Interest

NHK Unearths Long-Lost Tezuka Anime

In the early decades of television production, tapes used for broadcasting were expensive and often reused. What's more, concerns about preserving material for posterity were generally overridden by the endless scramble to find material to air in upcoming weeks. This means that many valuable shows from that era are lost, perhaps forever. Yet some are merely hidden in private collections, and NHK is setting out to uncover as many of these lost gems as it can. It has had great success so far, finding about 4,000 different works, and it will broadcast a TV special with segments from these old shows on September 25 called Kin'you eye: maboroshi no Meisaku Hakkutsu Daisakusen! ~Anata no "Mitai" ga Yomigaeru~ ("Friday Eye: The Great Operation to Unearth Elusive Masterpieces! ~Reviving What You Want to Watch~").

Among these newly discovered shows is Space Journey - The First Dream of Wonder-kun, a 20-minute TV special from 1969 that merged Osamu Tezuka's animation style with live-action footage to tell the story of a boy, Tarō, who takes a fantastic voyage through outer space on a magical chair called Wonder-kun. Its combination of live-action and animation was ground-breaking at the time. It aired on January 2, and is meant to represent Tarō's first dream of the New Year (which is culturally significant in Japan). Hironori Yoshida, Kin'you eye's chief producer, says "it shows how children wondered about space in an era when it was little known. Now we can learn anything by looking it up online... but it shows the importance in that era of having curiosity."

Wonder-kun was found in the house of Hiroshi Shimozaki, one of Tezuka's assistants. He owns many Tezuka works and invited NHK to his house when they were investigating Tezuka Productions for an unrelated story. Only the images remain, so Suguru Sugiyama, Wonder-kun's director, rewrote the script from memory and new voices were recorded by Katsue Miwa as Wonder-kun and Fumika Shimizu as Tarō. Only a five-minute segment will be aired, but the anime will air at the NHK archives in Kawaguchi, a suburb of Tokyo, in the future.

Other long-lost TV shows that will air on the special include Big Show, a 1975 music special featuring Yūjirō Ishihara; Kashin, a 1977 historical drama about the life of Japanese military theorist Masujirō Ōmura; comedy performances by Shinsuke Minami; and interviews with legendary director Akira Kurosawa, Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburō Ōe, screenwriter Kōhei Tsuka, and comedy director Jūzō Itami.

[Via Man Tan Web and Anime! Anime!; Images from Naver Matome]