects the village from the pollution by using the dam he lives in. It is created as a sequel of the Dam Keeper, a short animation they created. 

One of my favorite things about this graphic novel is its use of color and lighting. In fact, Kondo and Tsutsumi are former artists at Pixar who worked on the concept art; also, Tsutsumi worked on the color script of Monster’s University. In the Dam Keeper, their skill of coloring and lighting developed in the animation industry is fully used to tell the story. Especially in pig’s flashback, warm and cool color contrast is even more exaggerated, reflecting that the memories are more dramatized and thus its visual is affected by pig’s feeling. Interestingly, I found the motion in their graphic novel more energetic than its animation; their animation is more calm, settled feeling with great atmosphere, but the graphic novel depicts broader action and vivid emotion of the characters. Also, the Dam Keeper is full of its creator’s message: problem of environment pollution, bullying, and loneliness. The quote “Dad had always said the job of a dam keeper is to keep the darkness away. But he never told me what to do when it surrounds you. His mask protected me from the cloud, but nothing I had, protected me from the people” relates the darkness of pollution and people’s evilness. Their works remind us that the biggest problem in both pollution and bullying is people’s apathy.