Profile - Osamu Tezuka

As a child he compiled an insect reference book made copies, and handed it out to classmates. Fascinated by insects, "i incorporated the ideogram for a kind of beetle, Osamushi, into my first name Osamu, for use as a pen name."

At age eighteen, he enrolled in university as a medical student, and made his debut as a cartoonist with a four-panel newspaper comic strip titled Ma-chans Diary. He qualified as a physician, but Tezuka choose to devote his life to comics.

In 1961, he formed his own animation studio - Mushi Productions - and was involved in productions as director, scenario writer, key-drawing creator, and art director. Mushi Productions delivered the Mighty Atom (Astro Boy) and Jungle Emperor (Kimba the White Lion) animated television series to the world.

In his lifetime, Tezuka is reputed to have produced over 150,000 pages of comics, created over 1000 highly individualistic characters, and altogether, created more than 500 titles of work. So what did this man do in his spare time? Well, Tezuka was a movie fanatic, and would see hundreds of films a year. He would often see only a few scenes of a film, leave, then go on to the next. Tezuka saw Bambi more than 80 times. After about the 70th, and after he had memorised all the scenes, he would turn around in his seat to watch audience reactions.

The power of his work was based on a naive simplicity, characters, motivations and themes clearly displayed in black and white, complimented by vivid animated colour. He pioneered long narratives of hundreds, even thousands of pages, bringing a cinematic art style and novelistic plots to the medium.