The Story of Animerama: Origins

In the 1960s, one of the first studios to make anime for television was Mushi Productions.  Towards the end of that decade, their desire to innovate would lead them to produce a trilogy of animated films under the label of “Animerama.”  These films were a major gamble on their part, a means by which they could tap into both adult and international audiences.  This gamble ultimately ended in failure, and for many decades these films lingered in obscurity.  It’s only in recent years that modern viewers have been able to rediscover them and reassess their place in the history of Japanese animation.

This is the first is a series of essays chronicling the history behind this ill-fated trilogy.  It will explore the careers of the two men who helped bring these films into existence, the fate of the studio that killed itself making them, and the legacy of their work on the Animerama films and beyond.

This is the story of Animerama.

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This story begins with one of the most storied figures in all of Japanese media: Osamu Tezuka.  Starting in the late 1940s, he revolutionized the world of manga with his particular brand of thrilling, cinematic adventure stories.  Over the next two decades he would create one hit manga after another, earning loads of acclaim and a small fortune in the process.  Tezuka’s love of art didn't stop at manga, though.

Tezuka often said that while manga was his bride, animation was his mistress, and that love affair was a long-standing one.  As a child, he enjoyed watching Silly Symphonies, Felix the Cat, and Popeye shorts at the local theater or upon his family’s personal film projector.  During wartime he was moved by the beauty and fluid motion of Japanese animated features like Momotaro’s Sacred Soldiers, even if he did not take the imperial propaganda within them to heart.  During the Occupation, he would sneak away from his medical studies to watch the latest Disney film dozens of times in the theaters.  He was an animation otaku before the very concept of an 'otaku' even existed.

It is one thing to have a passion for animation, but it is quite another to be able to translate that passion into a career.  Tezuka tried to break into animation as early as 1947, but the market for Japanese animation at the time was virtually nonexistent and he was advised to stick to the less stressful and better paid world of manga.  He wouldn't get another opportunity until a decade later, thanks to a director at Toei Doga named Daisaku Shirakawa.  He had been a fan of Tezuka's manga, and in particular of Boku no Songoku, an adaptation of Journey To the West.  He had managed to convince the leadership at Toei to turn this manga into their next feature film, to be titled Saiyuki.  Tezuka was equally excited to work with him as he was a fan of their previous animated film.  His only insistence was that he would work on the film's storyboards (which would also make him the de facto character designer).  He spent the better part of a year working at Toei starting in 1959, but his relationship with the staff became increasingly contentious.

While Tezuka was extremely prolific with his storyboards (to the point of drawing over 500 pages), he was also frequently late with them due to his manga work and other obligations.  Sometimes he was so busy that he would have to send over one of his manga assistants to send messages and clean up his drawings.  Meanwhile, nothing Tezuka did seemed to satisfy the animation staff at Toei.  Instead of relying entirely on his storyboards for the narrative, they brought in a separate screenwriter and made storyboards from that.  Instead of using his character designs as-is, the animators tweaked them to better fit with their own ideas.  Things came to a head when it came to the ending, as the producers insisted upon a happy ending whereas Tezuka fought (and failed) to keep his story's original, bittersweet ending.

It is perhaps no surprise that the professional relationship between Tezuka and Toei ended shortly after Saiyuki's release in August of 1960.  Tezuka was not pleased with the end result, feeling that only half of his original ideas were present in the final film.  Still, his time there was not completely unproductive.  He had gotten to observe the process of making professional animation from the inside.  He had found friends and allies within Toei as well as at various other animation studios.  Further more, he realized that he had enough wealth from his manga that he didn't need outside producers to make his dreams of animation a reality.  That same year he purchased a property to contain not just his new house but an animation studio of his own.

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Eiichi Yamamoto’s history is not as well-known nor as thoroughly chronicled as Tezuka’s, but it is no less important to the story of Animerama.  He was one of countless up-and-coming animators who found their way to Tokyo during the 1950s, hired right out of high school.  He got his start at Otogi Productions, a tiny animation studio founded by popular pre-war mangaka Ryuichi Yokoyama.  Like Tezuka, Yokoyama had dreams of becoming the next Disney.  He had seen his popular Fuku-Chan comics turned into animated propaganda shorts during the war and had even met Walt Disney as part of a press tour in 1951.  He founded Otogi Pro in 1956, and within a few years they were producing some of the first animated shorts to air on Japanese television.  Young Eiichi was eager to work with one of his childhood idols.

Alas, Otogi Productions was also something of a mess behind the scenes.  It was manned only by a handful of animators working out of Yokoyama's house with little to no guidance or supervision. They received no formal instruction in animation beyond encouragement to read a handful of Disney instructional books.  Yokoyama's idea of direction was to point at one of his illustrations and say "make it look like that."  While they would produce some longer, more ambitious projects, the studio's distribution deal with Toho ensured that they were left on the shelf for years, unseen and unsold.  After a few years, Yamamoto was ready to seek better opportunities, and his opportunity came in August of 1960 when Osamu Tezuka came to visit the studio.

