Anime columnist Andrew Osmond explores the fringes of the iconic ‘God of Manga’s work: strange short films, magnificent fantasy sagas and doodlings on Disney.
Any foreign visitor to Tokyo using the city’s dense public transport will notice the jingles playing on station platforms when a train arrives or leaves.I’m amused to think of film fans arriving at Tokyo’s Ebisu station and wondering why they’re serenaded by the theme from 1949’s .
Answer: because the tune is often used on advertising by the local beer company, Yebisu.More relevant to anime, this summer I visited Seiseki Sakuragaoka station in the Tama Hills, a Tokyo suburb.I chuckled to hear the platform loudspeaker playing “Country Road.” The area round the station inspired the scenery in a lovely 1995 Ghibli film called … which memorably used “Country Road” as a motif (here’s a key scene in Spanish).
Then there’s Takadanobaba station.Like Ebisu, it’s on the Yamanote Line, which is perhaps Tokyo’s busiest.The platforms of Takadanobaba ring with a tune you may know even if you’ve never watched the source series – the TV animation , or () in Japanese.
Atom is a hero, an android boy with Superman strength and machine guns in his bottom.But just reflect on his name for a moment.Atom debuted in comics in 1951, a symbol of innocence and hope...
and the character was created in , barely five years after artificial suns burst over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.To call such a hero suggests an audacious creator, with a strongly individual, fearless vision.And that vision went way past Atom.
Right outside Takadanobaba station (the “Waseda Exit”), you can see this creator’s characters proudly assembled in a giant mural.I’m talking about Osamu Tezuka, titan of Japanese comics or, as he’s commonly called, the “God of Manga.” He rose to comic stardom even before Atom.His breakthrough was in 1947, when he drew the adventure strip “New Treasure Island” (written by Shichima Sakai).
Soon he was writing drawing strips, but one medium wasn’t enough for him.He had a childhood fascination with animation, and in 1961 he founded his own studio, Mushi Production.This made the monochrome TV cartoon that was exported to America in 1963, as well as the color from 1965 (called in Japan).
Both titles were hits, and Tezuka sometimes returned to them in later years, but they reflect only a small fraction of his output.He produced work at a boggling rate from the 1950s through to his death from stomach cancer in 1989.Even then the story goes that his final words in the hospital were a plea: “Let me work.” Tezuka fans highlight his wide-ranging epic strips such as (aka ), a political thriller; Tezuka’s multi-volume life of ; and his period supernatural adventure .
Then there’s , a cycle of cosmic stories musing on life, the universe, and everything.Thankfully, there are newcomer-friendly introductions to Tezuka in English.They include Helen McCarthy’s lavishly-illustrated “The Art of Osamu Tezuka” and Frederik L.
Schodt’s compact “The Astro Boy Essays,” which focuses on the title character.For readers interested in how and came to America, that was thanks to the late Fred Ladd, who localized them.You can find a vintage interview with Ladd on this site, and I summarize his story here.
But, Ladd’s full account is in his book “Astro Boy and Anime Come To The Americas,” co-written with Harvey Deneroff.For anyone coming to Tokyo in the coming weeks, there’s also a small but excellent overview of Tezuka’s work at the Tokiwaso Manga Museum.The museum itself is fascinating – it’s a reconstruction of a 1950s apartment building where numerous famous manga artists lived, including (briefly) Tezuka himself.
It’s near a subway station (Ochiai-Minami-Nagasaki on the Oedo line), or a quick bus ride from the overground Sugamo station.The exhibition, running to November 24, is called “Save The Glass Earth,” and it displays art from numerous Tezuka strips, accompanied by English explanatory text.You can examine it fully in half an hour, but I can vouch that it’s a great introduction to Tezuka, as I’m still a Tezuka newcomer myself.
I’ve read a lot Tezuka, and seen quite a few titles related to him, but I don’t feel I’ve ever dove into his work “proper.” As I grew up in England in the 1970s and ‘80s, and weren’t part of my childhood.The 1960s cartoons don’t seem to have ever reached British television, though later remakes may have.There weren’t any hefty DVD sets of and in Britain as there were in America.
