Thanks. Good luck on your side, I'm just hoping on my side too. It all seems so far away but someone has to try and find answers to the question eventually.
From what little I know, Tezuka did want to clone Disney in a sense. Prior to this there were comics before that resembled gag manga and Tezuka, finding difficulty in amassing resources to clone a Disney movie, tried to convert Disney unto paper with the current popular drawing style of the time.
Where he became a pioneer was in the area where he saw more of Disney than the art style. This combined with other old movies he knew of made him want to "clone cinema unto paper". Thus began both the success of manga and anime. Manga in the sense of Tezuka's pioneering cinema-like over comic-style like of pacing (at the time) and Anime due to the combined work ethic plus consistent high quality works he made which made it impossible for producers to resist offering an "Anime" version of his works. (Unfortunately or fortunately, this was also what leads to the unfair and unequal salary of many manga artists today. In those early days, the manga creator literally gave away their works to allow for an animated version setting aside certain industry celebrities and the model continues up till today except nowadays it works closer to a start-up where the professional manga artist is supplied food and rooms and materials to polish their work and then having an anime of your work is more of an honor than a hand-out)
Anyways, if you don't mind, how do you envision a solid base to be? Even today it seems Silicon Valley isn't quite as solid as it is and there are talks of talent shortage and high costs of living - I'm curious what a solid base really is. Over here, from my understanding, programmers don't so much work together as they end up interning for whichever company is willing to accept them as on the job trainees. In the rare chance that there is a small group of programmers working together, they are almost immediately formed through university projects otherwise they become unknown freelancers working with their former classmates or past acquaintances.
I think the same holds true for Silicon Valley only guys like Zuckerberg comes from already elite schools and most people are dreamers and the ones that aren't but are overly skilled unless I'm mistaken get acquired by Google or Facebook and lured by certain luxuries. On our end, and again I could be mistaken, I don't think we even have a YCombinator type of start-up training and almost everyone is on the follower mindset with regards to web services because not only is the money hard to support your self with but the Philippines isn't as internet surfing as other countries. (If you were to take a web surfing pie, I would assume majority of the users are using Facebook or playing MMORPG games. I could be highly mistaken since I don't have access to professional analytics programs but lurking in net cafes these are what I spot)
There is probably a higher hierarchy of elite level programmers and designers though but not only am I hard pressed to imagine them not already working or moving elsewhere in another country but I myself don't have investor level cash to satisfy them.