The Story of Animerama: A Fateful Meeting
In the fall of 1967, Osamu Tezuka met with staff director Eiichi Yamamoto, who brought along with him his friend and former Mushi animator Gisaburo Sugii. Tezuka had received an interesting proposition earlier in the year that he
wanted to discuss with them. He had received an offer to make a series of feature-length animated
films specifically targeted at adult audiences. These films were meant
for mainstream release not just in Japan, but in theaters worldwide. Yamamoto and Sugii were intrigued by the
idea but they also had serious concerns. Who would be paying
for such a venture? Did they have enough time and animators at Mushi Productions to make such a thing happen?
Would the public accept such an idea?
Tezuka listened to all their
questions and concerns and responded
with a single, calm statement: “We can do it.”
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So we've looked the origins of Mushi Productions as well
as the early careers of Osamu Tezuka and Eiichi Yamamoto, but none of that
answers the most obvious question behind the Animerama films: why did Mushi Productions make them in
the first place?
It was a risky venture, to say the least. Just as much then as now, animation was was seen inside and outside of Japan as family fare. Furthermore, Mushi Productions had never produced an original feature-length work before. The only Japanese animation studio that had managed to regularly do so thus far had been Toei, and while they were successful within Japan they couldn't compete internationally with the likes of Disney. Nonetheless, the idea appealed to Tezuka as he believed that there should be a middle ground for Japanese animation between the children's shows that Mushi was churning out and the independent experimental works he admired so much. He had initially intended for his own independent shorts to be that middle ground, but they had failed to take off with audiences. Perhaps these films could succeed where his shorts had failed.
The biggest priority for Hatano and the other producers at Nippon Herald was to make these films as appealing as possible to international audiences. They were the ones who suggested that these films be based on tales from western history and literature to give foreign audiences a familiar footing. Those same producers were also the ones who coined the term "Animerama". It was a portmanteau of "animation" and "drama," one that evoked the then-trendy Cinerama widescreen process. It also served to separate these films from the term commonly used for anime in those days: manga eiga, or literally "cartoon films.". Branding and international appeal was part of the reason they came to Mushi Productions in the first place. Thanks to the success of shows like Tetsuwan Atom and Jungle Taitei Leo, Tezuka and his animation studio were household names in Japan and increasingly well-known across the world. They hoped to capitalize upon that fame to take Japanese animation (and Nippon Herald) to places it had never gone, both literally and figuratively.
Those producers also had good reason to believe that the Animerama project had domestic potential as well. At the time, one of most popular film genres in Japan was pinku eiga - literally, "pink films." These were cheap, schlocky independent films whose content fell somewhere between your standard exploitation flick and softcore pornography, and by the mid-1960s they were all the rage. Just about every major city in Japan had at least a few theaters dedicated to showing them, and they were a popular way for young adults to spend an evening. This was the audience that Nippon Herald and Tezuka hoped to reach with the Animerama films: one too old for traditional children's animation but young enough to desire edgier content and recognize Tezuka's name from their childhood. More importantly, it was an audience that was far larger than the one their TV shows currently reached, with far more cash to spare. Making the animated equivalent of a pink film would allow both parties to reach this otherwise unreachable audience and profit from them.
Finding new audiences and exploring new ideas would have certainly been one of Tezuka's biggest personal priorities at the time. After two decades of unmitigated success, the tastes of manga readers was changing and he was struggling to keep up with them. The audience for manga was steadily expanding and getting older and as such were turning away from the classic adventure stories that had made Tezuka famous in the first place. More and more the industry was turning towards the darker, grittier, and more realistic stories of the gekiga movement. Tezuka had been trying for some time to make his own gekiga-style manga, going so far as to found his own gekiga-style manga magazine, but these efforts had been thus far met with indifference. Osamu Tezuka was no longer the leading force of the world of manga, and this depressed and frustrated him in equal measure.
Tezuka was also struggling to maintain creative control at Mushi Productions. Tezuka's hopeful dreams of experimental animation had long since been dashed by the realities of running a busy studio. Even though he was as busy as ever with his manga and various other professional obligations, he still wanted to be the primary creative force at Mushi. He may have promised his staff creative freedom in the studio's early days, but in practice he was a control freak who was reluctant to delegate creative decisions beyond what was absolutely necessary. At the same time he was reluctant to decrease his workload elsewhere, which led to increasingly frequent and expensive delays and an ever-increasingly amount of strife between him and his staff. As the decade wore on Tezuka become an obstacle that the animators had to work around, and his lack of relevance to his own staff only further fueled his frustration and paranoia. Thus, he saw the Animerama films as not just a way to mend his wounded ego and prove his continued relevance but also as a way for him to take back the reins of what he saw as a wayward animation studio.
There was something else that Tezuka was likely concerned about: Mushi Productions was broke.
More accurately, Mushi Productions had always struggled with funding. Since banks refused to loan money to animation studios at the time, Tezuka initially had to pay for all of the studio's expenses out of his manga earnings. This obviously changed once their focus shifted to TV, but as early as 1964 he was privately admitting to friends that Mushi Productions was using a ‘dangerous business model’ to survive, one that only got more dangerous over time.