I went to a four-day season of Tezuka animation in London in 2008, but even there I felt I was bouncing off a massive corpus of work, never seeing it in the round.Still, I’ve seen many “peripheral” Tezuka anime over the years.One of the most satisfying is , available on Netflix.
This is an eight-hour cinematic epic set in the universe, but it’s accessible if you’ve never seen before.I enthused about it in a previous column.It’s a reinterpretation of Tezuka’s work, written by a newer manga star, Naoki Urasawa.
It’s also a transparent comment on world events after Tezuka’s death, specifically on America’s post-9/11 invasion of Iraq.It’s worth saying, though, that Tezuka was quite capable of such commentary himself.It’s easy to think of Atom/Astro Boy as a cute “cartoon” hero, but Tezuka could use him for some extremely grave ends.
His adventures are mostly set in the future, but there’s a 1967 Tezuka strip called “The Angel of Vietnam,” where Atom finds himself in our (then) present-day world.In the strip, Atom defends a village of helpless Vietnamese peasants against American bombers.But he runs out of power, the Americans return and massacre the villagers.
Imagine if this summer’s film had ended like .The best-known posthumous tribute to Tezuka, though, isn’t , but 2001’s , a cinema feature directed by Rintaro (real name Shigayuki Hayashi).He worked under Tezuka at Mushi Production in the 1960s, directing episodes.
His film is a sci-fi adventure inspired by Fritz Lang’s silent and Tezuka’s early adventure strips, juxtaposing Tezuka’s retro-designs against CG backgrounds.Visually, it was a much more successful mesh of aesthetics than Don Bluth’s the year before, and many of its images are admirable.However, I find much of its story a rambling bore.
It was scripted by Katsuhiro Otomo, whose and ramble too, but they have an emotional cohesion which lacks.I prefer the 2009 film, which is unloved critically and commercially and isn’t actually anime.It was made in CG by Hong Kong’s Imagi Animation; the studio shuttered after the film flopped.
Imagi’s version adds some interesting tweaks – there’s an existential strand about whether Astro is a human child resurrected in a robot body or a of that child, moving into similar territory to this summer’s .There’s also irreverent humor with rebel robots who smack of Monty Python, and a suggestion of politics – the villain is a President planning a meaningless war.was directed and co-written by Britain’s David Bowers, fresh from directing Aardman’s CG .
However, I felt his humor had other roots – Bowers previously worked at Britain’s Cosgrove Hall studio on its wonderful TV cartoons, and .Reviewing the film for Britain’s magazine, I acknowledged it pilfered from other (non-Tezuka) films, that much of its animation was functional, and that it was no competitor for, say, Pixar’s .But I found it “a very decent junior SF adventure.” Many readers may find the short , above, a more congenial introduction to Tezuka.
The clip I’ve embedded shows the film’s first half, from the official channel of Tezuka Productions.However, there are a plethora of “full” copies of online, and of Tezuka’s other short works.Tezuka himself acknowledged was inspired by Ferenc Rofusz’s Oscar-winning animation (1980), but his film is its own creature, and I’ll always prefer it.
Its simple premise delights.An unseen protagonist magically jumps higher and further with each bound, till they’re crossing continents and oceans.Its conceptual elegance and cheeky wit reminds you of hypnotic picture books that entranced you as a grade schooler.
The climax toys with real-world darkness, but it dodges facetiousness or finger-wagging.Instead saves itself with a trickster simplicity that Bugs Bunny would approve.Tezuka’s short animations go back to his 1962 film , though at 39 minutes that was a featurette and a chore.
I saw it together with an esteemed animation critic who found it excruciating, which may have colored my reactions to it ever since.But I found another of Tezuka’s shorts a revelation: 1964’s (no relation to the anthology feature in 1995).’s sensibility and humor smack of Bob Godfrey, while its irreverent treatment of war traumas seems to foresee the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon 60 years on.
Here’s the opening: Tezuka’s later shorts play recursively and fannishly with the heritage of film and animation.1985’s is great fun; its obvious antecedent is Chuck Jones’ , but Tezuka is more enamored with the mucky materiality of the film medium.Here’s the opening: Then there’s 1987’s , which I remember watching in a cinema in awe.
Some viewers may find it comically overblown, complete with a Tchaikovsky soundtrack, but the film’s grandiloquence moved me, much like obvious inspiration, .It’s stuffed with fanservice for cartoon buffs – references include (by Emile Cohl), , and .Here’s the opening, before the images start to move (the full film runs 30 minutes).
