JASON ANDREW COHN Brings TEZUKA! GOD OF MANGA back to the Screen
Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, is joined by Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, Jason Andrew Cohn, to discuss his latest documentary, Tezuka! God of Manga, on Kickstarter now.
COMIC BOOK YETI: Jason, it’s a delight having you in the Yeti Cave today! How are things going up in the Bay area at the moment?
JASON ANDREW COHN: All good, man! Thanks for the opportunity to get the word out!
CBY: Of course - it's great learning more about one of animation's greatest global luminaries. Jason, let’s start with a quick review of your work; you’ve had a career marked with many profiles of other innovative figures, the way their lives shaped their work, and the way their work has shaped the world. After Charles & Ray Eames, Ursula K. Le Guin, August Post, and Eliot Noyes, among others, how did you land on Osamu Tezuka as the subject of your latest film?
JAC: I’ve been incubating this one for a long, long time! I lived in Sapporo for around four years after graduating from college and even though I was never a full-on manga nerd, I loved reading manga as a way to study Japanese. I’d sit in coffee shops with my Tezuka and a Japanese-English dictionary for hours and I’d get through like 10 pages! After coming back to the States I became a journalist, and one of my early gigs was working on a syndicated radio show called Pacific Time that covered US-Asia stories. I got to do a piece about the American release of the anime Metropolis, which was written by Otomo, directed by Rintaro and based on an early Tezuka sci-fi adventure classic. So when I did that story I had the opportunity to interview Frederik Schodt, who is the first person to take manga seriously as a subject of scholarly attention in English. Fred was also Tezuka’s frequent translator and they became quite friendly. So speaking with Fred was really eye-opening for me. I started to understand that Tezuka was a figure of cultural significance in Japan that was almost impossible to fathom in comparison to anyone in the West. I mean, people like to make the Disney comparison but they’re really so different. Disney was a visionary but primarily as a businessman. Tezuka was an artist through and through. While he deserves credit for making the Japanese comics and animation industries into a global behemoth, he was actually a pretty terrible businessman! Anyway, that was the seed of the idea of making a documentary, but I was always too busy to pursue it and figured it would be pretty hard to get off the ground. But I had time to start developing it around the pandemic era and to my surprise, I got traction pretty quickly.
CBY: Your pleasant surprise has turned into a fortuitous opportunity for insight the rest of us are now privileged to enjoy. You’ll be delivering this film through Bread & Butter Films, a production company you lead with Camille Servan-Schreiber, based out of California. Can you tell us a bit about the company, who else is involved in the crew above and below-the-line, and is there anyone you’d like to make mention of that is helping you bring this production to the public?
JAC: The company is really just me and my wife, Camille. We’re an indie company and we generally raise our own money for our projects, mostly through grants. And then we bring other people on as appropriate for the project. So we work with a rotating cast of associate producers, editors, directors of photography and composers, etc.
For this project we reached out to two people who have been critical to keeping us moving. One is Jinko Gotoh, who is a very highly esteemed Hollywood animation producer. I can’t list her full credits because it would take all day, but she worked on major releases like Finding Nemo, The Little Prince, Klaus, and Lego Movie 2. Right now, she’s producing the latest Spider-verse movie with Sony. So she is really big time; much too big time to be working with the likes of us! But we got lucky because she was a huge Tezuka fan growing up in Japan and she totally got what we’re trying to do, so she agreed to come on as executive producer.
The other person who has been so instrumental to keeping us moving forward is Glen S. Fukushima, who is a Japanese-American businessman and philanthropist. And he actually reached out to me because he found out that we had a $600,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that was unceremoniously terminated last year by the Trump administration during the DOGE days. So he called me up out of the blue one day and asked what we were planning to do now that our funding had evaporated, and I told him I was mostly planning on killing myself because we were all set to film with a group of legendary manga and anime artists in Tokyo and we were just waiting for our NEH funding to come through and now I had no idea how we were going to proceed. A week later, Glen came through with enough funding for us to do the Tokyo shoot and also to put together a first-rate crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. So Glen has really been a lifesaver. I should mention that Glen, too, was a Tezuka fan as a boy because his dad was a military intelligence officer stationed in Tokyo after the war, so he partially grew up there and used to watch Astro Boy on TV every day. We got very lucky!
