Can an animated production survive the passing of a key creative? This question demanded to be asked when famed director Satoshi Kon died in 2010, which left his film The Dreaming Machine orphaned. In that case, it seems to have been a bridge too far, but a certain anime studio managed to rescue a similarly bereft film right around the same time. When production on Gisaburo Sugii’s film The Life of Budori Gusuko came to a halt in 2010, it was because the production studio, Group TAC, was winding down. The studio’s CEO, Atsumi Tashiro, had died, leaving the studio with no succession plan and scant resources. However, Budori Gusuko’s director and staff were willing to march on, they just needed a studio with the nerves to back them up. That studio was Tezuka Productions, an outfit that had just done the same thing with the Black Jack OVA series, completing two new episodes in the face of its director Osamu Dezaki passing away.

All right, that isn’t exactly how it went. When Tezuka Productions assembled a team to produce two additional episodes of the 1990s Black Jack OVA series, they were actually fulfilling the original plans they laid down alongside director Dezaki. Back when production began, Dezaki was envisioning the affair as a twelve- or thirteen-episode OVA series. Over a remarkable seven years, he made it to ten episodes before breaking off and immediately getting to work on Hamtaro. No rest for the weary!

While devastating to many, Osamu Tezuka’s death finally created some space for a Black Jack anime project to get off the ground. The vision was a clear and simple one: to utilize the talents of one of anime’s “golden duos,” director Osamu Dezaki and animator/designer Akio Sugino, in service of adapting the unlicensed doctor’s greatest stories while bringing them in line with modern sensibilities. Dezaki would bring in his decades of directing experience to elevate the more simple elements of Tezuka’s original chapters, heighten the drama, and strengthen the storytelling. Meanwhile, Sugino’s animation and character designs would make the director’s material fly high. The formula worked; for the better part of a decade, new Black Jack episodes were released on a regular cadence, however, they weren’t marketed to kids or juveniles, but to adult viewers. When I visited the Tezuka Museum in 1999, it was mainly adults who were queuing up to view clips from the recently completed episode seven. At the time, episode eight was still a few months away from release.

The original Black Jack manga was the product of the 1970s, a Shonen Champion offering featuring an unorthodox hero: an unlicensed doctor, whose two-fisted tales of surgery were sometimes unsubtle attacks on Japan’s staid social and medical systems. The series was a hit. Its creator, Osamu “God of Manga” Tezuka, himself a doctor, was famously protective of the character. In fact, he reportedly insisted on personally drawing every keyframe of Black Jack’s animated debut, the TV movie Bandar Book. While the good doctor continued to cameo in a rash of early eighties anime film and TV projects—an episode of Astro Boy here, the film Phoenix 2772 there—nobody seemed up to adapting the character’s exploits in a longer animation production, least of all Tezuka himself, who remained famously busy with a never-ending parade of other projects right up until his untimely demise in 1989.

Black Jack’s greatest triumph is the way it showcases Dezaki’s technical and storytelling sensibilities, which he refined over a decades-long career. If you study anime as an art form, you’re probably familiar with the many flourishes he brought to the medium, like triple-takes, splitscreen animation sequences, and the “postcard memories” effect, where a dramatic scene will suddenly freeze and turn into a painting. Black Jack is rife with these huge moments of visual drama; the series really seems to capture him and his longtime collaborators hitting a creative peak, as well as enjoying each other’s company and energy.

But in 2010, a decade after the release of episode ten, Tezuka Productions had a challenge on their hands. The Black Jack OVA series was still popular and it’d just been released on DVD in 2006. The studio had the materials in hand for two more episodes. What they didn’t have was director Osamu Dezaki, who’d been fighting lung cancer and wasn’t fit to work. If they were going to end Black Jack with a real bang, it would ultimately have to be a celebration of Dezaki’s legacy. To do this, the studio reunited much of the series’ staff and asked two of the director’s lieutenants, director/production manager Satoshi Kuwabara and animation director Masayoshi Nishida, to each helm an episode under the banner of Black Jack FINAL.

To the eagle-eyed Black Jack fan, these episodes are notable for their takes on themes and material touched upon earlier in the manga. Episode eleven provides a new spin on Pinoko’s origin story, while episode twelve thrusts the good doctor into yet another troubled political conundrum—in which he offers medical aid to an oppressive regime while quietly helping its victims topple it. The jump from the old production to this new one isn’t just notable because it’s a cel-to-digital affair, complete with Black Jack and Pinoko now using modern cell phones, but because it’s pretty noticeable that these episodes weren’t made with Osamu Dezaki’s storyboards.

Here’s the thing about Osamu Dezaki: He practically never allowed anyone to draw storyboards for him. He was really good at it, to the point that he’d pull double-duty so much that he’d be obliged to be credited under the pseudonym “Makurasaki.” His boards don’t have the picture book quality of a Hayao Miyazaki, but they’re dense and communicate a lot. In interviews from Black Jack’s recent Blu-ray release, director Kuwabara laments that he’d often review Dezaki’s storyboards and think, glumly, that animating them would inevitably diminish the finished product’s storytelling quality. However, he’d also humorously point out that, like any production manager, he often found himself following Dezaki around, begging him to finish up those same storyboards.

But with this FINAL pair of episodes, Kuwabara and Nishida had to draft the storyboards themselves, and look for their own ways to leverage Dezaki’s trademark dramatic flourishes. It’s something that the director had prepared them for; in his remembrance, Nishida recounts an early assignment where, as animator, he hewed closely to the director’s storyboards. Upon viewing the rough animation, Dezaki let him have it. “If you only show what’s on my storyboards, then what do I need you for?” After that, he brought something extra to his animation cuts, which is what Dezaki expected from his animators.

Osamu Dezaki stuck around long enough that he did have some actual involvement with Black Jack FINAL. His credit as director is honorary, but he used some of his last days to oversee elements of the project, provide script advice, and storyboard notes to Kuwabara and Nishida. They, along with collaborators like Sugino, animation director Yoshio Takeuchi, and music composer Eiji Kawamura, acted in kind to make Dezaki’s final project one to remember. The sense of tribute in these last two OVA episodes is palpable, and almost like a magic trick, a bridge is made connecting the spirit of Black Jack FINAL’s production team to that of the crew from prior and before. That’s how strong Osamu Dezaki’s spirit was.

Mike Toole is an anime historian, presenter, occasional voice actor, and writer.

Available at MediaOCD:
Black Jack: The Complete OVA Series – Blu-ray