2026/11/11 20:48:10 +00:00 | Jonathan James
“It’s hard to overstate Osamu Tezuka’s influence on manga and anime in Japan and comic book and animation storytelling around the world. Before there was Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Chainsaw Man, and Jujutsu Kaisen, there was Tezuka’s Astro Boy: the loveable, iconic, atomic-powered robot boy. Known in Japan as Tetsuwan Atom, this loveable hero sprang fully formed from the imagination of Tezuka-sensei, AKA the “God of Manga.” Tezuka broke new ground in 1963 when he introduced Astro Boy as Japan’s first weekly animated TV program. Now, 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) — will spotlight Osamu Tezuka’s life and legacy with TEZUKA! God of Manga, an all-new, feature-length documentary.”
With TEZUKA! God of Manganow on Kickstarter, I caught up with director Jason Andrew Cohn and writer Samuel Sattin to discuss the life, work, and influence of Osamu Tezuka:
What was your introduction to the work of Tezuka?
Samuel Sattin: I was actually quite young–six or seven, I believe–when I saw Unico and the Island of Magic in theaters. The funny thing about that experience is that for decades I would think it was something I’d imagined. Those who have seen the film can likely speak to its surrealness, and it wasn’t until I was in my thirties when I saw it again and realized it hadn’t been a dream, but rather the work of Osamu Tezuka, whose work I had become enamored with by that point.
How did Tezuka’s work influence your path to becoming a writer?
Samuel Sattin: It’s an interesting question. I’ve been influenced by a lot of elements on the path to becoming a writer. Comics, prose, film, and everything in between. I would say that Tezuka in particular led to a kind of creative awakening in me after I’d already been writing for quite some time. I discovered an expansiveness in his work, and a messiness as well that felt liberating. I see him as someone who lived in the worlds he created. And as someone who never could stop making new ones. The way he depicted emotion, the depths and heights to which he explored… I suppose he convinced me that I was capable of more than I would have necessarily thought possible.
Can you talk about the rewards and challenges of continuing Unico? How did you honor what was done before while making sure to bring yourself to the story?
Samuel Sattin: I love writing Unico. Just the process of creating such an expansive story by pulling from the roots of the original, the ability to work alongside Tezuka Productions and Gurihiru… It has certainly been the highlight of my career thus far.
Honoring Osamu Tezuka’s legacy has been of principal importance to me since the beginning. Of course we are careful with character designs, and adhering to aspects of the original story. But mostly, there’s a notion I attempt to inhabit… One in which you try to connect to the heart of what Tezuka was trying to convey in any given story of his you draw from. Attempting to get close to that spirit is the most honest approach.
Additionally, one of the most important parts of this project has been establishing a truly collaborative relationship with Japan. None of the work I’m doing with Tezuka’s legacy can be done in a vacuum in America or anywhere else. That’s part of why I moved to Japan… To work closely with the world from which these characters and ideas emerged.
Tezuka’s more popular work may, on the surface, seem like it’s geared more toward kids, but there are complex, emotional, and sometimes darker stories and plotlines that are more geared toward adults. Can you talk about the complexity of his work and what you admire about Tezuka as a storyteller?
Samuel Sattin: Tezuka absolutely ran the gamut in terms of his output. He tackled stories for every kind of person and age group and critical demographic. People like to relate him to Walt Disney, mostly because of his foundational impact on Japanese animation and manga. But I think he was more of an artist than anything else–and I mean that in the purest sense. He truly cared about comics as a medium. He wanted to use them to make stories that challenged assumptions and acted as a mode for cross-cultural communication. He could get very avante garde at times, and plumb some pitch dark places in his explorations of humanity and its myriad of problems. This is why his children’ s work is so brilliant. Because it still tackles complex ideas that Tezuka himself would seem to wrestle with throughout his entire life. He was a complex thinker, and he didn’t look down upon children. He knew they could handle complex ideas, because they can.