CBY: Yeah, the term "angel investor" gets thrown around pretty loosely in venture capital parlance, but it sounds like Glen's contributions would certainly qualify him for the title. You’ve produced a trailer, released in May, that highlights the range of creators you’re featuring in interviews, including manga and anime industry luminaries Katsuhiro Otomo, Naoki Urasawa, Go Nagai, Yoshiyuki Tomino, Masao Maruyama, Rintaro, Samuel Sattin (whom I spoke with over his work on Tezuka’s Unico), and many others. Working across languages, international borders, and a variety of different scenarios carries a range of logistical challenges. What sort of pre-production timeline has elapsed thus far, and what sort of activities have you already undertaken for this forthcoming documentary?
JAC: Yeah, it’s a challenge working between the U.S. and Japan. The time zone slows everything down! But we’ve managed to film a bunch of interviews in California and Chicago, and of course all those legends in Tokyo. We’re also planning to shoot some stuff in Europe because this is really a very global story. I mean, Tezuka is much better known in Europe and Latin America than he is here. The timeline has been very slow because the funding process takes so long, and we have to work on other projects at the same time to keep the lights on, but that’s the luxury of making films about dead people; they’re not going anywhere. You can take your time and let ideas steep more than you could if you were following someone around for a more observational type of documentary. You take the bad with the good!
CBY: I suppose mortality provides a level of certainty you can't get with living subjects. On the production process, you’ve decided to seek financing through a Kickstarter campaign. What led you to apply the crowdfunding approach for this project compared to more traditional film financing models, and why did you opt to work through Kickstarter instead of one of the other crowdfunding platforms?
JAC: Well, the models for funding documentaries are really in flux right now, which is a nice way of saying they don’t really exist. It’s a terrible moment for the industry. I mentioned that my NEH grant was terminated last year. I was one of dozens of filmmakers who had that happen. And the NEH is one of the very few entities left that provide significant funding for documentaries. Everybody thinks Netflix and the streamers throw money around for documentaries but that’s really not the case anymore. It was for a minute but the algorithm has spoken and they’ve decided the only documentaries worth paying for are True Crime, Cults, and Celebrities. So if we wanted to make a movie about a supermodel murdered at an ashram, we’d be in good shape, but otherwise it’s a pretty dark scene.
Fortunately for us, Kickstarter is almost made for this kind of documentary because the audience for a film about a manga/anime icon is already on Kickstarter, and they’re used to backing projects about artists they’re interested in. In fact, a lot of comics get launched these days basically by pre-selling on Kickstarter. So we reached out to our old colleague Arwen Curry, who directed the film about Ursula K. Le Guin that we helped produce, and asked her to manage our Kickstarter campaign. She did an amazing job raising money for the Ursula film and she’s been super helpful pulling this new campaign together.
It’s going to be a great campaign. We’re going to have crazy rewards. Tezuka Productions is offering us some rare original color magazine prints so that’s a really unique opportunity for collectors. And they also let us commission a dozen or so incredible artists to produce their own original versions of Tezuka characters, so we have illustrations by folks like Shinichi Ishizuka, Gurihiru, Jorge Gutierrez, Jesse Lonergan and Yuko Shimizu. Paul Pope is supposedly working on one as we speak! All these artists were really excited to have the opportunity to put their own spin on Tezuka classics like Black Jack and Phoenix and Astro Boy so it’s super cool to see what they’ve come up with.
