Osamu Tezuka

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Osamu Tezuka spent his final hours in a Tokyo hospital bed, drawing. When a nurse tried to take his equipment away, his last words were: "I'm begging you, let me work!" He died of stomach cancer on the 9th of February 1989, and Japan grieved as if it had lost a national institution. His complete oeuvre runs to more than 700 volumes and more than 150,000 pages. He created the first domestically produced animated program on Japanese television, pioneered the business model that still drives anime production today, and shaped the visual language of nearly every manga artist who came after him. But Tezuka was also a licensed physician who never practiced medicine, a man who once received a letter from Stanley Kubrick and turned it down, and an artist who began his adult career by seeing Bambi more than 80 times. How does a child from Toyonaka, Osaka, become the person without whom Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Ghost in the Shell might not exist?

• 2. Roots in Takarazuka

  ›

  Tezuka was born in Toyonaka, Osaka, the eldest of three children in a prosperous, well-educated family. His father Yutaka worked in management at Sumitomo Metals. His grandfather Taro was a lawyer. His great-grandfather Ryoan and great-great-grandfather Ryosen were doctors. His mother's family carried a long military history. It was his mother, though, who shaped him most. She took him repeatedly to the Takarazuka Grand Theater, home of the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female musical theater troupe whose romantic productions were aimed at a female audience. Tezuka later traced the large, sparkling eyes that became the hallmark of his drawing style directly to those performers. He described carrying a profound "spirit of nostalgia" for Takarazuka for the rest of his life. His father introduced him to Walt Disney films, and the young Tezuka became obsessive about them, most famously watching Bambi more than 80 times. He also drew obsessively from around his second year of elementary school, producing pages faster than his mother could erase old ones to make room in his notebooks. Around his fifth school year, he found a description of a ground beetle called "Osamushi" in a book on insects. Its resemblance to his own name was close enough that he adopted it as his pen name, later adding the character for "bug" to his written name. During high school in 1944, he was drafted to support factory work for the Japanese war effort; he kept drawing manga through it. In 1945, he was accepted into Osaka University to study medicine.

• 3. New Treasure Island and the Manga Revolution

  ›

  At age 17, after World War II, Tezuka published his first professional work: Diary of Ma-chan, serialized in the children's newspaper Shokokumin Shinbun in early 1946. His path to wider fame came through a fellow manga creator who pitched him a story loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and promised a publishing spot at Ikuei Shuppan. Tezuka finished the manga, only loosely following the source material. Shin Takarajima, or New Treasure Island, was published in the akahon format, a 200-page comic book distinguished by bright red covers and paper called senkashi that made it easy to circulate cheaply. It was an overnight success. The wave it started is described as the manga revolution in Japan, a craze comparable to the American comic book Golden Age happening simultaneously. Tezuka then traveled to Tokyo to find publishers for more work. Kobunsha turned him down, but Shinseikaku agreed to publish The Strange Voyage of Dr. Tiger, and Domei Shuppansha agreed to publish The Mysterious Dr. Koronko. While still in medical school, he published three science fiction epics: Lost World in 1948, Metropolis in 1949, and Nextworld in 1951. In 1951, he graduated from the Osaka School of Medicine and published Ambassador Atom, the first appearance of what would become Astro Boy. That same year, he joined the Tokyo Children Manga Association alongside artists including Baba Noboru, Ota Jiro, and Eiichi Fukui.

• 4. Astro Boy and the Anime Business Model

  ›

  On the 4th of February 1952, Tetsuwan Atom began serialization. The character known in Japan as Atom, and later as Astro Boy in the United States, became an instant phenomenon. Tezuka had arrived at the idea for Atom's emotional depth partly through an unexpected encounter: while working at a hospital, he was punched in the face by a frustrated American G.I., and the experience gave him the concept of Atom's interaction with those unlike himself. Astro Boy was first broadcast on New Year's Day 1963, and the series created the first successful production model for animation in Japan. It also became the first Japanese animation dubbed into English for an American audience and opened the market for children's merchandise tied to animated properties. Tezuka cut costs to 2.5 million yen per episode through techniques including shooting on threes, stop images, repetition, and short shots. None of these methods were invented at his studio Mushi Productions, but they were refined there and subsequently adopted across the television anime industry. The series only survived its early days because Tezuka sold the foreign rights to NBC Enterprises, an important legal distinction from NBC itself. The American company ordered 52 episodes at a moment when Mushi Pro had only four episodes finished and resources for one more. American localization also stripped away any indication that the series was Japanese; street signs had to appear in English, religious references were removed, and no story arc could run longer than a single episode. Tezuka agreed to these terms but was soon disappointed when a Mushi Pro representative went to discuss renewal only to find the Americans saw 52 episodes as more than enough to recycle indefinitely.

