Ashita no Joe: Maruyama Recalls the Manga-Collage Trick

For Ashita no Joe, the team early on pasted manga drawings onto storyboard paper and cut short film sequences from them. Producer Masao Maruyama told this at the ANIAFF film festival in Nagoya on November 14, 2026. He suspects these experiments helped shape the storytelling of director Osamu Dezaki, who did not rely solely on continuous movement.

Maruyama appeared in the "Director Focus" program before a screening of Black Jack, together with animation historian Masahiro Haraguchi. Haraguchi made clear that Maruyama had not been involved in the production shown. Maruyama had talked with Dezaki about the anime adaptation of Ashita no Joe. According to the Japanese portal CINEMAS＋, he named Tezuka and Dezaki as two decisive pioneers of Japanese animation and stressed the freedom with which new creative methods could be tried at the time.

The manga source comes from Asao Takamori and Tetsuya Chiba. We reported on the death of the artist Chiba in October.

Dezaki, who died in 2011, is the focus of his own retrospective at this year's ANIAFF. The official festival program includes ten productions, among them Ashita no Joe 2, The Rose of Versailles, Golgo 13 and several episodes of Black Jack. The festival describes Dezaki's use of still images as a technique that deepens characters and dramatic situations.

In parallel, the ANIAFF program on anime and artificial intelligence is running. On November 14, director Kazuya Murata and producer Naohiro Hirasawa discussed the depiction of AI in Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. Further talks covered the staging of Golgo 13 and Clevatess.

ANIAFF runs from November 13 to 18, 2026, in Nagoya.