Tezuka was no stranger there, as he was friends with Ryuichi Yokoyama and had made regular visits over the years.  This time was different, as he was accompanied by Daisuke Shirakawa.  It was there that Tezuka publicly announced his intention to found an animation studio, even as Shirakawa and Yokoyama tried to dissuade him.  Eiichi Yamamoto would quit his job at Otogi Production not long thereafter, becoming one of the first employees of the newly dubbed Mushi Productions.

Mushi Productions was officially founded in June 1961 with just five staff members working out of a spare room in Tezuka’s new home.  By the next year the staff had grown to over two dozen individuals, demanding a move to the newly built studio building nearby.  The staff had mostly come from Toei, as the animators there were increasingly fractured by growing discontent and labor disputes.  They were dazzled by Tezuka’s offer of generous salaries and promises of greater creative freedom.  Tezuka wanted to hire the very best animators he could find because he had grand ambitions for his brand-new studio.  He didn't want to waste his time churning out low-quality animation for TV or commercials like so many other Japanese animation studios of the time.  Sure, those could be useful as a secondary revenue stream later on, but first and foremost he wanted Mushi Productions to make art.  Within a few months of its founding he set his staff to work on what would surely be the first of many animated masterpieces.

Mushi’s first release was 1962’s Tales of a Street Corner.  This 40 minute short is a fanciful anti-war story viewed through the lens of a wall of living posters and the characters around them.  This kind of message was nothing new for Tezuka but the presentation is what made it novel.  From the start, Tezuka and his team chose to not use dialogue to tell his story.  Instead, everything was communicated through music, movement, and animation.  The animation itself incorporated flat abstracted shapes, bright colors, and variable animation frame rates, tricks he had borrowed not just from the independent fringe of Japanese animation but also international animators like Norman McLaren and UPA for both creative effect and as a time- and money-saving effort.

As for Eiichi Yamamoto, he was busy making himself useful at his new workplace.  While Tezuka was the creator, writer, and producer for Tales of a Street Corner, he handed off direction duties to Yamamoto.  In later years he would admit that much of the hands-on direction of the short was handled not by him but by Yusuke Sakamoto, a seasoned Toei animator who started at Mushi at the same time.  Since the staff was so small, Yamamoto would ended up serving as the short's editor and art director as well.  He proved himself able and up to the task of his many roles on early shorts like this, and thus his career as an anime director was born.  

Sadly, Tales of a Street Corner did not earn the rapturous praise that Tezuka had wanted.  It would earn a few minor awards at a few Japanese film festivals, but critics were largely unimpressed with it.  Compared to the truly avant-garde works of independent animators like Yoji Kuri, Hiroshi Manabe, and Ryohei Yanagihara, Tezuka's short seemed indulgent, padded, and quaint.  Its reception with other animators wasn't much better.  Hayao Miyazaki (then just another animator at Toei) stated years later that he felt “so disgusted that chills ran down my spine” when he saw its simple, choppy animation.  

Tezuka would not be deterred by its lackluster reception.  He would have Mushi Productions produce six more shorts over the next six years, most of them paid out of pocket by Tezuka himself.  They varied wildly from short, punchy style exercises like 1962's Ose to longer, more ambitious projects like 1966's Pictures At An Exhibition, a series of shorts themed around the famous Mussorgsky symphony.  They dealt with very different topics: war, murder, love, sex, imagination, and nature, just to name a few.  What they all shared was a desire to experiment with animation itself, whether that was adding mixed media, exploring new visual styles, or by animating them with as few cels as they could get away with.

As much as Tezuka loved making them, there were few outlets where these shorts could be screened and fewer still for profit.  One of the few public showcases they ever received was in November of 1962, when Mushi debuted both Tales of a Street Corner and Ose at an showcase in the stylish Ginza district of Tokyo.  Both of these shorts would be overshadowed by another feature shown that night: a ten minute pilot film for Mushi's first TV show Tetsuwan Atom, the once and future Astro Boy.

Tetsuwan Atom was not so much Tezuka's idea as it was the passion project of the aforementioned Yusuke Sakamoto.  He had long been a fan of the manga and had tried (and failed) to pitch different Tezuka-based projects during his time at Toei, including a film adaptation of Jungle Emperor Leo and a series of theatrical shorts based on Atom.  He was also aware of what was going on with American TV animation at the time, particularly Hanna-Barbera's work on shows like Yogi Bear and The Flintstones and felt that Mushi could replicate that sort of production for Japan.  Tezuka was won over by Sakamoto's devotion and enthusiasm and liked the idea of an Atom TV show,  privately hoping that it would overshadow the failed live-action adaptation from a few years prior.  That being said, he felt that Hanna-Barbera's animation was boring and stiff.  If he was going to produce an animated television series, he was going to making something that was truly narrative driven and in line with Mushi's work up to that point.  The staff rushed to produce a pilot over a couple of months and shortly after its debut Fuji TV snatched up the rights to produce a weekly half-hour animated series, the first of its kind for Japanese television.  The show was an instant sensation, garnering incredible ratings which in turn led to valuable sponsorships, a flurry of tie-in merchandise, and even a deal to air the show in syndication in the US. 

