Tezuka Productions has released an special preview interview with Katsuhiro Otomo for the upcoming feature-length documentary that celebrates Osamu Tezuka’s life and legacy: TEZUKA! GOD OF MANGA.
The film will be funded by a Kickstarter campaign that will launch soon:
Otomo's comments
Tezuka was simply amazing. It's silly to underestimate him. Nowadays you can read lots of manga, but nobody produced as much as him. He could write girl's manga, period dramas, Sci-Fi... All I can say is it's amazing. It probably shortened his life, though. But someone who created that much work at the cost of his own life... You shouldn't underplay the accomplishments of someone like that.
At first I was reading. Tezuka stories when they came out every month. But there were these rental book stores. Rental book shops had books that you couldn't find in regular bookstores and the things that everyone liked reading were pretty violent. For example, samurai stories with people being slashed... blood gushing, arms and heads flying off, that kind of brutality. Tezuka had from the start been very influenced by Disney so you might say his stories were educational... good triumphed over evil and it was easy for even little kids to understand. But times had changed... Movies started becoming. more realistic, especially American movies and Tezuka would eventually start to follow those trends. But at first, the people who had been doing those violent stories from the beginning.... were more interesting to read. So I think during that period Tezuka was a little bit lost.
