Tezuka Osamu

Pollution, this article suggests, challenges the fundamental structural premises of contemporary state institutions such as the law. These institutions are based on the premise of human exceptionalism via the construction of a human-nature divide. This divide only allows one point of connection between human and nature: the human ability to absorb nature as property. Such metaphorical understandings of absorption become a problem as soon as the physical human body is faced with a situation in which we constantly absorb pollution (e.g. nitrogen oxides, microplastic, ionizing radiation, but also other life forms such as airborne viruses). As a result, contemporary institutions are ill-equipped to deal with pollution as a central element of the contemporary human condition.

This article suggests that comics are a model for rethinking these categorical issues productively and sustainably. By using visual elements, comics have already been able to reframe and recontextualize categorical premises such as the human-nature divide that otherwise tend to be reproduced in critical theory and the law. To make this point for the potential of a new categorical language that centrally draws on visual elements in text, the article uses two central examples from Japan and Germany: Osamu Tezuka's story "Space Snow Leopard" from the Astro Boy series, and Chlodwig Poth's short comic "Jörg the Limelight Hog."

En esta tesis doctoral se realiza un estudio del particular modelo de la animación japonesa, conocido generalmente como anime, en la pretensión de profundizar en sus orígenes, conocer su proceso de producción, analizar sus obras televisivas más actuales y, en definitiva, de tratar de ofrecer una nueva visión sobre este desconocido modo de creación.

This master’s thesis explores the construction and mutability of the Japanese race and ethnicity in the print comics of Dr. Tezuka Osamu (1928–1989), Japan’s “god of manga” and the creator of such beloved series as Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. By investigating three of Tezuka’s mature, lesser-known works from the 1970s and 80s, I will illustrate how Tezuka’s narratives have been shaped by his consciousness of racial issues and his desire to investigate the changing nature of Japanese identity in the postwar era.

Chapter one analyzes Ode to Kirihito (1970–71, 2006 English), and introduces Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to show the ways in which Tezuka bestializes his ethnically Japanese protagonists and turns them into a distinct class of subaltern. Chapter two examines intersections between race and war narratives using Adolf (1983–85, 1995–96 English), Tezuka’s WWII epic about the Jewish Holocaust. The concept of hybridity is utilized and the case is made that Tezuka ultimately denies his racially mixed characters the benefits of their Japanese identity. Chapter three investigates the manifestation of Japanese masculinity in Gringo (1987–89), one of Tezuka’s final works. In this chapter, Japanese identity, masculinity, and sexual ability are linked to the national sport of sumo wrestling. A discussion of diasporic communities is included in order to discuss how the Japanese race is conceptualized as it moves through different geographical and cultural spaces.

Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis is ultimately a narrative about the nature of art told in a concrete visual and verbal logic accessible to a child. The story unfolds across multiple domains – Greater Metropolis, Underground, Child’s World – and has the form of a ring where the first element matches the last, the second matches the next to last, and so forth: 1 2 3 4 5 4’ 3’ 2’ 1’. By juxtaposing multiple plot lines, Tezuka deploys an essentialist mechanics of inner-workings and external appearances of people and animals to illustrate practical, moral, and aesthetic issues. By depicting a world that is rapidly destroying itself, Tezuka indicates the order that must be conserved if the world is to persist. Two of Tezuka’s devices have been developed in later manga by himself and others:  1) an artificial being is search of its place in human society, 2) a being that can be either male or female.

The article examines the stylistic and narrative influence of the work of cartoonist Milt Gross (1895-1953) and animation producers Max (1883-1972) and David (1894-1979) Fleischer on Japanese manga artist Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989). Tezuka is considered to be Japan's "God of Comics" who introduced many of the stylistic and narrative conventions that have accompanied manga and made it a leading form of entertainment in post-war Japan. Tezuka himself acknowledged the influences of Gross and the Fleischer brothers, and this has been examined in previous studies. This article, however, focuses on a previously unexplored aspect of this influence: the Jewish heritage which is strongly echoed in both Gross' cartoons and the Fleischer brothers' animated films. The article argues that this heritage, which reflects Gross' and the Fleischer brothers' background as the sons of Jewish and immigrant families in America, is central to their influence on key aspects of Tezuka's works - the use of silent panels, identity changes, design style and more. The article also demonstrates Tezuka's own interest in Jewish culture and identity, as reflected in works from the  later period of his career.

This article analyzes two episodes of the Phoenix series written by Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), published between 1967 and 1988. The analysis of episodes narrated between Yayoi and Kofun periods allows identifying the documentation chosen by the author and to interpret the work as a historical fiction written according certain line of postwar Japanese historiography that understands history as a construction and is critical with a narrative centered on the emperor worship that configures the imperial ideology that derived in the Second World War.

