The Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum in Takarazuka will soon host an exhibition featuring re-imagined Tezuka character illustrations by many famous artists in the modern moe style. The roster of contributing artists numbers at about 20, including Noizi Ito (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Shakugan no Shana), Narumi Kakinouchi (Vampire Princess Miyu, Ryoko's Case File) and Haruhiko Mikimoto (Macross, Gundam 0080, Gunbuster).
There are about 90 different art pieces and dolls set for display at the exhibition. Here are some examples featuring Princess Knight.
This seems to be along the same lines as the Tezuka Moe Gallery I first reported about last year, only that one was held in Akihabara. So now more people will get another chance to see what the current generation of artists can do with Tezuka's classic characters.
Continue reading "Tezuka Museum's Moe Re-imaginings"...
Now here's something you don't see everyday. Fan art of Osamu Tezuka's character Prime Rose. It was illustrated by William Ruzicka, a great artist who is currently working on Transformers Prime, which is a totally awesome show. Check out some more of his artwork here.
Have had some exciting new developments with real work recently, and on top of that keeping me busy, I've got some serious problems with the computer that I keep all my cool stuff on. Bummer. So things have been slow here, but I'll carry on as best as I can.
A while back I put a copy of the first trailer to the upcoming Buddha movie, based on the Osamu Tezuka manga, on my YouTube account. Over the past couple of weeks, I've gotten a few comments from very angry people saying that this movie is a disgrace to Tezuka and that the art looks nothing like his style. They seem convinced that the movie is terrible and that these changes were made to intentionally make it more generic and appealing to "shallow American fans".
To this I say... WHAT?
Yeah, I don't see it. We've hardly seen much of the movie yet and I see several shots in this trailer that definitely have Tezuka's touches.
Come on, look at that. The bright shiny eyes. The elegant swoop of the nose. This totally looks like a Tezuka shot!
And even if it didn't, so what? Osamu Dezaki did not attempt to replicate Tezuka's style with the Black Jack OVA series he directed. Was that a problem for anyone? Of course not. Besides that, I am pretty sure, for very painfully obvious reasons, that any decisions on the art direction of this project are not made with the so-called "shallow American fans" in mind. Since, you know, this is a movie about Buddha.
The works of Osamu Tezuka are legendary and deserve respect, but what people need to realize is that if we were to hold it up on a pedestal, never to change, reinterpret, or revisit it in any way, than these works are simply going to fade into obscurity. Tezuka did not want for his work to become solely the realm of academic study, he wanted real people and average fans from the mass audience to continue to enjoy it for years. He was constantly reinterpreting and revising his own work, and so I seriously doubt he'd have a problem with this. To say that he'd be "spinning in his grave" over a trailer like this is, quite frankly, incredibly ignorant. If you respect Osamu Tezuka, then you should at least know something about who he was!
Some people complained about the Astro Boy movie, saying that it was changed from the original story, that the character didn't look like the original style, that it was too "Americanized", and other such nonsense. Not only do none of those arguments hold up, but they entirely miss an important point. It's because of that movie that many more people know about Astro Boy. Isn't that a good thing? And now the same irrational complaining is happening again here with Buddha, despite the fact that Buddha, unlike the Astro movie, is actually being produced by Japanese companies.
Go figure, huh? Some people are never going to be satisfied. And to think, we haven't even seen the whole movie yet.
This site is dedicated to everything Astro Boy, the works of Osamu Tezuka, and other related anime & manga. Whether you're an old-school fan, a newcomer, or anything in between, AstroBoy World is bound to offer something interesting for you.
