Creator of beloved cartoon dies
Print Edition
Takashi Yanase, creator of one of Japan’s most beloved cartoon characters, Anpanman, has died of heart failure, his studio said yesterday. He was 94.
Yanase died at a Tokyo hospital early Sunday, it said in a statement. He had been treated for liver cancer since August.
Anpanman is a superhero with the head made of anpan, or bread filled with red bean paste, a typical snack in Japan. In the cartoon, the round-faced, smiley hero, clad in a red suit and long cape, fights his archrival Baikinman, or a germ man.
The self-sacrificial hero, who allowed starving people to bite into his head, rose to stardom in Japan in a picture book series that started in 1973, racking up sales of 68 million copies over the past 30 years. The Anpanman television cartoon series started in 1988, and has spread across Asia, where it is also popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The cartoon series, “Let’s go! Anpanman,” entered the Guinness World Records in 2009 for the largest number of characters at over 1,700.
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