Miyazaki Hayao Talks About His Encounter With Tezuka Osamu

Miyazaki Hayao talked about his encounter with Tezuka Osamu's works for the first time. He confessed the admiration for and the repulsion against the great Mangaka.

"I've been struggling with Tezuka for long. Words like indebtedness or gratitude cannot describe my feeling toward him. The impact of Shin Takarajima upon the mangaka in our generation was beyond the imagination of the younger people."
Shin Takarajima is Tezuka's manga published in 1947. It established the style and the architecture of the modern manga.
"It brought us to a totally unseen world and greatly broaden our horizons."

Miyazaki was also absorbed in Tezuka's Sci-fi trilogy "Lost World", "Metropolis", and "Kitarubeki Sekai".
"The image of the future Tezuka showed us was not only bright but scary, irrational, and sad. He'd already realized the two opposing aspects of Modernism: prosperity and destruction."
Miyazaki supposed that the memory of the piles of corpses in the air raid on Osaka city made a dark hollow in Tezuka's mind. Tezuka started to hide the dark side as he became more and more popular.
"I can see Tezuka's nihilistic idea that humanism is the only way to succeed in the anime/manga business. He intentionally removed the darkness from his works. That's why Tetsuwan Atom (1963) was boring."

Miyazaki once bitterly criticized Tezuka in 1989 in the mourning message for him. "Tezuka's animation was Ohya no Gidayu. A landlord forces his tenants to see his terrible performances. The evaluation hasn't changed. But it's true that I felt relieved to see Tezuka failed in Atom. It gave me a chance to beat him."

Miyazaki quitted Mangaka and became an animator because he couldn't be free from the influence of Tezuka's arts. He admitted the basis of his perception originated from the impact he got from Shin Takarajima.
"And that's why I've never wanted to be a worshiper of Tezuka."

Source: Yomiuri