Our readers are probably most familiar with Astro Boy, but if you had to recommend an additional work of Tezuka’s for them to check out, what would it be?
Samuel Sattin: Oh man, there are so many…and some aren’t translated into English. Perhaps it’s because it’s on my mind at the moment, but I would recommend Trident of the Sea. It’s a very good adventure story. There are parts of it that are rough along the edges in terms of violence and general emotional intensity, but I think that’s part of what makes it so good. It’s a complex fable of loss, family, and vengeance that withstands the test of time.
What was your introduction to the work of Tezuka and what impact has his work had on your life?
Jason Andrew Cohn: First of all, thanks for the opportunity to talk with you!
After graduating from college I moved to Sapporo and lived there for a number of years. I used to study Japanese by hanging out in coffee shops and reading manga with my little Japanese-English dictionary. At some point my roommate, who was Japanese, told me to read Tezuka. The thing about Tezuka was that he created so much so I didn’t know where to start. He covered an insane range of stories, from kiddie adventure like Astro Boy to really serious social commentary like Message to Adolf, and almost everything in between. He did monster stories and mystery and SciFi and weird sex stories like Apollo’s Song and Barbara. Over time, that’s really what impressed me the most was his ability to experiment within so many different genres.
How did this documentary project come together and why was it so important for you to go on this journey?
Jason Andrew Cohn: I really just saw that American audiences were turning on to manga and anime in huge numbers so people knew the contemporary stuff like Miyazaki’s films or manga like One Piece or Bleach, but they didn’t know the deeper history at all. As a journalist I had produced a radio program about Tezuka when Rintaro and Otomo’s Metropolis came out so I knew that the whole Japanese pop culture industry owed its existence to Tezuka. And I also knew that his life story was really interesting. And because I had studied Modern Japanese History as an undergrad in college, I was really interested in the postwar period in Japan. I just felt like it was the right time to do something like this and raise Tezuka’s profile in the western world.
What was the most surprising or interesting thing you uncovered about Osamu Tezuka while conducting research for the documentary?
Jason Andrew Cohn: I think his failures interest me more than anything. I mean, he had this meteoric success from the late-1940s to mid-1960s which gave rise to a whole generation of comic book artists and animators in Japan. It’s honestly impossible to comprehend how influential stories like Astro Boy, Princess Knight and Jungle Emperor Leo were in Japan during that early postwar period. But I’m more fascinated by what happened next. At some point in the later 1960s, he came to be considered passé because he was still creating for audiences of young kids. A new generation of artists was creating in a much grittier style, with more mature themes, so I guess you could say that his original audience, and in a sense the broader culture, had grown up and left him behind a little. Tezuka had basically invented modern manga and anime but now had to completely reinvent himself, which as a middle-aged man, is not an easy thing to do. There’s a really fascinating period in there where he struggles. His animation studio goes bankrupt. His friends steal from him. His young proteges are reading books by his competitors. And his first attempts at artistic reinvention are pretty shaky and not commercially successful. But over time he really does emerge as a completely different kind of artist. Some of the work he created in the later period are absolute masterpieces. And of course he regained his popularity with audiences, as well. At the time of his death he was nearly as popular as he had been at the height of Astro Boy. It’s pretty remarkable. I think in the history of art you’d have a hard time finding many people who do as good a job as Tezuka of creating a second act for themselves, so to speak.
What have been the biggest challenges in putting together this documentary, whether it be tracking down a guest or hunting for long lost information or artwork?
Jason Andrew Cohn: To be totally honest, the hardest part of making any documentary, especially these days, is raising the money. We actually had a $600,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that was awarded to us in 2024. But then the Trump administration came in and canceled all the grants that had been awarded under Biden so we never really saw the money. So that was a kick to the head. Fortunately for us, we were saved by a great guy named Glen S. Fukushima, who heard about what happened and he kind of swooped in and provided the funding that’s kept us going for the last year. Thanks to Glen we’ve been able to fly to Tokyo and interview all these legendary figures in manga and anime who had agreed to talk to us. So we’ve been able to keep the train rolling despite that big setback.
