Astro Boy c. 1963 : Limited animation comes to Japan

Despite using fewer than 20 images, this sequence from the show’s first episode, “The Birth of Astro Boy,” covers more than 200 frames. It showcases the limited animation associated with Astro Boy’s creator, manga artist/anime boss/cultural giant Osamu Tezuka. Techniques like partial animation, abstract backgrounds, animation loops, and camera movement on still images all convey motion with as little animation as possible. But while they developed into stylistic conventions now part of anime’s visual language, these techniques weren’t Tezuka’s. Or new. Or unique to Japan. At the time, Astro Boy didn’t look too out of place next to Hanna-Barbera productions like The Flintstones. Tezuka didn’t pioneer limited animation so much as the commercial conditions that forced TV animators in Japan to rely on it. Tezuka sold Astro Boy’s pilot in the anime TV industry’s formative years. Unfamiliar with the costs involved, buyers made low offers based on known quantities such as animation imports. By accepting an amount he knew fell far short, Tezuka set a harmful precedent that became industry standard. The ripple effect of that decision continues today; where Tezuka switched suppliers to save five yen per cel, animators now receive starvation wages to work in crunch conditions without benefits. Astro Boy made today’s anime industry possible. That’s a complicated legacy. Astro Boy was also the first anime series to be broadcast on U.S. TV, imported by Fred Ladd, whose work carries its own complicated legacy. It set the precedent for treating imported anime as raw materials. Renamed characters, liberal translation, heavy-handed editing, bowdlerization, and filled silences (as in this sequence, entirely without words in Japanese) were hallmarks of anime localization until the aughts.