The History of Mushi Pro

Let me start this story by its ending. On July 12th, 2022, Mushi Production lost a lawsuit filed by Etsuko Tezuka, owner of the studio’s facilities, to whom it owed 11.5 million yen of unpaid rent. When I went there in February 2023, the building looked abandoned – after 60 years of existence, it seems that Mushi Production’s history has finally come to an end. This small bit of information may be a surprise to some, and it would have been to me not that long ago: after all, most accounts of the studio’s history stop in 1973, with the bankruptcy of subsidiary Mushi Pro Trading, followed by that of the animation studio. However, it reopened in 1977, managed by its union, and kept existing as an animation subcontracting company until 2018.

Most accounts of Mushi Pro stop in 1973, and this one will as well. It is, after all, a convenient date: the studio’s activities past 1977 don’t hold any of the attraction that the ones before do, and it seems like a good landmark in anime history in general. It is 10 years after the “first TV anime”, Tetsuwan Atom, and just before the double tidal change initiated by Heidi, Girl of the Alps and Space Battleship Yamato. It makes sense to stop there, then, but it is not an obvious choice – events go on their course, and breaks are never as radical as we’d like them to be.

Indeed, if one were to continue the story, it would be possible to argue that both Heidi and Yamato are themselves products of Mushi: the latter was largely made by ex-Mushi staff, and the former’s inscription in the World Masterpiece Theater cannot be separated from Mushi’s contributions to the prehistory of the program. In other words, Mushi Pro’s legacy goes beyond the production of Tetsuwan Atom and irrigates all of anime history.

Heidi and Yamato are significant for another reason. They seemingly embody two major directions Japanese animation would go – that of high-quality, all-audiences animation on one hand, and SF series aimed at hardcore fans on the other. 1974 is a turning point because it seemingly encompasses the duality between manga eiga and anime, two different understandings of animation in Japan that claim their respective origins in two rival studios, Tôei Dôga and Mushi Production.

The Tôei/Mushi duality is a structuring narrative in anime historiography. Originating in a real rivalry between employees of both studios during the 1960s and 1970s, it developed into a historical framework proper in the columns of magazine Animage during the 1980s. It was finally formalized in 2004 by Nobuyuki Tsugata, in his book The Power of Japanese Animation, which sets up Hayao Miyazaki and Osamu Tezuka as the two structuring and antagonistic figures of anime history – one focused on “full animation” and feature films, the other on “limited animation” and TV series.

This opposition has also been fueled by the writings of those who were involved in both studios. On one hand, Yasuo Otsuka and Hayao Miyazaki have taken the side of “cartoon films”: animation as entertainment, an international language of sorts that crosses cultural and national borders. On the other, Eiichi Yamamoto and Gisaburô Sugii have defended the legacy of their master Osamu Tezuka, illustrating the artistic qualities of TV anime and commercial animation’s ability to break the barriers between “art” and “entertainment”. To illustrate this opposition, I’d like to cite an excerpt from each party, each of which showcases, in its own ways, how fundamentally different both definitions of animation are.

The first is taken from Yasuo Otsuka’s memoirs, Drawings Drenched With Sweat, and describes the reaction of Otsuka and Tôei’s artists when they saw the first episode of Tetsuwan Atom air on TV in 1963.

“Everybody hurried to watch it, but nobody could provide any technical evaluation of it. The way it moved was so awkward that, thinking seriously, nobody would even want to watch it. […] A work of art speaks by itself and no excuses will justify it. It wasn’t ‘animated on 3s’ – it was just still frames and repeated sequences. The main character might be a robot, but the posing was poor and didn’t differ much from the drawings of the manga. The action was basic and without any inventiveness. It might be simplified, but it was so awkward that anyone in Tôei would have gotten scolded for it. We believed that animation is about creating movement, that characters have to act, and this was impossible to accept for us.” [Otsuka 2001, pp.101-102]

The second is a scene from the beginning of Eiichi Yamamoto’s autobiographical novel The Rise and Fall of Mushi Pro, in which the main character Meita explains that he works as an “animator” and develops his vision of his art.

Both texts don’t really answer each other, and perhaps they are not fundamentally contradictory – ultimately, they both rest on an understanding of animation as movement and life. But Otsuka positions himself as nothing more than a craftsman, whereas Yamamoto speaks with all the arrogance of an artist and “creator”. As much as Mushi may be decried for giving birth to standardized industrial animation production, most of its defenders speak as auteurs, masters of their craft with a vision to share.

After such statements on what animation is and what it should be, we can turn to a more immediate, concrete issue: that of the difference between “full” and “limited” animation. On this blog and elsewhere, I have already expressed my views on these concepts, especially the second one, which I consider lacking any sort of intellectual consistency. I will therefore not go in depth into it, and just mention Gisaburô Sugii’s claim that UPA’s “limited” animation is not really limited and that only Osamu Tezuka discovered the “true meaning” of the word [cited in Itô and Nagao 2001, vol.3, p.45]. If this is not enough to show that “limited animation” is nothing more than an ideological and polemical terminology, I don’t know what is.

