John K. On Astro Boy (and Tezuka in general).



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John K. On Astro Boy (and Tezuka in general).

Postby offmodel » Wed Jul 29, 2015 9:18 pm

Hey everyone, I'm a new poster (the only other anime/manga forum I'm active on is MAL), and I realized I know about some cool Tezuka related artwork (and commentary on him) that people might be interested in. The animator John K. (of Ren and Stimpy, Mighty Mouse among other series) has a really great blog on animation (actually two, a personal one and one that teaches the principles of animation). Anyway, he did a few posts on Osamu Tezuka, and has some really cool drawings posted as part of them. They're under this link, tagged anime: http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/search/label/anime

My favorite has to be this one, with Uncle Walt and Mickey Mouse:
Image

I didn't see anything related to this when I did a search, I apologize if it's been posted before.

Edit: I wanted to add a few comments to this, because it just occurred to me that you could take that drawing (and John's comments) the wrong way in the article, if you aren't familiar with his work and writing style. John K. is not a particularly huge fan of Disney as the standard bearer of American animation, and he also felt the golden age of American animation ended in the late 60's - just as Astro Boy and Speed Racer hit the U.S - and didn't recover until the 90's, while during that period Japan surpassed the United States as the center of quality animation, driven by Tezuka Productions. That's what he meant when he said "Little did I know it was all a well-conceived plot to take over America during its time of weakness." The message of that drawing is playing on Disney's well known dislike of competition and the ability of others to improve upon or even surpass his work, it's not a shot at Tezuka at all (a shot at Walt, well maybe...) Anyway, John K. is very sarcastic and has a dry sense of humor (Ren & Stimpy is definitely his vision), so it's easy to take him the wrong way if you aren't familiar with his work. His thoughts seem to be that Tezuka was a visionary who was then copied by subsequent artists (although as was pointed out in the blog comments, he is only familiar with a lot of mainstream anime that came to the U.S. that he is right in saying imitated Tezuka). I hope that made sense, I just wanted to put it in context.
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Re: John K. On Astro Boy (and Tezuka in general).

Postby Marc » Sat Aug 01, 2015 2:32 am

Thanks for sharing this! I love seeing accomplished artists' take on other artists. It's cool stuff!
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