Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) was a Japanese manga artist and animation filmmaker. Born in Toyonaka, Osaka, he grew up in Takarazuka, Hyogo, with interests in comics, cinema, and insects, and experienced mobilized factory work during the war. He made his professional debut with a newspaper comic strip in 1946 while attending Osaka University’s medical school. He graduated in 1951 and passed the national medical licensing examination the following year, pursuing manga alongside his medical studies. Serialized from 1952, Astro Boy used a boy robot capable of human emotions to explore hopes for technology, conflict between humans and robots, and discrimination. Tezuka also moved into animation production: the Mushi Production television adaptation began broadcasting in 1963 as Japan’s first full-scale animated television series. His manga extended from stories for children to longer works for adults, using cinematic shifts of scene and depictions of movement across a wide range of genres. Black Jack, begun in 1973, followed an unlicensed surgeon who undertook difficult operations for enormous fees. Its largely self-contained episodes examined patients’ suffering, life and death, and the relationship between medicine and human concerns. In Phoenix, which he developed in successive forms from 1954, an immortal bird linked stories alternating between the distant past and future. The work addressed life, death, reincarnation, civilization, and the universe. Alongside commercial animation, Tezuka made experimental animated shorts. He continued creating manga and animation until his death in 1989 at the age of sixty.
