Early life (1928–1945) Tezuka was born in
Toyonaka, Osaka. He was the eldest of three children. The Tezuka family were prosperous and well-educated; his father Yutaka worked in management at Sumitomo Metals, his grandfather Taro was a lawyer and his great-grandfather Ryoan and great-great-grandfather Ryosen were doctors. His mother's family had a long military history. Later in life, he gave his mother credit for inspiring confidence and creativity through her stories. She frequently took him to the
Takarazuka Grand Theater, which often headlined the
Takarazuka Revue, an all-female musical theater troupe. Their romantic musicals aimed at a female audience, had a large influence of Tezuka's later works, including his costume designs. Not only that, but the performers' large, sparkling eyes also had an influence on Tezuka's art style. He said that he had a profound "spirit of nostalgia" for Takarazuka. When Tezuka was young, his father showed him
Walt Disney films and he became a Disney movie buff, seeing the films multiple times in a row, most famously seeing
Bambi more than 80 times. Tezuka started to draw comics around his second year of elementary school, in large part inspired by Disney animation; Later in life, he would state that the most important influence on his desire to be an animator was not Disney but the experience of watching the Chinese animation
Princess Iron Fan as a child. Around his fifth school year, he found a description of a
ground beetle, known as "Osamushi" in Japanese, in a book on insects. Its name so resembled his own name that he adopted "Osamushi" as his pen name.
Early success (1946–1951) Tezuka came to the realization that he could use manga as a means of helping to convince people to care for the world. After World War II, at age 17, he published his first professional work,
Diary of Ma-chan, which was serialized in the elementary school children's newspaper
Shokokumin Shinbun in early 1946. Tezuka began talks with fellow manga creator , who pitched Tezuka a story based on
Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure novel,
Treasure Island. Sakai promised Tezuka a publishing spot from
Ikuei Shuppan if he would work on the manga. Tezuka finished the manga, only loosely basing it on the original work.
Shin Takarajima (
New Treasure Island) was published and became an overnight success, which began the golden age of manga, a craze comparable to
American comic book Golden Age at the same time. With the success of
New Treasure Island, Tezuka traveled to Tokyo in search of a publisher for more of his work.
Kobunsha turned Tezuka 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 Tezuka published his first masterpieces: a trilogy of science fiction epics called
Lost World (1948),
Metropolis (1949), and
Nextworld (1951). Tezuka played a central role in the influential magazine
Manga Shōnen, which was published between 1947 and 1955, contributing some of its most influential works and helping to define its artistic and pedagogical vision. His serial
Kimba the White Lion (1950–1954) was the magazine's most popular feature, demonstrating the potential of manga to deliver emotional, cinematic storytelling with moral depth. Tezuka also wrote the instructional column
Manga Classroom (1952–1954), which encouraged young readers to see manga as a learnable craft, inspiring many aspiring artists. His involvement was not only instrumental in elevating the magazine's prestige but also deeply formative for his own development;
Manga Shōnen provided him a platform to experiment with narrative form and to mentor a new generation of artists. In 1951, Tezuka graduated from the Osaka School of Medicine and published
Ambassador Atom, the first appearance of the
Astro Boy character. That same year Tezuka joined a group known as the Tokyo Children Manga Association, consisting of other manga artists such as
Baba Noboru, Ota Jiro, Furusawa Hideo,
Eiichi Fukui, Irie Shigeru and Negishi Komichi. On 4 February 1952,
Tetsuwan Atom began serialization in ''''. The character Atom and his adventures became an instant phenomenon in Japan. Due to the success of
Tetsuwan Atom, in 1953, Tezuka published the
shōjo manga Ribon no Kishi (
Princess Knight), serialized in
Shojo Club from 1953 to 1956. In 1954, Tezuka first published what he would consider his life's work,
Phoenix, which originally appeared in
Mushi Production Commercial Firm. Tezuka moved house in 1954, offering his
Tokiwa-sō apartment to two budding manga artists he had complemented previously, Hiroshi Fujimoto and Motoo Abiko. The duo, collectively known as
Fujiko Fujio, would later form careers rivaling Tezuka's in popularity and ambitions, passing on the apartment to other manga artists as time went on.
Production career (1959–1989) Tezuka's first work to be adapted for animation was
Saiyuki, a retelling of the Chinese story of
Journey to the West. Produced by
Toei Animation, Tezuka was officially credited as the director of the film. However, later crew accounts would prove that the manga artist was difficult to motivate to do work. Most of the direction was done by
Yabushita Taiji instead. Tezuka was eventually given the task of storyboarding the film, so that he didn't actually have to animate anything and something in the production could get done. He did not follow Toei's deadlines, and after a year of working on the project and several weeks of threats from Toei's producers, he finally delivered his 500-page storyboard so the animators could do their job in the autumn of 1959. That said, the crew found the storyboard to be entirely unpractical, lacking pacing and a clear plot for a 90-minute film, instead something that would be better told through an open-ended weekly comic like what Tezuka had been producing. This ran counter to Toei's "climax method" that had the goal of a big finish at the end for audiences to leave the cinema remembering. The script for the film was credited to
Uekusa Keinosuke. The film was released as
Alakazam the Great in 1960. That said, many of the animators were initially shocked at the amount they had to produce in such a short amount of time—amounting to a frame a day, thinking it undoable. However, Tezuka's simplified art style made the entire animation process much more efficient. Tezuka did not enjoy his time at Toei, and he especially did not like that he felt he had no control over "his" story or the ending. This film is recognized as a massive turning point in animation history. It introduced the use of simplified art style and
limited animation as labor and cost savers. It introduced
Tsukioka Sadao, one of Tezuka's assistants, to Toei where he would later become the director of the studio's first TV series, and it introduced Tezuka to the animators he would later poach for his own studio. In 1961, Tezuka entered the animation industry in Japan by founding the production company
Mushi Productions as a rival of
Toei Animation. His initial staff was composed of animators he had met while working on
Saiyuki that he convinced to join by paying the animators more than double what Toei was paying them as well as paying for food. Their first film was
Tales from a Certain Street Corner (
Aru Machikado no Monogatari), an 'anti-Disney', experimental film. Just like on
Saiyuki, Tezuka would often fall behind his own deadlines and the staff would have to pick up the slack only for Tezuka to take credit for it later.