Tetsuwan Atom was not only Mushi Production's big break but also a major stepping stone for Eiichi Yamamoto's career.  After working as a writer on one more short, he would become one of many rotating episode directors for Atom, all under the supervision of Yusuke Sakamoto as series director.  When Sakamoto was transferred to another project in 1964, Yamamoto took over as series director and supervised its compilation movie, Hero of Space.  Around the same time, the studio would green-light an adaptation of Tezuka's Jungle Taitei Leo (better known in the US as Kimba the White Lion) as their first color TV series with Yamamoto serving as series director. 

Starting with pre-production on Leo, Yamamoto completely changed up the way shows were made at Mushi Productions.  He devised a precise organization chart for the production, covering all the relevant departments along with guidelines for schedule, budget, and planning.  The idea behind the restructuring was that by clarifying the chain of command, he and his staff could get more work done on the show ahead of time while keeping it on-budget.  Under this style of management Yamamoto was almost as much of a producer as he was a director, as he and the episode directors had to regularly consult and collaborate with others at every level of production.  It's a production style that many of Mushi's later shows would adopt, but this change did not come without challenges.

Eiichi Yamamoto was under a lot of pressure during Leo's production.  Not only was he beholden to the show's Japanese sponsors, but the deal the studio had signed with American distributor NBC Enterprises forced them to make changes to the source material to make it more episodic while avoiding portrayals of violence and racist imagery of native Africans.  No one was more upset with those changes than Osamu Tezuka himself, who regularly needled Yamamoto with angry letters and phone calls from fans after each new episode.  Despite all his careful planning, the production on Leo did begin to break down as it progressed and that grind had terrible effects on the staff.  Many developed health issues and burn-out.  Yamamoto himself would collapse from exhaustion at one point, and a 24 year old in-betweener would die during production due to an untreated ulcer.

While the show did win multiple awards and saw its own fair share of international success, Leo underperformed when it came to TV ratings in Japan.  Tezuka insisted on replacing Yamamoto as director on its direct sequel, Jungle Taitei Susume Leo (aka Leo the Lion), but this series would be cut short after 26 episodes.  Still, by the end of 1966 Eiichi Yamamoto had proven himself as one of the studio's most accomplished and reliable directors.  Soon enough he would be put on the board of creative directors for the entire studio.  Fortunately for him, any grudge Tezuka bore over the changes made to Leo didn't last and soon enough Tezuka would be turning to him for advice on his next big idea.

Mushi Production had transformed itself drastically in those three short years since Atom's debut. The studio had mostly put aside the short films of its early days to focus its collective energy on producing more and more animated TV shows.  They were able to churn out new episodes at a breakneck pace through the use of limited animation, recycled assets, and all the other time- and money-saving tricks they had been refining since Tales of a Street Corner.  Their staff roster ballooned from 25 employees to 550 at its peak, spread out over multiple sub-studios.  As far as anyone on the outside could tell, everything was coming up roses for Mushi Production.

Behind the scenes, though, things were anything but rosy.  Tezuka was in the midst of a creative crisis and Mushi Productions was staring down its own financial crisis.  He hoped to solve them both through a fateful meeting with a film distributor, and it was this meeting would serve as the genesis of the Animerama project.

                                           Part Two: A Fateful Meeting

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BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Charles Brubaker.  "Otogi Production's 'Sparrow in the Gourd' (1959)."  6/28/22.  Cartoon Research. 

Jonathan Clements. Anime: A History.  BFI Palgrove. 2013

Gan Sheuo Hui. "Prefiguring the Future: Tezuka Osamu's Adult Animation and Its Influence on Later Animation In Japan."  Asia Culture Forum 2006; Session 3: Auteurs and Their Legacy.  Kyoto University. Academia.edu

"Interview with Director Eiichi Yamamoto." A Thousand and One Nights.  Discotek Media/Eastern Star.  2020.

Ada Palmer.  "Film Is Alive: The Manga Roots of Osamu Tezuka's Animation Obsession."  Smithsonian Freer & Sackler Galleries.  11/13/2009.  Academia.edu

Natsu Onoda Power. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and The Creation of Post-World War II Manga. University Press of Mississippi: Jackson.  2009.

Frederik L. Schodt.  The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, and the Manga/Anime Revolution.  Stone Bridge Press.  2007.

Matteo Watsky.  "The History of Mushi Pro - 01 - The Road to TV Anime (1960 - 1965)."  4/7/2023.  Animétudes.

        -----            "The History of Mushi Pro - 02 - Anime Business (1965 - 1966)."  4/22/2023.   Animétudes.