An Ode to the Nepo Baby: The Legend of the Stardust Brothers

Let us take a moment to celebrate those often (and occasionally for very good reason) maligned in Hollywood: the nepo baby. Given unprecedented access and connections to those highest echelons of artistic powers, there are, of course, horror stories. Mediocre talents given starring roles, writers so far removed from the problems of the average person and so inured to never suffering from consequences that they end up writing multiple awful movies in a row… yes, the nepo baby is an easy—and in some cases deserved—target for abuse. And yet, one's upbringing is an integral part of one's narrative. We cannot escape the expectations of our family. We cannot escape who we are or where we were born. To reuse a well-trod cliche, we simply have to play the cards we were dealt.

Such is the case with Makoto Tezuka, son of the legendary Osamu Tezuka. The senior Tezuka could be called, and this is, frankly, an insult to him, the Walt Disney of Japan. But where Disney represents a company, represents in a single name the very concept of utilizing a mass of talented, replaceable, non-unionized artists to build yourself up, Tezuka stands as a monument to himself. He's been called "the God of Manga" and it's at least somewhat fair to say that the entire Japanese comic and animation industry wouldn't exist the way it does without his singular and generation-defining talents. His works Astro Boy, Black Jack, Phoenix, Buddha, and Kimba the White Lion (arguments persist about whether or not Disney ripped this off for The Lion King and, personally, I'm on the plagiarism side) are still, to this day, continued influences across a wide variety of genres, authors, and multi-media works. As far as I can tell, with no small amount of experience writing about American comic book history, there is simply no equivalent presence in American comics. Jack Kirby arguably has the artistic influence to match, but not the name recognition. Same with George Harriman or Carl Barks or really any cartoonist working in the same era. Tezuka wasn't just wildly influential and successful—he became a brand in and of himself. He was "the father of Manga" and his artistic sons and grandsons were many.

He also had a flesh-and-blood son who did not go into manga. Instead, Makoto Tezuka went into art school to study film and, due partly to a series of shorts and the prestige and connection that a last name like that would naturally grant, became a rising star in weird experimental art films. That's when he met musician Haruo Chikada, who had, inspired by Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, written a soundtrack for a nonexistent movie called “The Legend of the Stardust Brothers.” Chikada had spotted some of Tezuka's shorts and decided that he was the only one that could reverse-engineer the nonexistent film into being. From there, the collaboration quickly expanded to include a frankly bizarre lineup of Japanese celebrities: Lupin The Third creator Monkey Punch, Cure director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, wrestler Akira Maeda, and many, many more. It even includes an animated sequence from legendary manga artist Yosuke Takahashi (by all accounts, Tezuka didn't even bother to ask his dad if he'd be interested in helping animate his son's project).

It was a strange path to casting the film, a strange path to getting funding, and a strange path to actually making the movie itself, and the finished product, shocker, didn't magically turn out to be a normal film. Film conventions are thrown out the window with rapid-fire genre/setting/aesthetic changes all at the behest of a chaotic world ruled over by the fat cats of the music industry. Autonomy is a personal failure, desires are a no go, and vampire David Bowie and literal Hitler may be in cahoots at the upper levels of the Japanese pop idol music scene.

The film didn't hit with audiences at the time—too weird for the moment, not enough legs to last long enough to be matched with the low-fi indie works of Sion Sono or Shinya Tsukamoto or any of the other auteur darlings of '90s Japan. It simply vanished, its low-budget charm and unflagging creativity and off-kilter comedic sensibility getting thrown to the wayside like garbage. It's a rite of passage for many of the best cult films, but very rarely does a 20- or 30-year reevaluation matter to the person whose work is a laughingstock for years. Makoto Tezuka, thankfully, went on to continue making works, though he eventually became enmeshed in the continuation of his father's legacy. Such is so often the fate of the nepo baby. But for one glorious moment in 1985, Tezuka was able to create something so unique, so bizarre, so utterly unlike anything else put out before or since that he achieved what so few children of artistic greats have managed to achieve: he made something so weird that he simply couldn't be compared to his father.