Osamu Tezuka’s influence on manga and anime in Japan is as far reaching as it is popular. The creator of Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, Unico, Phoenix, Black Jack, and many other iconic series is aptly nicknamed the “God of Manga.”
Peabody Award-winning director Jason Andrew Cohn and the Bread & Butter Films production team (Camille Servan-Schreiber, Jinko Gotoh, Glen S. Fukushima, and Roland Kelts) examine Tezuka’s life and legacy in the new TEZUKA! God of Manga feature-length documentary (currently available to back on Kickstarter).
We spoke to Cohn all about Tezuka’s body of work and the making of the documentary in this exclusive interview.
How did you find your way to directing a documentary film about Tezuka Osamu?
Jason Andrew Cohn: I started thinking about it a long time ago. I lived in Sapporo for around 4 years after college and I used to sit in coffee shops for hours with my Japanese-English dictionary, reading whatever manga books they had lying around. My roommate was Japanese and he was really into manga and he suggested I start reading more interesting stuff so he got me onto Tezuka.
When I came back to the states and started working as a journalist and documentary filmmaker I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to introduce Tezuka to American audiences. But I was busy with other films, and to be honest I didn’t think I’d be able to get funding for it from U.S. sources. But anime and manga were really starting to boom here so I started writing grants and eventually I earned a prestigious $600,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Unfortunately, the Trump administration came in right around the time they were about to distribute the funds and they terminated our grant, along with grants to dozens of other filmmakers.
This was pretty devastating because we were in the process of making arrangements to interview all these legends of manga and anime in Tokyo– people like Otomo and Rintaro and Naoki Urasawa. Without the funding we had to pause all those plans. Then a miracle happened. I got a phone call out of the blue from Glen S. Fukushima, who is a Japanese-American businessman and philanthropist. He had grown up watching Astro Boy on TV because his dad was with the U.S. army and they were stationed in Tokyo.
Anyway, Glen offered to foot the bill for the Tokyo shoot and in the end we were able to interview seven icons of manga and anime as well as three American artists and scholars. So that’s been a really great start and now we’re leveraging what we’ve accomplished in launching a Kickstarter campaign to help get us through the production stage of the filmmaking.
So the Kickstarter is really a big deal for us. We really need the support to keep moving forward.
What did you discover about Osamu’s far-reaching influence on anime and manga that you didn’t know before starting the documentary?
Cohn: One thing I found really interesting is the way that he served as the center of gravity for the whole universe of manga for many decades. In the early years everybody emulated him. Manga artists from around the country would migrate to Tokyo and they would instantly move into the Tokiwasō apartment building that Tezuka had lived in just because they wanted to be in his orbit. And when the gekiga movement started and artists were trying to do something very different, even then, I’d have to say Tezuka’s influence was really powerful because artists were consciously trying to break free from his gravitational pull. So even when you look at the people who were resisting him, they were trying to escape his influence. And that’s really just another kind of influence.
The first generation of U.S. anime fans most likely became fans because of Osamu’s Astro Boy. What was so significant about Astro Boy, not only for U.S. audiences, but for those in Japan as well?
Cohn: I think it really depends on your age and what era you grew up in. I didn’t really see Astro Boy growing up but I saw stuff like Speed Racer, which obviously owed a debt to Astro Boy for opening up American TV markets.
But I think Astro Boy meant something very different to Japanese audiences, especially the original b&w animation which first aired in 1963. I mean, Japan was on its way to becoming an economic superpower but in many ways the country was still very much recovering from the war. Yoshiyuki Tomino, the creator of Gundam, told us that you’d still be walking through the burned out ruins of neighborhoods and when you’d get home you’d turn on the TV and there was a 100,000 horsepower robot boy with human emotions having adventures. And the juxtaposition of those two things, he said, was mind blowing. So I think it gave Japanese people, especially young kids from that generation, a sense of hope about the future. And it’s been noted by a lot of people that Japan’s leading role in automation and robotics is in no small part due to the massive popularity of Astro Boy in that baby boom generation.
You interviewed many current manga and anime creators. How did they speak about Osamu in the documentary?
Cohn: Everybody has their own take. We talked to a lot of people like Tomino, Masao Maruyama and Rintaro, who worked directly with Tezuka in his animation studio in the 1960s and they have a certain take. I mean, there is definitely reverence there, but it’s also coupled with a lot of memories of how frustrating it could be working with him, mostly because of his insane schedule and the way he could become a bottleneck that slowed down production because he was so over-committed. So that’s one thing. But then we talked with artists like Naoki Urasawa and he flat out credits Tezuka for inspiring him to become a manga-ka. He says reading Phoenix when he was 13 changed his life. He called Tezuka his North Star.