The film was originally meant to have four “movements,” but the 1987 film just has two, which are confusingly designated the first movement (running 20 minutes) and the fourth movement (10 minutes).To be honest, nearly all the film’s impact comes from the first movement, which is about a hero squirrel; the rest is an addendum.But I want to point up that following Tezuka’s passing, his son Makoto Tezuka directed what had been meant to be the third movement of , and it was released in 2014 as a separate 12-minute short called .
Gorgeous and amazing, it deserves far more recognition than it has.Here’s a brief extract: It feels like an especially good segment of , and indeed Tezuka often stressed his love of classic Disney.In an infamous essay published when Tezuka died, Hayao Miyazaki claimed Tezuka was ruled by a Disney inferiority complex, “a fear he would never be able to surpass the grand old man [Walt].” Heaven knows what Tezuka would have thought of the storm that broke only a few years after his death, when hordes of anime fans furiously insisted that Disney’s had stolen from Tezuka’s lion cartoon, .
That’s a subject for another article; there’s a comprehensive account at .I’d only add that Tezuka ripped off Disney decades before – look at ’s very first episode around 19-30 and tell me that’s notwith robots.On a personal note, I was once in a Tokyo bookshop when I came across a beautiful Tezuka-illustrated edition of by Dodi Smith, published in Japan in 1972.
It wasn’t a Disney product, but it might as well have been.Here’s an internal illustration: Tezuka had already drawn strip versions of (in 1951) and (in 1952) though the latter, at least, wasn’t Disney-licensed.I’ve only seen extracts from them, but I’m morbidly fascinated that while Tezuka’s like Disney’s, Tezuka includes a scene from the original 19th century Italian story that would have been unimaginable in Disney’s film.
It’s where villains take the puppet boy and hang him from a tree, which author Carlo Collodi originally meant to be the end of his story.Perhaps only a Japanese creator could unite Collodi’s and Disney’s versions so blithely.The last examples of “peripheral” Tezuka work I want to cover go beyond anything Disney could do.
You may have heard of his 1970 feature film (trailer), if only because American marketers had the bright idea to rename it .But I much prefer its predecessor, the 1969 feature (trailer), which Tezuka co-wrote.As with , I remember seeing the film in a cinema and thinking this was a true discovery, as enjoyable for its Harryhausen-style mythical monsters as it was for its arty eroticism and unclean fun.
The video extract below is possibly NSFW, though only mildly.Even in its cult niche, though, has been overshadowed by the superior (1973), a non-comedy adult film made by Tezuka’s studio without his involvement.Still, you can find adult touches in “Tezuka” anime made even now.
The last title I want to point to is the 2023 miniseries , based on part of Tezuka’s story cycle that I mentioned earlier.The anime was serialized online, though there’s also an alternative cinema edit called .Like many of Tezuka’s stories, has tragedy, suffering, and really weird twists.
It as the story of a man and woman travelling to an alien world, determined to live there (and even more determined when the woman becomes pregnant).Then things get bad, and then bad, till finally a character is raging at the heavens, asking why he was even born. That’s followed by a development so outrageous that some viewers may walk away there.Suffice to say a young man finds himself embracing a naked woman who’s the double of his lost mother.
“Your heart was longing for that woman,” this beauty pronounces.“So, I took on the shape of her.” And you thought Ghibli’s was Oedipal.From there, ’s story unravels, becoming less involving and coherent, till its last scenes feel like a mockery of storytelling.
But it’s so odd and charming that the anime itself becomes a loveable character.In one sequence, we journey through space in a magic rock, piloted psychically by an alien child with green hair and a fleshy antenna.It’s captivatingly retro, like old sci-fi animated films like , or black and white . And as you may have noticed from the trailer, this perverse oddity was released worldwide on ! Well, except in America where it’s on Hulu instead.
But it still feels like the end of a very long cross-cultural odyssey, from Tezuka’s “Bambi and Pinocchio” strips, through the controversy and the hubris of , to a reconciliation between Tezuka and Disney in deep space.Andrew Osmond is a British author and journalist, specialising in animation and fantasy media.His email is [email protected].
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