ComicBuzz Chats With Jason Cohn

With the Kickstarter live for Tezuka! God of Manga, the documentary about the legendary manga and anime creator Osamu Tezuka. We are delighted to be joined by Peabody Award-winning director Jason Cohn.

Hi Jason, it’s so great to have you here with us.

Could you please introduce yourself?

Hi, I’m Jason Cohn. I’m a documentary filmmaker with a longtime interest in Japan and comics. 

When did you discover Osamu Tezuka?

I lived in Sapporo for around 4 years after college and I used to read manga to study the language. I’d sit in coffee shops for hours with my Japanese-English dictionary, reading whatever manga books they had lying around. It was usually stuff like Shonen Jump or Slam Dunk. My roommate was Japanese and he was really into manga and he suggested I start reading more interesting stuff so he got me onto Tezuka. He explained that all manga begins with Tezuka so he started lending me Tezuka books from his collection.

How would you describe Osamu Tezuka?

I’d describe him as a genius for a start. He chose to make a career as a comic book artist and animator but he probably could have been a novelist or a filmmaker or a theater actor or a pianist or a medical doctor. He actually had a medical degree and was interning at a hospital when the manga work he was doing on the side started becoming so overwhelming that he had to make a decision. I think he made the right choice because he was so passionate about manga and animation. 

You’d also have to say he was on the compulsive side because of how hard he worked and how much he created. And when he wasn’t creating he was absorbing other work, like movies and books, which he could then re-process into his own stories. He barely slept and as far as I can tell, he didn’t have a terribly active social life. His work was pretty much his life.

Can you tell us about the history of TEZUKA! God of Manga?

I started thinking about it a long time ago. But I was busy with other films and to be honest  I didn’t think I’d be able to get funding for it from U.S. sources. But anime and manga were really starting to boom here so I started writing grants and eventually I got a really prestigious $600,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities so we were off and running. Unfortunately, the Trump administration came in right around the time they were about to distribute the funds and they terminated our grant, along with grants to dozens of other filmmakers. 

This was pretty devastating because we were in the process of making arrangements to interview all these legends of manga and anime in Tokyo– people like Otomo and Rintaro and Naoki Urasawa. Without the funding we had to pause all those plans.  We had basically been kicked back to the five yard line, so to speak. 

Then a miracle happened. I got a phone call out of the blue from Glen S. Fukushima, who is a Japanese-American businessman and philanthropist. He had grown up watching Astro Boy on TV because his dad was with the U.S. army and they were stationed in Tokyo. Anyway, Glen generously offered to foot the bill for the Tokyo shoot and in the end we were able to interview seven icons of manga and anime as well as three American artists and scholars. So that’s been a really great start and now we’re leveraging what we’ve accomplished in launching a Kickstarter campaign to help get us through the production stage of the filmmaking. 

So the Kickstarter is really a big deal for us. We really need the support to keep moving forward.  

Do you have a favourite Manga created by Osamu Tezuka?

The thing about Tezuka is that his work is incredibly diverse. He worked in so many different subgenres and for very different audiences. Obviously he started out creating mostly sci-fi adventure stories for young boys, like Astro Boy. That was the stuff that initially made him famous. Then he basically invented shojo manga with Ribbon no Kishi (Princess Knight). And he re-interpreted classic literature like Faust and Crime and Punishment. And by the 1970s he was doing really edgy stuff for adult audiences dealing with sexual themes, political corruption and stuff like that. 

But for me there’s a sweet spot sort of in the middle, where he was dealing more with philosophical and spiritual themes and the audience wasn’t really little kids but it also wasn’t jaded adults. So I’m thinking about books like Phoenix or Buddha, where there is a lot of adventure but the underlying messages are deeply thoughtful and sophisticated.

What can you tell us about TEZUKA! God of Manga?

Well, we’re still very much in the process of putting it together but my goal is to make a film that will draw in audiences that know almost nothing about Japanese pop culture and yet still be eye opening for people who have walls of bookshelves lined with manga and anime DVDs.

We’re working closely with the cooperation of Tezuka Productions and Tezuka’s son, Macoto and we hope to be able to show things that even superfans have never seen.

Any message for the ComicBuzz readers? 

One thing that’s very cool is that we’ve been collaborating with a bunch of really great artists. With permission from Tezuka Productions, we asked folks like Jorge Gutierrez, Shinichi Ishizuka, Jesse Lonergan and Yuko Shimizu to do original illustrations of their favorite Tezuka characters and stories. And the stuff they delivered is really spectacular. So I hope you’ll sign up for notifications on our Kickstarter pre-launch page so you’ll have a chance to get some of those as rewards. They’re really beautiful!

We would like to say a big thank you to Jason for chatting with us and wish him the best of luck with the  Kickstarter for Tezuka! God of Manga.

Feel free to check out Tezuka! God of Manga on Kickstater.

Shabbir