Although Osamu is now seen as one of the trailblazing artists in anime/manga history, he did fall out of favor in the late 1960s. How did he bounce back from what was certainly a trying time for him?
Cohn: Yes, I think he was incredibly competitive and had an insatiable need to be at the top of the manga world and there were long stretches which he called his “slumps” where he really was not at the top. And that could be very emotionally taxing. He would get quite anxious and depressed. Whenever there was a new thing that audiences gravitated to he would desperately work to get back into favor. There are aspects of that that I find a little sad, because he had been so successful and in a sense he could have just kept re-making Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion and he would have made plenty of money from that, but he couldn’t be satisfied repeating himself while other artists were innovating new styles and new ideas. So he just kept grinding. He was the old dog who insisted on learning new tricks.
But in the end he really did re-invent himself and he became a far more complete artist because he tapped into aspects of his own psyche and intellect that he wasn’t really able to exercise when he was making manga and anime for little kids. A lot of it wasn’t very good at first, but by the time you get to books like Barbara, Ayako, Message for Adolph, Kirihito no Sanka, and of course Buddha and the later volumes of Phoenix, he’s really created his own version of gekiga or seinen manga that can draw in older readers but still feels distinctly Tezuka. It’s not copying anyone else. And at the end of his career he had created Black Jack, a series for older readers that was almost as popular and iconic as Astro Boy. So that’s an exceedingly rare thing to be able to re-invent yourself like that. I find it really admirable.
You also co-produced the award-winning Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin documentary. Like Osamu changed the idea of a Japanese cartoon, she also changed the idea of what a science fiction story could be. What stood out to you most about Le Guin’s legacy and work?
Cohn: Well, for me there are two things about Ursula that separate her from the crowd. One is just the writing. She was such a masterful writer. SF and Fantasy are genres that are rich in people with amazing ideas but they aren’t always the most skillful writers. Ursula was among a pretty small cohort of artists who happened to work in those genres but their writing holds its own in so-called straight literature. I find the comparison between the Earthsea Trilogy and the Harry Potter books useful. They’re both about a young wizard at a wizard school. But I think Earthsea has far more emotional depth and the writing is infinitely more poetic and dreamy. I love Harry Potter, don’t get me wrong. It’s an exciting adventure story. But it can’t compare to Earthsea as literature.
The second thing is how steeped Ursula was in anthropological understanding. Her father, of course, was the famous UC Berkeley professor, Alfred Kroeber, who had a controversial relationship with Ishi, the so-called “last Yahi.” So she grew up with a really intense grounding in anthropological theory and practice. She’s really always asking what it means to be human. And she’s often toying with the idea that you can change aspects of our biology or behavior if you imagine a human race that evolved differently or had to adapt to a different environment, and certain things change as a result, but the underlying human-ness never goes away. I find those thought experiments to be endlessly fascinating.
Now that you bring it up, I’d also say Tezuka explored some very similar territory but we’ll save that for another day!
What are your thoughts on bringing the project to Kickstarter? Which perk is the one that you are most excited about?
Cohn: Well, obviously the termination of our NEH grant made it necessary to do a Kickstarter but we probably would have done one anyway because it’s such a great way of connecting with audiences. I mean the audience for a documentary about Tezuka is already on Kickstarter. If a publisher wants to come out with a new English language version of a Tezuka manga, they basically go to Kickstarter to get it funded. So it’s a way of building an ecosystem for the film even while we’re still in the process of developing it. That’s a very cool aspect of Kickstarter.
As for rewards, we’re super excited about what we’re going to be able to offer backers. We’ve been collaborating with a bunch of really great artists. With permission from Tezuka Productions, we asked folks like Jorge Gutierrez, Shinichi Ishizuka, Jesse Lonergan and Yuko Shimizu to do original illustrations of their favorite Tezuka characters and stories. And the stuff they delivered is really spectacular.
Tezuka Productions is also going to donate a couple of rare prints of color magazine covers that will be very collectible and exclusive. So I hope folks will sign up for notifications on our Kickstarter pre-launch page so you’ll have a chance to get some of those as rewards. They’re really beautiful!