I read this a while ago and just kept forgetting to mention it here, but Paste magazine has an excellent article on the experimental animation of Tezuka Osamu, including a number of the videos themselves embedded in the story. Best known in North America as the creator of Astro Boy, Tezuka pretty much invented Japanese Anime in its modern form, as well as authoring an amazing number of Manga titles. The new Astro Boy Movie will be hitting theaters in October, while last February was Tezuka’s 80th birthday and the NHK’s 20th anniversary of their satellite service. In honor of that, the NHK is running specials from February until October about Tezuka Osamu’s contributions to Manga, Anime, and Japanese popular culture (you do have to scroll down a bit to get to the entry about it). In April of this year the 13th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize awards were handed out, the winners being those Manga and Artists deemed the best in Japan. Here is his 1962 experimental piece, “Male”…
