If you enjoy mod­ern Japan­ese ani­ma­tion, you can no doubt name sev­er­al mas­ter­pieces of the form off the top of your head, whether acclaimed series like Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion and Cow­boy Bebop to the work of cin­e­ma auteurs like Satoshi Kon and Hayao Miyaza­ki. What may cross your mind less read­i­ly is how much these and oth­er ani­me pro­duc­tions owe to Astro Boy, or as it was known in Japan, Tet­suwan Ato­mu (“Mighty Atom”). First con­ceived on the page by artist Osamu Tezu­ka, remem­bered today as “the God­fa­ther of Man­ga” (i.e., Japan­ese comics), it became an ani­mat­ed tele­vi­sion series in 1962, a pro­duc­tion over­seen — and fate­ful­ly under-bud­get­ed — by Tezu­ka him­self.

“It was a stu­pid­ly low num­ber,” Tezu­ka lat­er wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy of the per-episode fig­ure he quot­ed to his reluc­tant spon­sors. Yet despite the man­i­fold pro­duc­tion stress­es it caused, it forced — like any severe lim­i­ta­tion — a good deal of cre­ativ­i­ty.

In time, writes Matt Alt in Pure Inven­tion: How Japan Made the Mod­ern World, “the beloved hall­marks of Japan­ese ani­mat­ed fare — the strik­ing of the­atri­cal pos­es, the lin­ger­ing freeze-frames, the lim­it­ed ranges of motion — evolved from des­per­ate cost-sav­ing workarounds into fac­tors that dis­tin­guish ani­me from con­tent pro­duced in oth­er lands.”

When they were first pub­licly screened in Novem­ber of 1962, the first episodes of Astro Boy were accom­pa­nied by a less­er-known Tezu­ka project: Tales from a Cer­tain Street Cor­ner (ある街角の物語), a 40-minute film craft­ed with an “anti-Dis­ney” aes­thet­ic. At Nishika­ta Film Review, Cathy Munroe Hotes describes this as “the first of Tezuka’s jikken ani­ma­tion – or exper­i­men­tal works – which Tezu­ka made for artis­tic rather than com­mer­cial pur­pos­es. Although the ani­ma­tion does employ some unusu­al tech­niques such as a POV shot of a plane tree seed fly­ing to the ground, it is not ‘exper­i­men­tal’ in the usu­al sense of the word.”

The term bet­ter suits some of the oth­er works includ­ed in the playlist at the top of the post, which col­lects clips of a vari­ety of Tezuka’s exper­i­men­tal and qua­si-exper­i­men­tal ani­ma­tions pro­duced between the mid-nine­teen-six­ties and the late eight­ies (many of which can eas­i­ly be seen in full on Youtube), which col­lec­tive­ly exhib­it both imag­i­na­tive pow­er and a sense of humor. “Mem­o­ry” (めもりい), from 1964, mix­es tra­di­tion­al ani­ma­tion with Mon­ty Python-style cutouts to depict the yearn­ings of a post­war salary­man. The omnibus Pic­tures at an Exhi­bi­tion (展覧会の絵), made a cou­ple of years lat­er, sat­i­rizes mod­ern soci­ety in ten dif­fer­ent ways, each scored with a move­ment of the epony­mous Mus­sorgsky piece.

By the last years of Tezuka’s life, the style of his ani­ma­tion seems to have evolved in sev­er­al direc­tions at once. “Jump­ing” (ジャンピング) from 1984, imag­ines what it would be like to jump ever-more-super­hu­man heights from a first-per­son per­spec­tive; “Push” (プッシュ), from 1987, uses a more con­ven­tion­al­ly car­toon­ish aes­thet­ic to ren­der a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic world dom­i­nat­ed by vend­ing machines. That same year, Tezu­ka — a descen­dant of famed samu­rai Hanzō Hat­tori — also released “Mura­masa” (村正), a nuclear-anni­hi­la­tion alle­go­ry about a haunt­ed sword. The threat posed to Earth by man was also the major theme of Leg­end of the For­est (森の伝説), left unfin­ished by the time of Tezuka’s death in 1989 but lat­er picked up by his son Mako­to: just one of the count­less ani­ma­tors, Japan­ese and oth­er­wise, work­ing under the God­fa­ther’s influ­ence today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the First Episode of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, Of Which Stan­ley Kubrick Became a Big Fan

Jim Hen­son Cre­ates an Exper­i­men­tal Ani­ma­tion Explain­ing How We Get Ideas (1966)

Watch the Old­est Japan­ese Ani­me Film, Jun’ichi Kōuchi’s The Dull Sword (1917)

The Beau­ti­ful Anar­chy of the Ear­li­est Ani­mat­ed Car­toons: Explore an Archive with 200+ Ear­ly Ani­ma­tions

The Ori­gins of Ani­me: Watch Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions (1917 to 1931)

Watch Fan­tas­magorie, the World’s First Ani­mat­ed Car­toon (1908)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.