Tezuka Osamu: The Secret of Creation

Another first for Orphan: a live-action documentary about (who else?) Tezuka Osamu. A raw for this showed up recently on the anime community's favorite torrent site, and one of the team members recommended it to me. When I watched it, I realized I'd seen it before: it had been included as a bonus DVD in Helen McCarthy's marvelous book, "The Art of Osamu Tezuka" - with English subtitles. Here was an opportunity to present this intriguing glimpse into the working life of the "God of Manga" to an English-speaking audience.

The documentary was filmed in 1985, when Tezuka was in his late 50s. He was nearing the end of his life, although no one realized it at the time. The camera crew was allowed remote access to Tezuka's "secret sanctum" - an apartment where he drew his manga in grueling work sessions consisting of long days with little sleep. Even at the height of his fame, when he was honored at home and abroad for his pioneering work, Tezuka still had to grind out new material and cope with hounding from anxious editors trying to meet deadlines. 

His schedule was always tight. For example, he is seen drawing manga on the way to the airport and on a plane to France, where he was going to be a guest of honor at a conference. In addition, he also had to meet the demands of his public persona, chairing an anime conference in Hiroshima, greeting fans and dignitaries, and presenting a cheery face to the world. Yet he retained the spirit of the boy who was fascinated by insects and drawings, who loved nature and silly jokes, and who hated war and environmental destruction.

There are intimate glimpses of Tezuka with his guard down - listening to classical music as he works on a manga (Walter Gieseking's performance of Mozart's last piano sonata); exhausted and asleep at his desk; looking at the very dark works he created after Mushi Productions collapsed and he was being hounded by creditors; and musing on the effects of age and the impact on his drawing abilities. The gaps can between the man and the slapstick entertainments he created at times can be startling. But genius is unaccountable.

I expected this to be an easy project, as I had assumed that the English subtitles were a professional translation. They were, but with serious omissions. Significant dialog sections - particularly of asides between Tezuka and others - were not translated. (We filled in some of the gaps, but not all of them.) None of the signs were translated either. So there was work to do.

M74 ripped and encoded the DVD and extracted and OCRed the English subtitles. Yogicat timed. A host of people helped fill in dialog gaps and translated signs: TougeWolf, Iri, kokujin-kun, and for some scattered lines of French, sangofe from Saizen (merci, mon frère). I edited and typeset. Nemesis and Uchuu QCed.

Some notes:

• Tezuka meets French animator Paul Grimault at an anime conference in Hiroshima. Grimault was one of the most famous and influential animators in France, but he only made one feature-length film, Le Roi et l'oiseau, which has been dubbed in several languages, including English. It has never been released in North America, but there was, apparently, a European BD release with the original French dialog and English subtitles. Let me know if you come across a copy.
• In Japanese, Tezuka is almost always called "Tezuka-sensei," probably in the sense of "Master." However, the English subs translate "sensei" as "Doctor," because Tezuka was, in fact, a medical doctor, although he did not practice.
  

So here is a glimpse of the great man himself, a workaholic to the end of his days, determined to tell as many stories as he could before his time ran out, as it did all too soon. You can get this fascinating portrait from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.