Osamu Tezuka: comics, television and animated experiments

Tezuka made his newspaper debut in 1946 with the four-panel Diary of Ma-chan. New Treasure Island followed in Osaka in 1947: Shichima Sakai supplied the original conception and structure, and Tezuka drew the manga. Successive panels develop movement through the opening car journey. Tezuka later redrew the book for his collected works in 1984, producing a different version of the collaboration.

From a book project to national serialisation

Jungle Emperor began in Manga Shonen in 1950, extending Tezuka’s work from Osaka books into national magazines. Editor Kenichi Kato saw a manuscript intended for a standalone book and helped turn it into a serial. Growing workloads also encouraged assistant work and written instructions for backgrounds and colour, making production increasingly collaborative.

Writing for different readers

Astro Boy and Princess Knight became magazine serials. In the 1970s, Black Jack followed an unlicensed surgeon through largely self-contained medical dramas, while Buddha reworked the Buddha’s life as a long narrative with fictional characters. Different subjects and publication formats brought different storytelling possibilities, from episodic cases to an extended life story.

Tezuka established an animation department in 1961; it took the name Mushi Production in 1962. The Astro Boy television series began in January 1963, requiring a recurring production schedule and collaboration across storyboarding, drawing, photography and sound. It established the weekly half-hour continuing television-anime format in Japan, rather than marking the beginning of Japanese animation.

Tezuka Productions was founded in 1968, initially for manga production. Tezuka left the presidency of Mushi Production in 1971; that company went bankrupt in 1973. He continued making manga and animation in other settings. The short films Jumping (1984) and Broken Down Film (1985) experimented with viewpoint and the appearance of film itself. In Jumping, a boy’s increasingly large leaps carry him over a town, forest and ocean, eventually into a country at war. A continuous shot makes the rising and falling viewpoint the film’s organising device: familiar streets give way to cities and seas seen from above. After his death in 1989, his work continued to circulate in new editions and adaptations.