CBY: You've clearly made an astute decision in picking a subject to examine who has so many fans ready to come out of the woodwork and add their contributions to the production. I had the opportunity to speak with Fred Fordham and Theo Downes Le Guin regarding the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin on the development of fantasy and sci-fi genre literature in the latter half of the 20th Century. Tezuka has had at least as monumental a legacy on the formation of manga and anime over the same period, and the same could be said of the Eameses in the design world. What commonalities have you identified in your inquiries and research into these figures that results in the enormity of their impact? What distinct steps along their respective journeys have stood out as integral elements of their success, and how do you bring that to the forefront in your coverage of their lives?
JAC: Yeah, there are a lot of commonalities between all those artists, at least in terms of how you have to approach them when documenting their lives and careers. The key factor is longevity and productivity. So you have to make some very hard decisions about what to include and what to leave out. The instinct to be comprehensive is hard to resist, but if you don’t resist it you’ll end up with a documentary that’s all info and no insight. But to answer your question, I think the longevity and productivity factors are a big part of why they were all as influential as they were. They just kept producing interesting and challenging new ideas throughout their long careers. They were never satisfied repeating themselves. I mean, even Ursula’s Earthsea Trilogy, which people naturally think of as a single work, is really three very different books, in a way that all the Harry Potter volumes, for instance, are not. Tezuka was very much like that. He could have kept producing Astro Boy until he retired and he would have lived very comfortably. But he was far too restless as an artist to allow himself that comfort. Instead he basically worked himself to death, which is of course, tragic. But given the kind of compulsive creativity that made him into the giant that he was, it almost couldn’t have happened any other way.
CBY: Indeed, something for all the other creative obsessives amongst our readership to look forward to on the path to success! This is also not your first foray into covering comics, with 2021’s No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics covering other critically important creators largely from the Western comics community. How did you initially become interested in comics, and what sort of distinct character do different traditions across the sector have you identified as you speak with people across the global comics community and delve into the highly idiomatic and culturally unique nature of the Japanese manga and anime industry which Tezuka helped establish?
JAC: To be clear, I was just a minor advisor on the wonderful No Straight Lines. That film was directed by my friend Vivian Kleiman, and I helped a little with the writing and offered my critiques here and there, but that was her film all the way.
That said, I’ve been a fan of comics my whole life. Peanuts was practically the only thing I would read until I was around eight years old. And later I got into Doonesbury and alternative comix by folks like Daniel Clowes and Peter Bagge, and graphic novelists like Marjane Satrapi and Craig Thompson. When I lived in Japan, I discovered Tezuka and some other manga artists. Most of my friends stopped reading comics when they were teenagers, but I’m always reading multiple things at once, including at least one graphic novel or comic book. Nothing makes me happier at the end of a work day than lying on the sofa with a glass of rye, Wes Montgomery on the stereo, and a good vintage manga. Tezuka called comics a universal language, and I totally agree with that. If you can’t read Riad Sattouf’s L’Arabe Du Future and laugh and cry, then you’re not human.
CBY: You've just dropped a few great recommendations on us, but to close, we like to offer guests an opportunity to discuss other creative work unrelated to their own endeavours that has been of inspiration lately. What other comics, films, music, literature, and other art has been catching your attention that you would suggest to our readers?
JAC: I’m a big fan of French Noir and I’ve been enjoying the Jacques Tourneur films on the Criterion Collection. The Pacific Film Archive theater on the Berkeley campus is doing a run of films by Jean-Pierre Melville, who is one of my all time favorites. He’s just an absolute master of mood, mostly in a Noir vein. I’m planning to see one of his films this weekend!
CBY: With that on the record, I'm even more excited for your forthcoming film, and beyond. Jason, it has been a pleasure having you drop by the Yeti Cave! If you have any portfolio, publication, or social media links you’d like to share, please include anything you’d like our audience to check out.
JAC: Thanks for having me! Then most important thing I want to share right now is the pre-launch page for our Kickstarter. We’re trying to get as many people as possible to sign up for notifications.
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