Now we’re about to launch a big Kickstarter campaign that we’re really excited about. We’ve been working with some of the top comic artists and animators around the world to produce these amazing collaboration prints featuring original art work based on Tezuka stories. Those will be available as backer rewards. So we can’t wait for that to launch in September.
Can you talk about the guests you speak with for the documentary and anything interesting you learned or commonalities you noticed throughout your discussions?
Jason Andrew Cohn: Everyone has their own take. We’ve been interviewing a range of people, including artists who worked with him or were deeply influenced by him. Guys like Toshiyuki Tomino, Masao Maruyama and Rintaro all worked with him pretty closely at his animation studio in the 1960s so they had a certain kind of experience. Riyoko Ikeda never worked with him but she was friendly with him because they both loved classical music and would go to concerts together. Guys like Naoki Urasawa and Go Nagai just grew up reading Tezuka so he shaped what they became as artists to a significant extent. Then we talked to Americans like the great translator Fred Schodt, who knew Tezuka quite well on a personal basis despite their age difference, because they traveled together a great deal. And also Ada Palmer, who is a polymath genius who teaches Renaissance History at the University of Chicago and writes bestselling fantasy novels in her downtime. She’s a huge Tezuka fan and she’s written many erudite essays about his work that expound some really interesting theories. I’d say the only thing that really ties everyone together is their respect for what Tezuka accomplished in his incredible career.
Our readers are probably most familiar with Astro Boy, but if you had to recommend an additional work of Tezuka’s for them to check out, what would it be?
Jason Andrew Cohn: I’m really into the ambitious multi-volume comic books he wrote starting in the late 1960s. Dororo is a great one. That was one of his more successful early attempts to break out of shonen manga and write for slightly older audiences. He was jealous of the popularity of Shigeru Mizuki’s fantastic yokai manga so he said, “I can write about monsters, too” and came out with Dororo, which is a great adventure with ghosts and monsters in a medieval Japanese setting. I think fans of Junji Ito would find Dororo to be a pretty fun entry point into Tezuka’s work.
Buddha is another one that adults can really enjoy along with older kids. It’s a very fictionalized saga about the life of Siddhartha Gautama, but it reads like a swashbucking adventure with liberal amounts of philosophy thrown in. I think you really get a good picture of Tezuka’s world view from Buddha. Same goes for the Phoenix series which he started in 1959 and never completed at his death in 1989. A lot of people consider Phoenix to be his master work and I wouldn’t argue.
Then you have some of his darker, adult-oriented stories like Ayako, Barbara and Ode to Kirihito. Those deal with all kinds of political and social corruption and transgressive sexual issues so they’re not for kids. But they are novelistically complex and will give you a sense of the kind of range Tezuka had as an artist. You also see how he adjusted his style of illustration to fit the content of the stories. Even within a single story, like Barbara, you’ll sometimes see him alternate between realistic and cartoony styles depending on whether or not he’s going for a laugh. It’s pretty amazing.
Watch the trailer and learn more about TEZUKA! God of Manga below. Interested in more Manga interviews or looking for some horror Manga recommendations? Make sure to check out my recent interview with Junji Ito!
From the Press Release: It’s hard to overstate Osamu Tezuka’s influence on manga and anime in Japan and comic book and animation storytelling around the world. Before there was Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Chainsaw Man, and Jujutsu Kaisen, there was Tezuka’s Astro Boy: the loveable, iconic, atomic-powered robot boy. Known in Japan as Tetsuwan Atom, this loveable hero sprang fully formed from the imagination of Tezuka-sensei, AKA the “God of Manga.” Tezuka broke new ground in 1963 when he introduced Astro Boy as Japan’s first weekly animated TV program. Now, 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) — will spotlight Osamu Tezuka’s life and legacy with TEZUKA! God of Manga, an all-new, feature-length documentary. Support the film on Kickstarter today.
