Who is Osamu Tezuka?

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Well when you really get right down to it, Osamu Tezuka is the man that's known as the Godfather of anime and manga.

And when you consider that he is the creator of Astro Boy, which was originally thought of as the first anime and manga ever made, then this just makes sense.  And even though it was later discovered that there were anime and manga before Astro Boy, the fact remains that Astro Boy is still the first anime and manga the way we know it today.

This is the reason that Tezuka maintained his title as the Godfather of anime and manga.  So let's find out why those of us who love anime and manga today owe almost everything to Osamu Tezuka.

The Childhood Of Osamu Tezuka

Born on November 3, 1928 in Toyonoka, Osaka Prefecture as the eldest of three children, Osamu Tezuka was first exposed to animation in the form of Disney from his father.  Growing up in the 30s and 40s made him a huge fan of Disney and he loved it so much, that it's said that he watched Snow White 50 times and Bambi 80 times.  He loved all the solid and fluid animation and the beautiful music.

After he would have the movies memorized, he would watch the audience instead of the movie.  He always felt so proud of how the movie would make the audience react with laughter and crying, as if they were his own audience and the movie was his creation.  And this love never died out even after he became a man and was now drawing his own manga.

Even though he would start his career at the young age of 17, Tezuka was already known for his drawing skills by the age of 11 because he drew all the time as a child and all through high school.  And you could see where he was heavily influenced by Disney because a lot of his drawings would have things like exaggerated facial expressions and large eyes, which would eventually become staples of anime.

In fact, it is said that Tezuka and Disney are two sides of the same coin with their circumstances being the difference.  The United States having just won WWII made Disney's works very happy and cheerful, whereas Japan having just lost WWII made Tezuka's works more focused on dark themes like loss, sadness, and regret.  This is how anime started, as a way of returning hope to a nation that had none left.

And one of his works, Diary of Ma-chan, had even appeared in an Osaka newspaper in 1946.  Tezuka then released New Treasure Island in 1947 after he had been discovered by a publisher.  And because of it's cinematic style, it stood out from other manga so much that it sold four hundred thousand copies.

Metropolis was another one of his successes that also got him discovered by another publisher.  After having just created the monthly Manga Shonen, the Tokyo publisher Kenichi Kato discovered Tezuka and recruited him along with Eiichi Fukui and Machiko Hasegawa.  This was where he published Kimba The White Lion, and while everyone else was making only two or four panels at a time, Tezuka was making ten.

Tezuka was then drafted to work in a factory that was supporting the Japanese military in 1944 during WWII.  And it was his experiences of seeing the harsh realities of war during this time that changed the shape of his manga from that point on.

Tezuka got accepted into Osaka University in 1945 where he studied to become a doctor while continuing to create manga as a side hussle.  Tezuka's manga Astro Boy had finally become a hit in 1952 after starting off as a failure, and he created Princess Knight just a year later starring a cross-dressing female who's big eyes were inspired by Bambi.

And because of all the years of experience that he has writing manga, Tezuka created a number of techniques that are unique only to him.  He understands so well the importance of design and panel composition so much better than other artists and has this uncanny knack of being able to tell so much of the story using little to no words at all.

A Golden Opportunity For Osamu Tezuka

After he had become an established manga artist, Tezuka was given the opportunity to work on making anime by Toei in 1958.  At the time, Toei wanted to become the Disney of Japan, and they wanted to make an anime based on one of Tezuka's manga Boku no Son Goku, which was the story of the monkey king Son Goku.

Naturally, thinking this would be a golden opportunity to learn about animation, Tezuka jumped at the chance.  But having never worked on an anime project before, or having worked in a team setting before either, Tezuka was extremely out of place.  Because of all of his original ideas, there were many complaints about him not getting along with the other team members.

Tezuka wanted the story to end as a tragedy with the death of the Son Goku's girlfriend.  Since every other story of the time always had a happy ending, he wanted to be original.  But this was quickly shot down by the other team members because they did not want children leaving the movie theater in tears.  The anime went with a happy ending, and Tezuka was very disappointed.

The main thing that Tezuka learned at Toei was not how to make anime, but how hard it is to work with other people in a team setting.  He often got yelled at, had arguments, and communication breakdowns.  Tezuka found working with other people to be very hard.  But while this was a setback for him, it did help Tezuka make up his mind about making his own anime in his own way.

The Birth of Osamu Tezuka's Mushi Productions

In the year after The Monkey King, Tezuka launched his own animation studio called Tezuka Osamu Productions Animation Division (So I take it that there were other divisions?) using his own money.  Tezuka paid for everything himself, from the construction to the staff salaries.  And he gave the staff a very ambitious first project, exploring all the possibilities of animation.

