The Smithsonian celebrates the work of Osamu Tezuka (Part 6)

By Brian Mah

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What were the positive and negative things Mr. Tezuka contributed to the Japanese anime and manga industry?
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Fredrick Schodt: Tezuka created the framework for the modern anime and manga industry. He helped to improve the great storytelling in the manga. He didn't do it alone, but he was most responsible for creating the gigantic, self-contained, symbiotic Godzilla-like creature that is the anime and manga industry. At the same time he has been criticized, mostly in animation, for establishing a system of default low wages and limited movement. It wasn't his intent, but it was the economics of the time. Hayao Miyazaki was highly critical of that system.

I think you can also say that he really demonstrated more that anyone else in the world that his belief that the comic book format came from the west and is more conceptual than previously thought. He tried to elevate comic books to the to the same level as novels.

Helen McCarthy: The huge diversity of Tezuka's work and his fearlessness in tackling any subject are one of the reasons why manga and anime have such wide appeal. Also, he gave every character real respect, by refusing to pigeonhole them as just 'good' or 'evil. He showed that every living thing has reasons for its actions, whether human or not, whether a star or a bit part player. That's something we can still learn from. It's too easy to label things by outward appearance or by association. Tezuka makes us think about where actions come from, why characters do things. Sometimes we have to wait for another story or appearance to find out their true motives or backgrounds. Just as in life, his characters aren't transparent and obvious.

Natsu Onoda Power: That's a super big question. His contribution is so huge... and perhaps had different influences in manga and anime. For one thing he valued storytelling. His plots are so intricately woven and experimentally crafted, like a film or a novel. (The story is not always told chronologically, or from one point-of-view, etc.) He introduced vocabularies of film, live theater, and numerous other art forms into his comics (other people did this too, but he did it so extensively). He made children's comics into a mainstream media. You can't summarize his contributions into a paragraph. We have a hard time summarizing it into a book!

Negative? He is often accused of inventing some of the "cheap tricks" in TV animation to save costs. But I don't know if that's actually unique to Tezuka... I feel like it was an innovation out of necessity.

Yoshihiro Shimizu: The most positive things about Tezuka's work were that he had the ability to influence a wide range of audiences, from children to adults.