Osamu Tezuka's Tetsuwan Atom (鉄腕アトム, Astro Boy) began as a 1952 manga in Shōnen magazine and became, in 1963, the subject of the first weekly half-hour Japanese TV anime. Both the manga and the anime are foundational works in the history of the medium: the manga established many of the visual conventions of postwar children's manga, and the anime's production economics — limited animation, low budget, sponsor-financed broadcast — set the template that almost all subsequent Japanese TV anime followed.
The manga (1952–1968)
Tezuka began serialising Tetsuwan Atom in Shōnen magazine (Kobunsha) in April 1952. The serial ran for sixteen years, with breaks, and produced 23 collected volumes. The story of a humanoid robot built by Doctor Tenma to replace his deceased son, then abandoned and adopted by the kindly Professor Ochanomizu, established many of the recurring concerns of Tezuka's career: technological ambivalence, the ethics of created life, and the relationship between scientific authority and individual conscience.
The 1963 anime
Tezuka's Mushi Production began producing Astro Boy for Fuji TV in 1963 at a per-episode budget that was substantially lower than Disney's contemporary television work. The production economics — three frames per second for many sequences, repeated cycle animation, stock backgrounds, mouth-only animation — became the standard 'limited animation' practices of Japanese TV anime. The series ran for 193 episodes through 1966. The 1963 production model is the single most consequential set of technical choices in anime history.
Later adaptations and the international export
Astro Boy has been re-adapted three times — a 1980 colour series (also Mushi/Tezuka Productions), a 2003 Sony Pictures Television series, and a 2009 American CG feature. The original 1963 series' international syndication, particularly its NBC broadcast in the United States from 1963 onward, is often cited as the first major export of anime as a category.