Opening Paragraph: The penultimate sequence of Rintarô’s Metropolis (2001) is astonishing. We see a finger press down on a key, followed by flashing light, and then hear Ray Charles singing “I Can’t Stop Lov- ing You,” a bittersweet ballad about lost love. As the music unfolds, we see the horrendous destruction of a huge building complex.  e juxtaposition of music and image is exquisitely jarring. What is going on here?

The Japanese animated film “Metropolis” (2001) drew on two earlier visual narratives sharing its name: Fritz Lang’s famed silent film (1927) and Osamu Tezuka’s early postwar comic book (1949). This paper understands these three tales as instances of what Walter Benjamin referred to as the dialectical image. It examines the imaginary cities offered up by the stories, places them in the context of their contemporary urban and political discourses, and relates them to applications of military and police violence over the arc of the last century as understood through the work of Giorgio Agamben. Making a few observations on the topologies of the dialectical image and of the state of exception, it raises the question of where their relationship might be taking us now.

"The tradition of the oppressed shows us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
—Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

This paper documents three tellings of "Metropolis": Fritz Lang's film (1926), Osamu Tezuka's manga (1949), and Rintarô's animated film (2001). It makes the case for a political and historical understanding of their imagery of bodies and cities disrupted."

Beginning with a contemporary example drawn from the relationship between U.S. President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, this chapter examines racial and national identity politics in Gringo (1987–1989, Big Comic), one of the last, unfinished manga Tezuka Osamu was serializing at the time of his death. In a tape-recorded interview conducted in 1987 from his Tokyo hospital bed, Tezuka characterized Gringo as a message to a Japanese citizenry he viewed as increasingly insular—unwilling to associate with foreigners abroad or accept them domestically into Japanese households. While Gringo debuted during the height of Japan’s bubble economy, it remains oddly prescient in how it anticipates populist political discourses in both Japan and the United States today.

I read Gringo as Tezuka’s own rebuttal against the forces of Japanese cultural nationalism (nihonjinron). My analysis centers on the destabilization of Japanese identity as it moves through different national and cultural spaces, typified by the main story arc of transplanting a sumo wrestler turned salaryman, his French-Canadian wife, and their biracial daughter, to South America. Tezuka’s series highlights a new, internationalized vision for the Japanese nuclear family that is quickly called into question when the characters sojourn in Tokyo Village (Tōkyō-mura), an anachronistic diaspora community in Brazil that values Japanese ethno-racial purity. Japanese culture, cuisine, and national sport are therefore recast to expose ongoing tensions between contemporary Japanese society and the imperialist and nationalist values that defined the country four decades earlier. It is by parodying these stereotypical images of ‘Japaneseness’ that Tezuka’s Gringo becomes as useful a critique of Japan’s bubble economy as it is of today’s political climate.

[*Full eBook available online through Routledge]
https://www.routledge.com/The-Representation-of-Japanese-Politics-in-Manga-The-Visual-Literacy-Of/Rosenbaum/p/book/9780367439965

This article examines the evolution and impact of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl on postwar manga (print comics) and Japanese visual culture. The author argues that Anne’s enduring legacy in Japan, dating back to 1952, owes much to the ways in which the content of her Diary capitalizes on certain hallmarks of shōjo (girls’) manga culture, such as affective storytelling and character interiority. Moreover, as shown through a primary analysis of two emonogatari (illustrated story) versions of the Diary from 1964 and two manga versions from 1967, among others referenced, Anne Frank’s life and legacy inspires a hybridized narrative and visual style in manga that blends the emotionality and interiority of shōjo with the more graphic depictions of violence common to shōnen manga for young boys. In so doing, it encourages a reevaluation of the shōjo mode and its ability to bear witness to the physical violence and psychological trauma of the Holocaust.

[*Full article available online through Duke University Press]
https://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-abstract/28/4/729/167018/When-Anne-Frank-Met-Astro-BoyDrawing-the-Holocaust?redirectedFrom=fulltext

1961 : The Japanese artist Osamu Tezuka founded “Mushi Production studio” in order to create a series in animation, especially for television. The device he invented with his team revolutionized the traditional methods (limiting the number of colors to accelerate colorization, multiplication of still shots on backdrops, loops, camera scans accompanied by sound effects, recoveries of backgrounds, etc..). When the cartoon Tetsuwan Atom (“Astro boy”) swept over the small screen, the success was immediate. Today, even depreciated by some analysts and filmmakers, this “limited animation” has been copied over and above in Japan.

De l’œuvre filmique d’Osamu Tezuka, l’Europe n’a guère connu et diffusé que les remakes en couleur, réalisés spécialement pour le marché d’exportation par Tezuka, dans la deuxième moitié de sa carrière. L’ouvrage, de 300 pages et illustré d’une trentaine de planches, présente et analyse les dessins animés originaux qui inaugurèrent l’ère télévisuelle dans les années 1960. Ce « moment fuyant » que Tezuka a su capter correspond bien sûr aux états arrêtés de ses personnages, saisis par le dessin dans un moment d’effroi, de stupeur ou de plaisir ; c’est aussi le boom de la télévision, en plein développement dans le Japon d’après-guerre.

