村上隆さんのインスタグラム写真 - (村上隆Instagram)「Osamu Tezuka, the manga artist who created Astro Boy, was a magnificent creator who established the early days of Japanese TV animation. Born to a wealthy family with a projector at home since his early childhood, he carefully examined the animations by Fleischer brothers and Disney frame by frame and, fascinated by the structures of such animations, aimed to become an animation creator himself. Then the country went into the war, in which it was defeated, and he subsequently became hugely successful as a manga artist. Using that momentum, he cleared a path for the world of TV animations to thrive, but his constant and desperate wish was to create on his own the kind of world he had glimpsed in the American animation films in his childhood. He was not, however, blessed with talent, nor was he destined, to create feature-length animations. He was thus always burdened with an inferiority complex and relentlessly kept producing TV animations; his production company ballooned to employ hundreds of staff members, which ultimately led him to bankruptcy. As a child, I head the news and wondered why someone so tremendously successful as a manga artist would squander his wealth in such a way. In one of Tezuka’s manga, "Firumu wa ikiteiru (film is alive)," he vividly portrays his own passion for animation production and the pressure he was under. Of course it’s presumptuous of me to compare myself to Tezuka, but I can relate—in a sense, I have myself been captivated by the tremendously emotional moment in which a film comes to life. My gallerists who have been sending me my share from the sales of my fine art works, with which I have been funding my film and animation productions, have long questioned why I would pour all my money into film production, which is not even my principal vocation, to the point of risking bankruptcy. They have been telling me to stop. And this year, my company almost did go bankrupt due to the over-investment in the very film production. I am still in the middle of tremendous struggles in trying to avoid the worst case scenario and, in the midst of it all, I have made and released the behind-the-scene video series on Jellyfish Eyes Part 2. 👉」10月1日 14時34分