Ankha

Nippon Television Network broadcast the animated special Bagi, the Monster of Mighty Nature on August 19, 1984, with Osamu Tezuka serving as creator, director, and writer through his own studio Tezuka Productions. The title character Bagi is a cougar whose genome has been spliced with human DNA by a scientist couple in Japan, granting her bipedal movement, the capacity for human language, and tan cougar-style fur with green eyes. The protagonist Ryosuke raises her in secret as a domestic kitten before her feline nature reasserts itself during adolescence. Akita Shoten published manga adaptations of the special in 1984 across multiple paperback formats, with art produced under Tezuka's personal supervision. The manga adaptation faithfully reproduces the special's narrative beats while expanding the South America segments in which Bagi escapes Japan and Ryosuke later hunts her as a young naturalist. The work fits within Tezuka's late-career engagement with genetic-engineering themes that also appears in his Black Jack series and in Phoenix: Resurrection. The special and manga together form one of Tezuka's final major animated and print works before his death on February 9, 1989, with Bagi specifically cited in retrospective Tezuka Productions documentation as a transitional bridge between his earlier action-oriented work and his late-career philosophical experiments. Tezuka received the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize posthumously when the prize was established in 1997 by the Asahi Shimbun in his honor, and the prize itself is now Japan's most prestigious annual manga award. The Bagi character appeared posthumously in tribute material published in Mushi Production and Tezuka Productions retrospective volumes during the 1990s and 2000s. Subsequent Tezuka anthologies including The Complete Works of Osamu Tezuka editions issued by Kodansha and Akita Shoten preserve the Bagi manga in print, and the original 1984 special received DVD release in Japan in 2003 through Vap Video as part of the Tezuka Productions television-special boxed set, ensuring continued availability for new readers and viewers across the past two decades.