Se revisan los elementos gráficos que Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989), uno de los dibujantes de historietas japonesas más famosos de todos los tiempos, utilizó para representar de manera sexual a los personajes femeninos que aparecen en sus obras, sobre todo aquellas publicadas en la década de 1960. Se retoman algunos estudios que lectores de Japón y del extranjero han hecho sobre el trabajo del artista desde la publicación de "Shin Takarajima" (La nueva isla del tesoro) en 1947. Se hace énfasis en los libros del crítico estadounidense Frederik L. Schodt, quien ha  publicitado  y  popularizado  en  el  mundo  angloparlante  la  obra  del  llamado  Dios del manga. Finalmente, se describe cómo Tezuka se convirtió en el pionero en la sexualización de niñas y adolescentes representadas en el manga japonés.

1961 : The Japanese artist Osamu Tezuka founded “Mushi Production studio” in order to create a series in animation, especially for television. The device he invented with his team revolutionized the traditional methods (limiting the number of colors to accelerate colorization, multiplication of still shots on backdrops, loops, camera scans accompanied by sound effects, recoveries of backgrounds, etc..). When the cartoon Tetsuwan Atom (“Astro boy”) swept over the small screen, the success was immediate. Today, even depreciated by some analysts and filmmakers, this “limited animation” has been copied over and above in Japan.

This was a talk for high school students from Christian-Ernst-Gymnasium, Erlangen, Germany. I talked about adaptations of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's drama "Faust" in the medium of comics, using "Faust" versions by Luciano Bottaro (Italy, 1958), Flix (Germany, 2009), and Osamu Tezuka (Japan, 1988) as my main examples.

This article examines three lesser-known war comics by Tezuka Osamu - The Man Who Visited Joe (1968), The Hill of Zero Dimension (1969), and I.L: The Man from the South (1970) - in terms of how they depict ethno-racial difference and the politics of national identity. My analysis focuses on hybridized characters whose liminality blurs the boundaries between “races,” genders, and sexualities. I argue that while Tezuka creates productively “queer” characters in each of these manga, he seems to paradoxically hold an aversion to this very hybridity, and therefore attempts to neutralize it or revert it by the conclusion of each work.

[*Full article available in print or online through PRISM: University of Calgary’s Digital Repository]
http://hdl.handle.net/1880/111897

De l’œuvre filmique d’Osamu Tezuka, l’Europe n’a guere connu et diffuse que les remakes en couleur, realises specialement pour le marche d’exportation par Tezuka, dans la deuxieme moitie de sa carriere. L’ouvrage, de 300 pages et illustre d’une trentaine de planches, presente et analyse les dessins animes originaux qui inaugurerent l’ere televisuelle dans les annees 1960. Ce « moment fuyant » que Tezuka a su capter correspond bien sur aux etats arretes de ses personnages, saisis par le dessin dans un moment d’effroi, de stupeur ou de plaisir ; c’est aussi le boom de la television, en plein developpement dans le Japon d’apres-guerre.

Pollution, this article suggests, challenges the fundamental structural premises of contemporary state institutions such as the law. These institutions are based on the premise of human exceptionalism via the construction of a human-nature divide. This divide only allows one point of connection between human and nature: the human ability to absorb nature as property. Such metaphorical understandings of absorption become a problem as soon as the physical human body is faced with a situation in which we constantly absorb pollution (e.g. nitrogen oxides, microplastic, ionizing radiation, but also other life forms such as airborne viruses). As a result, contemporary institutions are ill-equipped to deal with pollution as a central element of the contemporary human condition. This article suggests that comics are a model for rethinking these categorical issues productively and sustainably. By using visual elements, comics have already been able to reframe and recontextualize categorical ...

The image of the destruction of the city has a long history, and resonates disturbingly with current events. It seems to question the very possibility of creating an architecture – that is, of giving the world a form and thereby a meaning. This thesis charts mutations of that imagery as it emerges in three visual narratives punctuating the last century: the "Metropolis" tales. These are Fritz Lang's film of 1926, Tezuka Osamu's manga or graphic novel of 1949, and the 2001 work of anime or Japanese animated film by director Rintarô. Despite their differences, these tales exhibit a fundamental overlap of concern. Each deals in its own way with crises in modern conditions of life: crises articulated not only in the imagery of the city but also in that of the broken bodies central to it. The thesis argues that this imagery, hovering at the brink of and ultimately passing beyond the line of apocalypse, articulates an undiminished human yearning to engage in a life project. In our time this yearning, this desire, takes on a new form in which the city and the body adopt a precarious and problematic relationship to their image. But perhaps the seeming instability of this condition as articulated in disrupted bodies and cities is a more faithful reflection of the fundamental human anxiety reflected in myth, and the more foundational destructuring involved in our perception and making of the world, than any whole and healthy body, than any utopia.