Miyazaki’s work often refers to the abuse of technology, and contains pleas for human restraint. Like Tezuka, the award-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki witnessed some of the American air raids as a child. Astro Boy eventually finds his calling and becomes a superhero.Īstro Boy is one of many characters symbolizing the fusion of technology and nature, and the tension created by its capacity for both advancement and destruction. In Tezuka’s Astro Boy, a scientist attempts to fill the void left by his son’s death by creating a humanlike android named Astro Boy.Īstro Boy’s father, seeing that technology cannot replace his son completely, rejects his creation, who is then taken under the wing of another scientist. The tensions of technology are apparent in the works of Tezuka and his successors. Two examples are Little Wansa, about a puppy who escapes from his new owners and spends the series looking for his mother and Young Bear Cub, who gets lost in the wild and must find his own way back to his family. His stories often have a young character who is orphaned by particular circumstances and must survive on his own. His films and comics both address themes like coping with grief and the idea that nature, in all its beauty, can be compromised by man’s desire to conquer it. The bomb became a particular obsession of Tezuka’s. Osamu Tezuka would go on to influence scores of Japanese animators. Yet to this day – 75 years after the bombs – these themes continue to be explored by their successors. ![]() The directors and artists who witnessed the devastation firsthand were at the forefront of this movement. The devastating aftereffects – orphaned kids, radiation sickness, a loss of national independence, the destruction of nature – would also influence the genre, giving rise to a unique (and arguably incomparable) form of comics and animated film. The finale of Akira is only one example of apocalyptic imagery in the anime and manga canon a number of anime films and comics are rife with atomic bomb references, which appear in any number of forms, from the symbolic to the literal. It’s no surprise that for years, the devastation remained at the forefront of their conscience, and that part of the healing process meant returning to this imagery in literature, in music and in art. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – along with the firebombings of Tokyo – were traumatic experiences for the Japanese people. Eventually, its swirling winds engulf the metropolis, swallowing it whole and leaving a skeleton of a city in its wake. ![]() At the end of Katsuhiro Otomo’s dystopian Japanese anime film Akira, a throbbing, white mass begins to envelop Neo-Tokyo.
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