Tezuka Productions Co., Ltd. (株式会社手塚プロダクション) is a Japanese mass media company founded by Osamu Tezuka in 1968, based in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The company is known for managing, supervising and licensing the intellectual property of Tezuka's works through various business areas such as publishing, animation, films, toys, video games among others. Aside from its licensing business, the company also handles an animation studio in Tezuka's former studio office in Niiza, Saitama and has produced notable works such as Marvelous Melmo, the 1980 and 2003 Astro Boy series, and Black Jack among others.
Astro Boy, the titular character of the media franchise of the same name serves as the company's mascot.
History
In 1961, Osamu Tezuka established Osamu Tezuka Mushi Production as a video and animation production unit. It was officially incorporated as Mushi Productions, the following year.[4] Tezuka served as acting director of the company until 1968, when he left to start another animation studio, Tezuka Productions Co., Ltd., as a spun-off division of
In 1970, Tezuka moved the headquarters of Tezuka Productions to the second and third floors of a cafe business across from Fujimidai Station in Nerima.[5] The second floor was reserved for employee offices and production assistants, while the third floor was Tezuka's own workspace and office.[5] For the first few years, the studio took sub-contracted animation work from Mushi Production, which included a variety of animated shorts and a full television series, Fushigi na Merumo (Marvelous Melmo), which was broadcast by TBS for 26 episodes from October 1971 to March 1972.[6][7] After Mushi Production filed for bankruptcy in 1973, Tezuka Productions took on animation production full-time along with its manga and copyright businesses and began growing rapidly as an animation studio.[6] In 1976, Tezuka Productions relocated again to the Takadanobaba Seven Building (高田馬場のセブンビル) in Takadanobaba, Shinjuku.[5]
From 1980 to 1981, Tezuka Productions produced a remake for Astro Boy that ran for 52 episodes on Nippon Television.Tezuka had been dissatisfied with the first Astro Boy series produced at Mushi Production, and had wanted to create a remake for the series since 1974.[8]
In 2007, Tezuka Productions began a multi-year project to digitize and color all of Tezuka's published manga series, comprising over 150,000 pages.[9] Tezuka's former personal assistants reproduced the color charts that they originally used for all-color pieces while Tezuka was still producing series, in order to ensure that the new coloring process remained faithful to the colors used in Tezuka's time.[9]
In 2008, Tezuka's son, Makoto, announced that he would complete Legend of the Forest, his father's final unfinished work, at Tezuka Productions.[10] The film was completed in 2014, premiering at the 2014 Hiroshima International Animation Festival in August, and in North America at the Japan Society in New York City on February 21, 2015.[11][12]