More fundamentally, I think that speaking of “limited animation” is dangerous because it makes it impossible to see animated works for what they are: animation, first and foremost, exploring the possibilities of the technique in their own unique ways. This is how I will try to approach the works I discuss in this series. I will, to some extent, keep discussing movement in terms of framerates, not because I think it is methodologically or formally interesting – it most often is not – but to put an end to the frankly ludicrous assumptions one encounters so often about TV anime and Mushi Pro’s animation “style”.

This series of articles about studio Mushi Production will try to cover various aspects, from the history of the studio as an entity to that of specific productions and analysis of certain works and sequences. This has become a speciality of sorts for this blog, but I would like to note that I am not alone in this. Indeed, production histories have become more common and spread beyond the narrow limits of the sakuga community and even of the anime fandom, whether in text, video or podcast format. All of these efforts have been incredibly encouraging and inspiring, and they keep pushing me to do better, to expand both the range and focus of my writing. 

With that in mind, my goal here will be to treat animation in its various aspects – animation as business, production and art. In that sense, this series will very much be in the continuity of two previous articles. The first is the one that immediately precedes this series, dedicated to Japanese animation in the 1940s and 1950s: not only did it chronologically end with Atom, but it was also a test for me to explore further the conditions of animation business and production. The second is the one where I tried to establish the framework of the “production model” in order to grasp together the three dimensions mentioned above.

This framework also interrogates the choice of my subject, and brings us back to the questions I initially raised about how to begin and conclude historical narratives. “Studio discourse”, in which all artistic agency is attributed to companies and not individuals, has always been a hot topic in sakuga circles. While I hope that the actual content of my articles is enough to show that I don’t intend to erase individual agency, centering the narration on studios should be questioned.

First, I would say that starting from the studio is asking a question. As I did with the World Masterpiece Theater, it means taking an apparently well-defined object, studying its characteristics, and then asking: is it really that consistent? This is basically the point of the “production model” framework, which will be applied to Mushi (but this time, not retroactively) in order to see whether the studio had a consistent production system, financing model and creative philosophy.

Following from this, I’ll try to approach studios not as “consistent”, “well-defined” objects from the start, but rather as modes of organization open to diversity and change. A “studio”, like any company, is at the same time a place, the people and things that occupy it, and all the relationships that bring them together and separate them. It is not closed up but open, in multiple ways: people come and go, production may be outsourced, ideas, trends and influences circulate… Focusing on the studio doesn’t necessarily mean hiding individuals behind an anonymous entity: it can also mean asking “what happens when these people work together under these conditions?” and, in the case of a historical approach like mine, “what makes these conditions sustainable, how did they come to be and disappear?”

Much more concretely, this also means broadening the scope as much as possible. For instance, Mushi Production seems to be closely tied to just one individual, Osamu Tezuka, to whom are attributed some of the studio’s best or worst orientations, greatest successes or failures. I of course do not intend to erase Tezuka from the story, but I want to show that he was but one actor in what were always collective processes over which he sometimes had little influence.

On the other hand, I want to stress that the “history” I want to write is fundamentally a history of art, based on the belief that works do not speak for themselves but need to be explained, at least partly, by how they were financed, distributed, produced, and by the lives and ideas of those involved in these processes. This is a necessary prerequisite so that “production history” does not become just a succession of production anecdotes. In other words, while studio and production history might occupy most of the word count, aesthetic and formal analysis will remain an essential part of articles – they are, in a way, what justifies all the rest.

How, then, does one approach Mushi Production? As I have discussed, the studio’s legacy is both obvious and debated. In English-speaking circles in particular, writings about it have mostly been confined to two themes – the “first TV anime”, Tetsuwan Atom, which opens the studio’s history, and the Animerama film trilogy, which more-or-less closes it. It is only very recently, with Toadette’s in-depth article about Mushi’s Moomin, that general knowledge about it has been allowed to expand. 

I will of course cover both the beginning and the end in this series, but just as important is all that stands in-between. It is not just interesting in itself and when some of anime’s first masterpieces have been produced (Jungle Taitei and Ashita no Joe, to only cite two): Mushi’s attempt and ultimate failure to dominate TV animation and even the animation industry in Japan can only be understood by narrating its decade-long development.

To that end, I will be using almost exclusively Japanese-language sources, for the simple reasons that I can access them and that they are the most complete and up-to-date. Thankfully, most are very recent, as if there had been a sudden movement to write memoirs, conduct and publish interviews and research on the first years of the anime industry in the last 5 years or so. Hopefully, what I write here can therefore be in line with at least some of the latest developments in Japanese animation historiography. In that regard, I am particularly indebted to one book, Yûsuke Nakagawa’s The Founding of the Animation Kingdom: not only does it appear to be one of the most recent and complete syntheses on the first decade of the anime industry, it puts anime production in the wider context of the TV and manga industries, a perspective that is often lacking in anime history.