Tales from a Certain Street Corner was shown at a single special screening and featured many "tricks" that would be later standardized as labor-saving measures in the anime industry such as repeated and reversed animation cycles of characters dancing, frames being held for a long period of time. This same screening also featured the first screening of Tezuka's
Astro Boy initial two episodes eight weeks before its original broadcast on the 5 or 6 November 1962 at the
Yamaha Hall.
Astro Boy was first broadcast on New Year's Day 1963; this series would create the first successful model for animation production in Japan and would also be the first Japanese animation dubbed into English for an American audience and also created the market for children's merchandise. This is in large part because Tezuka was able to undercut his competitors, cutting costs to 2.5 million yen per episode by using techniques that would later be adopted by the television anime industry at large such as shooting on threes, stop images, repetition, sectioning, combined use, and short shots. None of these methods were invented by Tezuka or Mushi Pro, but were instead refined there. During production, the staff also found that while the short cuts were initially obvious, the use of soundscaping helped to mitigate it. The only reason
Astro Boy was able to survive its inception is because Tezuka was able to sell the foreign rights to
NBC Enterprises (an important distinction from
NBC itself which was the entity Tezuka believed he was selling to). The American company ordered 52 episodes, a crucial investment because Mushi Pro only had four episodes in the can and only enough resources for one episode more. In the American localization, even more over the top sound effects were used to mitigate the obviously cheap animation. The use of sound would be further utilized and exemplified in other anime to follow, leading to many of the "stock" anime sound effects modern audiences are now used to. Selling to an American market was very restrictive, though. They were not to include any indication that the show was made in Japan, they were not to have any arc that lasted more than an episode, all street signs had to be in English, there could be no religious references, "adult" themes, or nudity. Tezuka agreed to this, claiming that it would fit better with the sci-fi setting by giving the sense of a "placelessness". However, he would soon be disappointed by the American market when a Mushi Pro representative went to discuss the next year's episode order only to find out that the Americans didn't need anymore, believing that 52 episodes were more than enough to cycle through indefinitely. Other series were subsequently adapted to animation, including
Jungle Emperor (1965), the first Japanese animated series produced in full color.
Jungle Emperor was also successfully sold to NBC Enterprises who almost made Mushi Pro clothe the wild animals featured. They were finally able to negotiate "than animals were permitted to be 'naked' in natural settings, and that the depiction of black characters was permissible, as long as they were presented as 'civilized'; evil characters could still only be white." In the late 60s and 70s, it was clear that the rise of Mushi Pro was a short one and it was sliding into bankruptcy. Tezuka's financial model was unsustainable and the company was deeply in debt. In two desperate attempts to earn enough money to pay investors, Tezuka turned to the adult film market and produced
A Thousand and One Nights (1969) and
Cleopatra (1970). Both attempts failed. Tezuka stepped down as acting director in 1968 to found a new animation studio,
Tezuka Productions, and continued experimenting with animation late into his life. In 1973, Mushi Productions collapsed financially; the fallout would produce several influential animation production studios, including
Sunrise.
Gekiga graphic novels (1967–1989) In 1967, in response to the magazine
Garo and the
gekiga movement, Tezuka created the magazine
COM. Dissatisfied with the result, he soon after produced
I.L.. His work
Phoenix began in 1967. Besides the well-known series
Phoenix,
Black Jack and
Buddha, which are drawn in this style, he also produced a vast amount of
one-shots or shorter series, such as
Ayako,
Ode to Kirihito,
Alabaster, ''
Apollo's Song, Barbara, MW, The Book of Human Insects, and a large number of short stories that were later collectively published in books such as Under the Air
, Clockwork Apple
, The Crater, Melody of Iron and Other Short Stories
, and Record of the Glass Castle''. Tezuka would become a bit milder in narrative tone in the 1980s with his follow-up works such as
Message to Adolf,
Midnight,
Ludwig B (unfinished), and
Neo Faust.
Death Tezuka died of
stomach cancer on 9 February 1989 after he was rushed into the hospital in Tokyo. His last words were: "I'm begging you, let me work!", spoken to a nurse who had tried to take away his drawing equipment. Although Tezuka was agnostic, he was buried in a Buddhist cemetery in Tokyo. In 2014, it was reported that Tezuka's daughter, , opened a drawer to her father's desk which had been locked since his death. In it she found a half-eaten piece of chocolate, a handwritten essay about
Katsuhiro Otomo in regard to his good work on
Akira, sketches from his various projects, and a large number of erotic sketches of
anthropomorphic animals. ==Style==