Director Jason Andrew Cohn, Bread & Butter Films to launch Kickstarter campaign for feature-length documentary about Osamu Tezuka
The Tezuka Productions YouTube channel began streaming on Friday the first trailer for the upcoming feature-length documentary on Osamu Tezuka titled Tezuka: God of Manga. The documentary project will have a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign that will begin on an as of yet unspecified date.
Director Jason Andrew Cohn and the Bread & Butter Films production team comprising Camille Servan-Schreiber, Jinko Gotoh, Glen S. Fukushima, and Roland Kelts are producing the documentary.
The documentary will feature interviews with manga and anime creators such as Katsuhiro Ōtomo (Akira), Riyoko Ikeda (The Rose of Versailles), Naoki Urasawa (Monster, Pluto), Gō Nagai (Devilman), Yoshiyuki Tomino (Gundam), MADHOUSE co-founder and anime producer Masao Maruyama (Tokyo Godfathers), anime director Rintarō (Metropolis), fantasy author Ada Palmer (Too Like the Lightning), Samuel Sattin (Unico Awakening), and Jorge R. Gutiérrez (The Book of Life). The documentary will also feature interviews with leading manga scholars such as Fred Schodt (Manga! Manga!) and Helen McCarthy (The Manga Bible).
If the crowdfunding campaign succeeds, the producers will schedule interviews with artists Paul Pope (THB) and Ronald Wimberly (Prince of Cats).
Tezuka was born in 1928 and he died in 1989. Arguably best known as the creator of Astro Boy, he has been called the “Godfather of Anime and Manga” due to his prolific output, pioneering techniques, and pervasive reimagining of genres. Although he is often referred to as the “Walt Disney of Japan,” Helen McCarthy, author of The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga, wrote Tezuka “was more like Walt Disney, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Tim Burton, Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Sagan all rolled into one incredibly prolific creator.” According to Tezukainenglish.com, “Over the course of his 40-year career, Tezuka created more than 700 volumes of manga, encompassing an estimated 150,000 pages of drawings. He also produced another 200,000 pages of storyboards and scripts for nearly 500 episodes of a variety of popular animated T.V. series and numerous award-winning short and feature-length animated films.”
Source: Tezuka Productions’ YouTube channel
