How did Yoshitaka Amano start at Tatsunoko?

Amano grew up in Shizuoka City, drawing constantly. A childhood friend who had moved to Tokyo fed him news of the capital's manga world, and the boy taught himself from the how-to-draw books of Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishinomori. During a winter trip to Tokyo in his last year of junior high school, he took his paintings to Tatsunoko Production, the studio founded by Tatsuo Yoshida.

The talent was recognised at once. He was hired in 1967, at fifteen, and his family moved him into a company dormitory in the capital; his English-language biography calls him the youngest person the studio ever hired. After about a year of training he joined the studio's character work, on series such as Mach Go Go Go, the show the West knows as Speed Racer.

It was an apprenticeship inside a studio that was inventing the role he would define: the character designer, the artist whose drawings set the look that hundreds of animators then follow. By seventeen or eighteen Amano was carrying both character design and animation direction work, and he stayed at Tatsunoko for fifteen years, until 1982.