Most sources will claim that the financial problems with Mushi Productions began with Tetsuwan Atom, when Tezuka accepted an initial budget that only covered half of the actual cost of making a weekly animated TV show. This supposedly set a precedent not just for future Mushi shows but for the anime industry as a whole. Tezuka himself would support this claim in his later years, saying that he was forced into such a deal by the networks and sponsors. While it is true that Tezuka did accept a low budget for Atom upon its initial release, he did so knowingly and with purpose. He believed it would not only make Atom's budget competitive with the live-action dramas of the day but that the low amount would discourage other animation studios from following Mushi's example, thus ensuring their domination of the TV sphere. While history has proven that last idea hilariously false, it should be noted that Atom's budgets did not remain so dire. Indeed, the budget for that show and the others that followed were significantly higher, even if the specific amounts would rise and fall over time.
Ironically, the real problem with Mushi Pro's finances were the generous salaries and benefits that had brought in so many employees in the first place. They made the everyday costs of running Mushi Productions higher than those of competing studios. To cover that cost, the studio had to produce more and more TV shows to generate income. In time it became a vicious cycle: the bigger Mushi Productions got, the more projects it had to take on to simply support itself, which in turn placed more stress on the staff, which could only be relieved by bringing in more people. It was this cycle that spurred many of the time- and money-saving animation tricks that have come to define much of Mushi Production's work, creating a model of anime production where speed and cheapness took priority over the quality of any given episode or show.
In the early days, the studio could cover any gaps in its income through sponsorship fees, licensing fees, and royalties from publishing and merchandise. This became much less reliable in the latter half of the 1960s, thanks to the combination of Tezuka's declining popularity and the general decline in quality and ratings of their shows after Jungle Emperor Leo. They couldn't even rely on their American licensing partners anymore, as new anti-monopoly legislation brought their deals with NBC to an end after Kimba the White Lion and American broadcasters shifted their focus more towards American-made works. In later years Tezuka was not above taking the advance from one show and using it to pay off the losses of the previous one, a practice which only aggravated the situation.
That's not to say there weren't any attempts to fix Mushi's financial predicament. Kaoru Anami, the managing director and sales chief for the studio, enacted a radical restructuring of the studio in the mid-1960s. This was done not only to streamline the studio's finances and separate the creative side of the studio from the business side but also to ensure that future shows would be self-sufficient and to alleviate any outstanding debt. His revamp was successful at keeping their shows under budget, but it wasn't enough to fix the studio's larger financial problems. All these changes didn't please Osamu Tezuka one bit, as he felt this restructuring was shifting Mushi Productions further and further away from his original artistic intentions. It got to the point where Tezuka called an all-hands meeting in the fall of 1966 to basically question his employees' loyalties. He polled his staff as to whether they wanted Mushi Pro to be (in his own words) "a group of artists aiming to create works with an artistic character" or "a company with a salaryman spirit working at an industrial pace." This query was met mostly with confusion and indifference, making it clear who was truly in charge of things.
Alas, Anami died suddenly from an aneurysm at the end of 1966 and without his guidance the system began to fall apart. Things only got worse after his death when it was discovered he had signed a contract with Fuji TV that left Mushi Pro with almost as much debt as he had originally discharged. Now they were right back where they started with fewer resources and know-how than ever before. Tezuka's idea of fixing things was to produce a bunch of pilot films based on various manga properties of his to pitch to the networks. This venture proved to be a failure, as only the pilot for Dororo got picked up and the rest served only as a drain on Mushi's current TV shows and their increasingly limited resources. To even entertain Nippon Herald's offer they would need to get an advance on one of their shows just to cover the start-up costs. To put things bluntly, Mushi Productions was in dire straits by 1967 and Nippon Herald's offer could not have come at a better time.
It did not come without a catch, though.
What the producers at Nippon Herald were offering was not a gift but a loan. This loan would cover the initial estimated budget of 30 million yen for the first film, in addition to the costs of distribution and marketing. In return, Nippon Herald would take a 50/50 split on the box office revenue as repayment. This arrangement alone should have given Tezuka pause, as it meant that anything short of blockbuster success would lead to Mushi Pro losing money on these films, but he would ultimately move forward with the deal. That deal soon got worse, as the budget increased to 45 million yen by the end of 1968. Nippon Herald agreed to the additional cost, but amended the terms so that the box office would now be split 70/30 in their favor.
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So why did Tezuka agree to this deal? Perhaps the creative challenge of such a project combined with the prospect of publicly proving his continued relevance was just too irresistible. Maybe he felt that he had no other choice if he wanted Mushi Productions to survive. Most likely it was a bit of both. Regardless, the Animerama project represented the riskiest bet he had ever made, one where the future of the studio was at stake. If everything worked out, then all of Tezuka's problems would be solved. Mushi Productions would be solvent, he could regain some degree of creative control over his career and his studio, and more people than ever would hail him as an innovator and a genius. If it didn't work, then he and his hundreds of employees stood to lose everything they had created since 1961.
Still, Mushi Productions was a company that had been built on risky bets, and so far those bets had paid off. Tezuka was willing to press his luck once more, confident in his abilities and those of his staff. It's little wonder then that Tezuka was so confident when he spoke with Eiichi Yamamoto and Gisaburo Sugii that day in 1967. It certainly worked as far as Yamamoto was concerned, as he would recount decades later how Tezuka's confidence allayed his own fears about the project. Soon enough, they and the entire studio would be swept up into production on the first Animerama film: A Thousand and One Nights.
Part Three: A Thousand And One NightsMatteo 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.
----- "The History of Mushi Pro - 03 - The Beginning of the End (1967 - 1969)." 4/29/2023. Animétudes.
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