How did a medical student obsessed with Disney start the manga revolution?

Osamu Tezuka started it by making manga read like movies. In 1947, while he was a medical student, his New Treasure Island became an overnight success and began what is called the golden age of manga, and his film-like way of sequencing panels was widely adopted by later artists. Considered among the greatest and most influential cartoonists of all time, he earned the nickname "Father of Manga", and even "God of Manga". The story starts with a boy who loved Disney.

When Tezuka was young, his father showed him Walt Disney films, and he became a Disney movie buff, most famously seeing Bambi more than 80 times. He started drawing comics around his second year of elementary school, so much that his mother had to erase pages in his notebook to keep up with his output. He even took his pen name, Osamushi, from the Japanese word for a ground beetle whose name resembled his own.

Japan was changing fast. In 1944, still in high school, Tezuka was drafted to work in a factory for the war effort, and in 1945 he began studying medicine in Osaka. After the war, at 17, he published his first professional work, a newspaper strip for children. In 1947 came New Treasure Island, only loosely based on the novel Treasure Island.

The big change was how the pages moved. In Tezuka's cinematographic technique, panels are sequenced like a motion picture, revealing action almost in slow motion and zooming rapidly from far away to close-up. Later manga artists widely adopted that dynamism. Then came Astro Boy in 1952, an instant phenomenon in Japan, and in 1953 his shōjo manga Princess Knight. By 1969 two marketing genres had firmed up: shōnen manga aimed at boys and shōjo manga aimed at girls.