Leiji Matsumoto

Before Matsumoto's breakthrough work, Japanese animated science fiction was almost exclusively targeted at small children, with little room for serious thematic depth. His stories wove anti-war messaging, meditations on the cost of immortality, and nuanced depictions of intergenerational grief into swashbuckling space adventure, proving that sci-fi anime could draw massive, loyal audiences of teens and adults and laying the foundational groundwork for the global anime boom of the 1980s and 1990s.

Unusually for a manga creator working in the 1970s and 1980s, Matsumoto set nearly all of his major sci-fi works in the same loose, interconnected timeline. Beloved characters like rogue space pirate Captain Harlock, the mysterious Maetel, and the wanderer Emeraldas make recurring appearances across dozens of separate series published decades apart, a cross-property shared universe structure that predated the modern mainstream Hollywood shared universe trend by more than 30 years.

While his work was already a cultural staple across East Asia and parts of Europe in the late 20th century, Matsumoto gained a huge new generation of Western fans in the early 2000s when he collaborated with iconic French electronic music duo Daft Punk to produce retro anime style music videos for their tracks including One More Time. The project introduced his distinct vintage, hand-drawn sci-fi aesthetic to millions of Western audiences who had no prior exposure to his original manga or 1970s anime works.