• 5. Founding Mushi Productions

  ›

  Tezuka's relationship with the established animation studio Toei Animation was deeply uncomfortable from the start. His first project there was Saiyuki, a retelling of the Chinese story Journey to the West. Later crew accounts confirmed he was difficult to motivate. Most of the actual direction was handled by Yabushita Taiji. After a year of work and several weeks of threats from Toei's producers, Tezuka finally delivered a 500-page storyboard in the autumn of 1959. The crew found it entirely impractical for a 90-minute film. Rather than the studio's preferred "climax method," with a memorable finish for theater audiences, his storyboard read like material for an open-ended weekly comic. The film was released as Alakazam the Great in 1960. Tezuka left Toei feeling he had no control over his own stories. In 1961, he founded Mushi Productions as a rival. He recruited animators he had met on the Saiyuki project by paying them more than double what Toei had paid, and covering food. Among the things Tezuka's departure from Toei set in motion was the introduction of Tsukioka Sadao to that studio; Sadao would later become director of Toei's first TV series. When Mushi Productions' financial model proved unsustainable and the company slid into bankruptcy in 1973, the collapse gave rise to several influential animation studios, including Sunrise. Tezuka himself had already stepped down as acting director in 1968 to found a successor company, Tezuka Productions.

• 6. The Gekiga Turn

  ›

  In 1967, responding to the magazine Garo and a broader movement in Japan toward more realistic, adult-oriented comics called gekiga, Tezuka created his own magazine, COM. The change was radical: he moved away from the cartoony, Disney-influenced slapstick style that had made him famous and toward darker, more literary material. The stories that followed were filled with explicit violence, erotic scenes, and morally complex characters. His first steps in this direction came with Dororo, a yōkai manga influenced in part by the success of Shigeru Mizuki's GeGeGe no Kitarō. He produced Vampires at the same time, and both series introduced a stronger, more coherent storyline and a shift in drawing style. His series Phoenix, which he considered his life's work, began appearing in 1967 and continued until his death, remaining unfinished. The scope of his mature output was vast: besides the well-known series Phoenix, Black Jack, and Buddha, he produced shorter works including Ayako, Ode to Kirihito, Alabaster, Apollo's Song, Barbara, MW, The Book of Human Insects, and many short stories collected in volumes such as Under the Air, Clockwork Apple, and The Crater. Black Jack received the Japan Cartoonists' Association Special Award in 1975 and the Kodansha Manga Award in 1977. In a 2006 poll by the Japan Media Arts Festival asking critics, scholars, and fellow artists to name the greatest manga of all time, Tezuka placed three works in the top ten: Phoenix ranked first, Black Jack ranked fifth, and Astro Boy tied for sixth. He was the only figure with more than one work in the top ten.

• 7. A Cinematic Eye

  ›

  Tezuka's visual approach drew from film in ways that were unusual for manga. His "cinematic" page layouts owed a debt to Milt Gross' early graphic novel He Done Her Wrong, which he had read as a child. He incorporated deep-focus cinematography into single frames, a technique that had been developed in Hollywood film. His Metropolis is often cited as a demonstration of his use of cinematic pans, close-ups, and zooms that created the illusion of motion on the page. He also developed what he called the Star System: rather than creating characters unique to each story, he cast the same recurring characters in different roles across his body of work, much as actors modify their personalities and appearances for different performances. This approach built an intertextual universe long before such a concept had a name. His use of the "kiss-scene" motif reflected the rising popularity of kissing in Japanese film, but he typically offset it with a Japanese narrative preference for self-sacrifice: instead of a happy ending, one or more characters would die specifically for the sake of others. He also deployed what he called dyadic visual jokes, in which a creature would arrive at an emotionally charged scene and break the tension, reminding the reader of the framework of fiction. The large eyes that became the signature of Japanese animation style originated with Tezuka, drawn from his memories of the Takarazuka Revue's performers alongside Western cartoon characters including Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, and Bambi.

• 8. Legacy Across Borders

  ›

  Tezuka guided many of the artists who defined the generation after his own, including Shotaro Ishinomori and Go Nagai. The list of creators who have cited him as an influence covers an enormous range: Hayao Miyazaki, Akira Toriyama, Naoko Takeuchi, Rumiko Takahashi, Masamune Shirow, Kentaro Miura, Naoki Urasawa, and the studio Gainax among them. Outside Japan, Will Eisner called himself an ardent admirer. Jean Giraud, known as Moebius, called Tezuka "a great artist, and a fascinating personality." Art Spiegelman compared his place in the history of manga to Siddhartha's place in Buddhism. Film directors Akira Kurosawa, who owned his collected works, and Guillermo del Toro have cited him. Video game designers Shigeru Miyamoto and Yuji Horii named him as an influence. In the poll asking for the Top 100 Historical Persons in Japan, broadcast by Nippon Television in 2006, Tezuka ranked 24th, the only manga artist to appear. In 2019, a project was announced called Tezuka 2020, in which an AI system trained on his style was used to produce a new manga; after the AI-generated illustrations were refined with input from human artists, the resulting work was published in the magazine Morning on the 27th of February 2020 under the name Phaedo. The Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum in Takarazuka, inaugurated on the 25th of April 1994, holds a manga library of five hundred of his works, a video library, and an Animation Workshop where visitors can make their own animations; outside the entrance, imitations of the hands and feet of his characters stand in a walk-of-fame arrangement, and inside, a glass sculpture based on a book he wrote in childhood called Our Earth of Glass.