TEZUKA! God of Manga will feature interviews with legendary manga and anime creators including Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), Riyoko Ikeda (Rose of Versaille), Naoki Urasawa (Monster), Go Nagai (Devilman), Yoshiyuki Tomino (Gundam), MADHOUSE co-founder and anime producer Masao Maruyama (Tokyo Godfathers), anime director Rintaro (Metropolis), best-selling fantasy author Ada Palmer (Too Like the Lightning), Samuel Sattin (Unico Awakening), and Jorge R. Gutierrez (The Book of Life), to discuss how Tezuka’s trailblazing influenced their work and changed the mediums of manga, comics, and animation.
The documentary will also include in-depth conversations with scholars Helen McCarthy (The Art of Osamu Tezuka), Natsu Onoda Power (God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the creation of post-World War II Manga), and the dean of English-language manga scholarship, Fred Schodt (Manga! Manga!) discussing his long working relationship with Tezuka. Once the film is funded, the producers will schedule additional interviews with artists including Paul Pope (THB) and Ron Wimberly (Prince of Cats).
Cohn and Tezuka Productions are also teaming up with some of today’s hottest manga and comic artists to create Kickstarter-exclusive collectible art prints featuring beautiful tributes to beloved Tezuka stories and characters. Fans can collect an astonishing Acetylene Lamp print by Shinichi Ishizuka (Blue Giant), striking takes on Astro Boy by Dave Baker (Mary Tyler MooreHawk) and Jorge R. Gutierrez (Book of Life), bold looks at Black Jack by Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth) and Yuko Shimizu (Barbed Wire Baseball), a beautiful Buddha print from Jesse Lonergan (Dome), a fantastic look at Phoenix by Matt Kindt (Mind MGMT), a pitch-perfect Princess Knight print by Elsa Charretier (November), unbelievable Unico artwork by Gurihuru (Unico Awakening, and a vibrant take on Vampires by Nicole Goux (Punk’n Heads).
Though he’s often compared to Walt Disney, Tezuka was arguably a greater cultural force. His mind-bending storylines — including Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, Princess Knight, and hundreds of others — ignited a post-war explosion of creativity that positioned Japan as a global leader in comics and animation to this day and influenced generations of creators around the world.
“TEZUKA! God of Manga celebrates Tezuka-sensei as a preposterously prolific, enigmatic creator who forever altered popular culture by introducing young readers to a brand-new, DIY medium that rocketed around the world,” said Jason Andrew Cohn. “The creative cross-fertilization between artists in Japan and the rest of the world made Tezuka one of the most beloved and influential artists of the 20th century. This film will celebrate his legacy and introduce his incredible creations to a new generation.”
A moving, immersive, and visually stunning romp through comics history, TEZUKA! God of Manga unfolds in three acts, beginning with his childhood in the suburbs of Osaka in the shadow of the Pacific War. Launching from young Tezuka’s dream of creating manga and founding his own independent animation studio, the film chronicles his ascendence to becoming a national sensation and the subsequent counter-cultural backlash in the 1960s, when young manga readers gravitated away from Tezuka and toward edgier artists in the gekiga movement. The third act explores Tezuka’s remarkable comeback with enduring storylines like Phoenix and Black Jack. The film will leave viewers reflecting on a creative legacy that extends beyond Tezuka’s dozens of television cartoons and animated films and estimated 150,000 pages of published manga.
In addition to the art prints, the TEZUKA! God of Manga Kickstarter campaign features rare rewards and merchandise from Tezuka Productions, a collectible Blu-ray version of the documentary, and a bounty of fun treats.
TEZUKA! God of Manga is scheduled for completion by 2028, in time for the centenary of Osamu Tezuka’s birth. Fans can support the film on Kickstarter now. For more updates follow Tezuka! God of Manga on X, Bluesky, and Instagram.
