Bokura Mangaka: Tokiwa-sou Monogatari (1981)

Front cover image of the 7-inch vinyl
single release of the TV special's OP/ED theme songs

https://nyaa.si/view/1948897
Fansub credits can be found in the link above.

 

Another collaboration with perevodildo, released under the "LonelyDildo" tag—this is "Bokura Mangaka: Tokiwa-sou Monogatari", a Toei Animation TV special from 1981.

 

Tokiwa-sou was the name of an apartment building in Japan which was famous for housing many influential manga artists, some of which include Osamu Tezuka, Fujiko Fujio, and Fujio Akatsuka, among many others. The animated TV special—which, interestingly enough, was broadcasted one year before the building was demolished—centers around the lives of the manga artists living in Tokiwa-sou, though most of the special focuses on Fujio Akatsuka as he slowly begins to doubt his skills as a manga artist and questions what type of manga he should truly be drawing.

 

Funny enough, this project dates back to 2022... but it is entirely my fault and the result of stalling. edo999 was in possession of an official Shotaro Ishinomori DVD that contained this TV special, and sent the DVD ISO over to me. I later sent that ISO over to this project's encoder, and the TV special was... pretty much just kept dormant in my SSD throughout the next years, with me telling myself that I'd eventually get to it "soon".

 

Several months ago, perevodildo expressed interest in translating this, to which I had asked if he was interested in collab'ing on this since it was on my radar too. He agreed, and the project pretty much finally kickstarted from there—Yume timed & translated it, perevodildo helped TLC, imatu and I QC'ed this, and an anonymous user offered to help QC this to help identify & fill in references to various manga & anime that none of us on the project's team knew—said user also helped TLC this and fixed some lines here & there.

 

I think that's pretty much it. Despite this anime special featuring various prominent authors, there's only a few handful I really recognized in here. The others—either I vaguely knew them somewhat or didn't know them at all... and TBH I have no interest in checking them out either 😅

 

Regardless, enjoy!