This led directly to their very first work, Aru Machikado no Monogatari (A Story On A Street Corner.), which was an anime where the characters were posters on a billboard.  It was an experiment with still objects, and was uniquely Tezuka's work.

Tezuka soon found that animation required a huge amount of money, time, and manpower making it an unreachable art above the clouds.  Not liking this one bit, he made it his mission to bring it down to earth and make it accessible for anyone to enjoy.

But his production staff was worried about how many people would be interested in watching something made by a small, independent animation studio.  But when the American animation known as Popeye The Sailor Man became popular in Japan at this time, this gave them a brilliant idea.

They decided that Tezuka's long running and already popular manga series Astro Boy would be the perfect competitor and suggested to Tezuka that they make it into an anime.  And Tezuka agreed.

Once the studio was completed in 1962, Tezuka eagerly changed the name to Mushi Production and immediately got to work on Astro Boy.  But his production team would soon learn that Tezuka was never the type to settle for second place, he had to be perfect and the best at everything he did.

And because no one had dared to try making a thirty minute TV anime production that aired a new episode every week, Tezuka was determined that he was going to do it himself with Astro Boy.

Tezuka's plan was to get the same results but with less work.  Disney was using what was known as full animation where there was constant movement of the characters the entire time.  But Tezuka came up with limited animation, where it was not necessary to have the characters moving all the time.  He would only move what was necessary.

For example, Astro Boy would be moving his body around all while he's talking in full animation.  But with limited animation, Astro Boy only needs to move his mouth and nothing else.  This became known as the Tezuka Method, and it saved a lot of time and money by allowing him to use only 8 pages of drawings rather than 24 for the same scene.

Osamu Tezuka's Week of Hell

After some piloting, Fuji Television had agreed to air Astro Boy.  They were willing to pay $3300 per episode, but Tezuka surprised everyone when he sold it for only $1500.  The only thing that the production staff could think of was that Tezuka wanted Mushi Productions to dominate the market.

Once they started working, it didn't take long for the production staff to realize what they were in for.  Even with the Tezuka Method, it was so hard trying to meet the deadline of one episode per week that they were calling it their week of hell.  Except for meals and bathroom breaks, they never left their desks and had to draw all the time.  If they missed a single day, it would shorten the already hectic week.

This is the primary reason why I've always been against illegal downloading and anything that allows illegal downloading and I support anything that puts a stop to it.

Think about how you would feel if after working your ass off, you don't get paid because everyone stole your work instead of purchasing it legitimately.  So then why do we think it's cool to do this to animators by stealing their work through illegal downloading?

Also you have to take into account that purchasing it legitimately is the only way that they will know that you like it.  So by stealing it through illegal downloading, they won't ever find out that you like it.  And if nobody likes this anime as far as they know, then they won't know to keep working their asses off to make it.  In Jet's own words from Cowboy Bebop, "All that work and no reward."

The Success of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy

On January 1, 1963 at exactly 6:15 pm Japanese time marks the date that the very first episode of Astro Boy debuted on Japanese television.  And it was a huge hit almost instantly with over 40% viewership.  And because this was during Japan's boom period where the economy was growing fast and it was now an exporter, they began wondering if they could export animation as well.

Fujita spoke to Tezuka about going to America and asked if he could bring Astro Boy with him to see if he could get it to sell.  Tezuka didn't think it would sell, but he agreed anyway just in case.  After Fujita showed it to several television studios in the US, a dividision of NBC was interested.

They contacted Fred Ladd, a leader in the field of producing dubbed versions of foreign animations.  One thing that he bragged about was how he was so good that he don't need the soundtrack.  He can know how a character is supposed to sound just from looking at him.  And while most people would look at Astro Boy and think, "What does he know?  He's just a boy," Ladd knows that sometimes the boy is smarter than the man.

When Astro Boy debuted on American televisions across America in September of 1963, it won a huge following of Americans when it reached a viewership rating exceeding 30%.  To think that after Tezuka said that he exported Astro Boy, he was laughed at and told it wouldn't sell and that he'd be nothing but a laughing stock in America.

So you can only imagine just how happy Tezuka was when he found out that it not only did sell, but was also a major success and was loved in America.  I still can't get the image I came up with of Tezuaka dancing up and down the streets of Tokyo out of my head!  "Whoo!  I feel good, yeah!"

Osamu Tezuka Has Merch Now

But even though Tezuka realized his dream of being a success in America, another problem was making itself known.  While making a profit was never what he was interested in, he was unable to pay his expenses with just the money he was making from his anime alone because the cost of labor and production grew too fast.