I have tried to use as many secondary sources as possible, but primary sources – particularly memoirs and interviews – remain the foundation for anime history. But I would like to stop here a bit and discuss the risks of using such documentation. First, it is always edited in a way or another; second, individuals misremember, confuse things and always have their own implicit or explicit biases. As a rule of thumb, I now tend to consider that witnesses may be lying, but in good faith – in other words, they sincerely believe in what they say, even if it’s wrong. This is a necessary assumption, because if people were consciously lying, their testimonies would be unusable. This would lead nowhere, so I believe it more interesting and productive to investigate why and how biases and mistakes develop. This is only possible by comparing sources and always keeping in mind where a given witness stands.

To illustrate these remarks, I’d like to discuss one specific source: Eiichi Yamamoto’s The Rise and Fall of Mushi Pro. This is not a memoir or an autobiography, but a novel narrated in the third-person, whose main character, Ani Meita (yes, “animator”) roughly occupies the same position Yamamoto did. The novel format makes the book very tricky to use, because it’s never clear what is fact and what is fiction, or what really happened but is told differently for dramatic effect. Moreover, as I will show in the articles, Yamamoto makes multiple factual mistakes and repeatedly omits what appears like key events in Mushi Pro’s history. The fact that it was published in 1989, just after Osamu Tezuka’s death and at a point when his legacy in manga and animation had to be defined, must not be ignored either.

On the other hand, there are a few elements that make it an essential resource. First, it is chronologically rather close to the facts: after Tezuka’s 1973 series of tearjerking essays about Mushi Pro and the reasons for its collapse and Yoshiyuki Tomino’s provocative 1981 memoirs, it is one of the earliest and most complete accounts of the studio’s history. Moreover, the sheer amount of detail and information makes Yamamoto’s narration extremely convincing. It’s impossible not to use it – but one must do so with the utmost caution.

As a result, when citing sources, I have tried to adopt the following principles whenever possible (which sadly didn’t apply as much as I’d have liked):

1) Never cite a source individually but always give at least two testimonies for an event or claim

2) Always give priority to secondary sources, which are presumed to have already done criticism of primary sources and consulted some that I may not have accessed

3) When available, always give priority to actual production documents and archives, while at the same time acknowledging that they do not speak by themselves and need to be analyzed in the light of other sources

4) If a statement is particularly important or unexpected, it must be backed up by a higher number of sources

In terms of how this will translate in the articles themselves, I have decided to adopt a system of footnotes. I provide a full bibliography here – which can hopefully serve as a resource for those interested in researching the topic further – which I’ll reference by footnotes in each article. In these, I will also discuss the sources themselves, such as some of their limitations and contradictions. While it may not be the most practical, I encourage those interested to check them out, even if they don’t intend to cross-reference every one of my statements.

As I usually do in those introductory articles, I will also provide an outline of the series. It will be generally chronological, but with some caveats. The last 5 years of the studio in particular are extremely crowded, not to say confused, as many things were in production at the same time and the internal conditions within Mushi got increasingly complicated. I have therefore chosen thematic entries, such as “gekiga anime” or “pre-World Masterpiece Theater”, but these are always somewhat arbitrary. These, alongside the lack of access, have led me to bypass certain productions: Tezuka’s so-called “experimental works” will not be analyzed in depth, while shows like Vampire, Sasurai no Taiyô or Kunimatsu-sama no Otoridai will only get brief mentions. This is, as always, a reminder that my work here is far from complete and always welcomes corrections and additions.

Series outline

1. The road to TV anime, 1960-1965 (Saiyûki, Aru Machikado no Monogatari, Tetsuwan Atom) – 08/04/2023

1.5. Atom through its storyboards – 15/04/2023

2. Anime business, 1965-1966 (W3, Jungle Taitei) – 22/04/2023

3. The beginning of the end, 1967-1969 (Goku no Daibôken, Ribbon no Kishi, Wanpaku Tanteidan, Animal 1, 1001 Nights)  – 29/04/2023

4. Mushi’s gekiga, 1969-1971 (Dororo, Sabu & Ichi, Ashita no Joe) – 20/05/2023

5. Farewell to Tezuka, 1970-1972 (Cleopatra, Kanashimi no Belladonna) – 27/05/2023

6. Towards the World Masterpiece Theater, 1971-1973 (Moomin, Andersen Monogatari, Vickie the Viking) – 03/06/2023

7. Digging Mushi’s grave, 1972-1973 (Umi no Triton, Wansa-kun) – 10/06/2023

Conclusion: Mushi’s successors? (Ace wo Nerae, Space Battleship Yamato, Zero Tester, Manga Nippon Mukashibanashi) – 24/06/2023

Bibliography