Early series of Astroboy spawned an industry with a massive following in the West. John Mangan reports.
Japan and cartoons. The combination seems so obvious now, but, in 1963 when Fred Ladd got a call from NBC Enterprises about a children's TV show called Tetsuwan Atomu, his first reaction was "Japan? There's no animation in Japan."
Japan in those days was a dark, mysterious place. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had copped the world's first, and so far only, nuclear weapons launched in anger and, with a seven-year US occupation following surrender, World War II hadn't really ended for the Japanese until 1952. The devastated nation's understandable preoccupation with radioactivity spawned the mutated super-lizard, Godzilla, and, in a more cheerful vein, the rocket-footed Tetsuwan Atomu, or "Mighty Atom".
At first glance, Mighty Atom, dreamt up by anime's first genius, Osamu Tezuka, looked like Pinocchio, says Ladd, who happened to be working on his own series of Pinocchio in Outer Space at the time. Ladd decided that the only way to find out if Tezuka's series would work for a Western audience was to write the dialogue and see how it flew. The result, after a rebadging, was Astroboy, the first in a long chain of Japanese anime that has won over mainstream and cult audiences in the West ever since.
Ladd, who has been in Melbourne promoting the DVD release of the original Astroboy episodes, and the 40th birthday of Kimba (young white lion pictured above), took a punt writing and directing the English language versions of Astroboy, and was rewarded with immediate success on US television.
"The early overnight ratings were spectacular. They won their timeslot just after school in New York City, swept the ratings, so it was easy then to go to places like Chicago, Denver, Washington and Los Angeles."
Since the animation had already been paid for by the show's original broadcaster, Fuji Television, the programs were cheap for American distributors, but their Japanese origin remained controversial. "Because the war was still recent there was some sensitivity," Ladd says. "But most people then didn't know there was an animation industry in Japan and while we didn't conceal where Astroboy came from, we didn't publicise it either, so people assumed it was coming from somewhere like Hanna-Barbera."
They certainly didn't assume it was coming from Disney, which had set sky-high standards in animation quality. "The goal for everybody in those days was to be as Disney-like as possible," Ladd says.
"But they had so few yen to work with. For example, you'd never see a smooth fall to the ground.
Hundreds of drawings would be necessary to make a smooth fall, but instead the character would fall in stills, six or seven drawings.
But the kids weren't counting drawings, they got the message. ‘The play's the thing,' Shakespeare said, and that's right, the kids were following the story!"
Ladd, an effortless raconteur, talks about these characters like they were family friends. "The difference between Pinocchio and Astroboy was that Pinocchio didn't know right from wrong, and Astroboy did."
Another difference between Pinocchio and Astroboy was some of the subject matter, which the American TV executives thought needed to be toned down for young US audiences.
"In their version someone would collapse and they'd say ‘He's dead!' In our version they'd say, ‘He's unconscious, call an ambulance!'," says Ladd.
"There was an episode that included vivisection. We decided that was a no-no!" he laughs. "Another had a bachelor whose apartment wall was covered with drawings of naked women.
Another episode was called Christ's Eyeballs, which involved leaving secret messages scrawled on the eyeballs of an icon of Christ. NBC said, ‘Fred, here's the money, you've got to go over to Japan and get them changed to make them less violent and more sensitive to our cultural needs."'
The impact of those early series can be judged in the scale of anime, which is now a multibillion- dollar industry, churning out not only hugely successful TV series such as Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z and Yu Gi Oh, but also acclaimed movies such as Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away.
And, turning the full circle, the influence of the original anime can be judged in the subconscious homage paid by Disney itself in its recent smash hit, The Lion King. Disney's boy lion is called Simba instead of Kimba, and while the studio claims that it had never heard of Osamu Tezuka or Kimba until after The Lion King was released, Ladd has recounted his impressions on first watching the Disney film.
"Finally, after five or six striking similarities, there was a pan up to the sky. I said to my wife, ‘Don't tell me that the father lion is going to appear in the clouds' (as had happened in a Kimba episode). And he did! I couldn't believe it!"