Fortunately, it was around this time that companies were taking an interest in using Astro Boy for their products because of it's success.  These toy, candy, and other such manufacturing companies came together to form the Astro Boy Society where they made sure the official Astro Boy products had the Mushi Productions official seal to tell them apart from the fakes.  This proved to be big business and became another much needed source of income for the company.

Because children loved to bring Astro Boy products with them on their field trips, Astro Boy proved to be a huge seller as Astro Boy merchandise sold extremely well.  In 1963 alone, the year that Astro Boy started, 100 Astro Boy character goods sold.  This proved to be big business as Mushi Productions earned $270,000 from the copyright revenue, and these new streams of income covered a lot the company's expenses.

The Influence Of Osamu Tezuka

As soon as broadcasters and sponsors saw the huge income potential, they began to also get into TV anime.  Fuji Television began airing Tetsujin 28 about 10 months after it launched Astro Boy, and Tokyo Broadcasting System Television debuted Eight Man a month later (Am I the only one who is now curious about what happened to Tetsujins 1-27, as well as Mans 1-7?).  Both of these anime were the work of the Television Corporation of Japan, which is a company that has already been making commercials using animation.

This soon led to TV stations coming to Toei for TV anime, but most of the animators didn't want to get involved because they didn't consider Tezuka's TV anime to be real animation.  They only saw their full animation as real animation.  However, one guy did agree to it but only on the condition that he gets to do it his way.

This guy was known as Sadao Tsukioka, and the anime he came up with was Wolf Boy Ken.  This was a story that takes place in the jungle, and it stood out from the other anime because it came out during a time when science fiction anime was popular.

He used a technique similar to Tezuka in that he used only a few frames of animation and then repeating it over and over, as in the case of animating a fire for example.  This is because in TV anime, you want to create the desired effect with as little frames as possible.  This is something that people involved in TV production know very well.

And these other anime shows also followed in Tezuka's footsteps and also gained popularity in foreign countries as well.  And while there were some that criticized the explosion of anime, the fact remained that they all owed their success to Tezuka for paving the way for them (And I'm assuming this is also including them dancing up and down the streets of Tokyo celebrating their successes).

Osamu Tezuka Leads The Charge Into Colored TV Anime

Around the time that Japan hosted it's first olympic games, Japan was now getting into colored animation.  And one of the very first one's was Tezuka's Jungle Emperor Leo, which was the story of a lion family that lives in Africa.

But Tezuka was being made to stay away from the production staff this time because they didn't want him being such a perfectionist to slow them down and keep them from meeting their deadlines.  Otherwise they would never have succeeded at being the company that exports Japan's very first colored TV anime.

As you can probably guess, this was extremely hard for Tezuka.  And while he was able to contain himself during the production, he was constantly phoning up the show's producer Eiichi Yamamoto after it went on the air demanding that it must PERFECT, PERFECT I SAY, PERFECT (Well now we have an idea of who Tezuka's favorite Dragonball Z villain would've been, don't we?)!

But it was still Tezuka's passion that resulted in Jungle Emperor Leo making huge strides anyway.  He contacted a composer that gained recognition for his work on a historical drama that was aired on NHK in 1963 by the name of Isao Tomita.

Tezuka commissioned him to make the musical score for Jungle Emperor Leo insisting that the music in TV animation is rather cheap and needed something better.  Tezuka even went so far as to play a Tchaikovsky symphony for Tomita so he'd know exactly what Tezuka wanted.

Tezuka's performance for Tomita led to the theme music for Jungle Emperor Leo.  Tomita had to create new music for each episode and match it up to the movements of the animals and the people.  But as a result of his hard work, Jungle Emperor Leo became the first TV anime to have it's music made into it's own soundtrack.  And that soundtrack sold over 100,000 records, which set the trend for TV anime soundtracks.

Osamu Tezuka Lets It All Hang Out

The second part of the 60's was all about doing things different.  This gave rise to the younger generation questioning and wanting to be and do things different from the older generations.  And this included them being both fans and creators of manga.

And getting their works turned into anime as well began to have an impact on Tezuka.  While Mushin Productions was doing great with turning Tezuka's manga into anime, they were beginning to lose the interest of the younger generation.

But in 1967, Nippon Herald Films wanted to create a feature length animation film that they could sell abroad.  Already a distributor of foreign movies, they approached Tezuka with the offer to make the very first animation that's aimed at adults.

While other producers were only thinking about making movies about Astro Boy or Princess Knight, Nippon Herald Films wanted to do something different.  Since they knew they wouldn't be able to compete with Disney or Toei, their thinking was for something new and different.

And this most certainly would be different because every animation being made at the time was aimed at children.  Making animation for adults had never even crossed anyone's mind.  And as you can probably guess, this was exactly the kind of originality that excited Tezuka (Uh oh, "dancing up and down the streets of Tokyo" time again!).  He loved the idea of allowing even adults to enjoy the magic of animation so much, that he was even willing to make something erotic.

Tezuka chose the Tales of 1,001 Nights, and was so fired up that by the time he was done with the zillions of ideas that was pouring out of his head faster than the waters of Niagara Falls, he had come up with a movie that would be over 5 hours long.  Naturally, the production staff had to quickly chop off the tail of the Tezuka Oozaru as there was no possible way that they could make a movie THAT long.

However, my research would later reveal that Tezuka never discarded any of his ideas as he also came up with a gekiga story aimed at adults by the name of Ayako where he went even farther than Tales of 1,001 Nights by including things like rape, murder, incest, and so on.

But even after cutting enough parts to shorten it down, this would still be their first time making a movie longer than 2 hours.  They used a number of new techniques to combine animation with real life scenes, more than likely to solidify that this movie was aimed at adults, but this resulted in big delays.  And they soon found themselves in a position where they only had 11 minutes of a 2 hour movie completed by the time the media preview was only a month away.

The Name's Tezuka, James Tezuka

Now being under the gun, Tezuka had a meeting with the producer Atsushi Tomioka.  He was going to ask Herald for an extension and needed to know how much longer it would take for them to finish it.  But Tomi, as Tezuka called him, was very disappointed when Tezuka was told no.  So they had no choice but to have Tezuka join the production staff and hurry to finish the movie.

Even if that meant that Tezuka was slowing them down by being a perfectionist.  This part has to be PERFECT, that part must be PERFECT, and so on.  But by this point, the staff had come to realize that being a perfectionist is just a part of being an artist, which is exactly what Tezuka was.

Tales of 1001 Nights was finally released on June 14, 1969 as the world's very first animation for adults.  It was a groundbreaking work that completely exceeded what everyone had come to expect from anime.  Every theater that played it was filled to capacity, and Tezuka would go see it whenever he could take a break from work.  And even though everyone recognized him and he was allowed in for free, Tezuka still insisted on buying his own ticket.

Naturally, Tezuka was very happy to see the film succeed so well that it ranked 5th in the box office that year.  Tales of 1001 Nights earned over $900,000, which was a record amount for any animated film at the time.

The Fall Of Mushi Productions

But despite the huge success of 1001 Nights, Mishi Productions was having trouble making ends meets because of the huge amount of staff that it had to hire to keep up with the growing competition it was facing in the TV anime industry.  And even though Tezuka took on all of the debt of the company and stepped down as president at the age of 42, it still wasn't enough to save it and the company went out of business two years later in 1973.

And while Tezuka spent 10 years exploring the possibilities of anime, he helped kickstart the careers of numerous anime artists that would go on to become big names today.  Eiichi Yamamoto went on to create Space Battleship Yamato, Gisaburo Sugii directed the anime known as Touch, Yoshiyuki Tomino both wrote and directed Mobile Suit Gundam, Osamu Dezaki directed Ashita No Joe, and Rintaro directed Galaxy Express 999.  Every single one of these artists learned their craft by struggling alongside Tezuka at Mushi Productions, and they became the very artists that saw the growing popularity of anime into what it is today.

But even after Mushi Productions went under, Tezuka never lost his passion for animation.  He began working on one last work in 1987 known as Legend of the Forest, which was the culmination of everything he learned about animation at Mushi Production.  But he passed away before completing it in 1989 at the young age of 60 years old.

However, you could say that a lot of his works were based on the way that he saw the Japanese people, starting with the fact that Astro Boy was exactly what the Japanese needed during the post WWII era.  One thing that Tezuka did point out before his passing was his observations of the Japanese people, or maybe the entire Japanese society in general.  He felt that they were not much different from robots in the way that they simply imitate what other cultures do and how they do it with little to no creativity or originality of their own.

But this was at least a step in the right direction because they would need to fully absorb the influences of other cultures first before they can get to the point where they can now start coming up with ideas of their own.  And once that happens, he believes that Japanese creativity will come to be respected around the world in the future.  Spooky how right he was about the future, almost as if he had a crystal ball that he was looking into while he was saying this.

As one of the most brilliant artists of all time, his passion was animation.  And to the very end, he never stopped chasing after that dream.  And even though he never got to see it himself, his dream did come true and continues to live on in the many anime artists that he inspired and they went on to inspire, in addition to all of us fans that continue to enjoy the many fruits of his labor to this day.