Before we can talk about animated feature films made in Japan, we need to take a look at what came before that. Namely, non-feature length animated films made in Japan, which had had a fairly long history prior to the release of Japan’s first feature length animated movie in 1945. The probably oldest piece of surviving Japanese animation is a 3 second clip of a boy writing “活動写真” (“katsudō shashin'' which roughly translates to “moving pictures”) and bowing to the camera, created by an unknown animator around 1907 who probably created the clip by impressing the drawings directly onto the celluloid with a stencil. Beyond this early curiosity, the oldest known Japanese animated shorts started appearing around 1917, when noted animation pioneers such as Junichi Kouchi, Ōten Shimokawa, and Seitarou Kitayama began making their first shorts. Sadly, much of these early pieces are now lost, through some a combination of the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, the destruction caused during World War II, and the generally poor contemporary preservation efforts that much early film has suffered form. Of this very early group, Junichi Kouchi’s “Hanawa Hekonai Meitō no Maki” (known in English as “The Famous Sword” or “The Dull Sword”) is the only readily available surviving short.
The availability of early anime does get much better for films made after the 1923 earthquake and depending on where you’re willing to look, a surprisingly large number have made their way to home video. Some of these are...not terribly accessible or easy to get, such as the long out of print Nihon Art Animation Eiga Senshuu DVD collection that was released to tie into the "日本アニメーション映画史" ("A History of Japanese Animation") film exhibition that the National Film Center of the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo ran in 2004 or the Japanese Anime Classic Collection, which is easier to get but will still set you back over $100 for 4 DVDs of animation history. So instead we’re going to talk about a much easier to get DVD set, Zakka Films’s 2008 release The Roots of Japanese Anime Until the End of WWII.
This set provides a nice little overview of anime shorts made between 1930 and 1942 in a variety of styles and genres. The most represented creator is Noboru Ofuji, who directed the two musical sing-a-longs “The Village Festival” (1930) and “Song of Spring” (1931) as well as the short comedy “Chinkoroheibei and the Treasure Box” (1936). (Chinkoroheibei is the rounded, mouse-ish looking dude on the cover up there. If you were ever wondering around when anime started featuring cute, mascot-ready characters, now you know). The two sing-a-long shorts, designed to be played in tandem with a record of the song they were set to, are fun examples of the kind of cut-out animation that was popular in Japan at the time, where all the animation was done with paper cut-outs that would be moved around, stop motion style, between shots. (This was more or less the norm in Japan for years, as animation cels were expensive to import and didn’t become widespread in the industry until larger companies started to get into the animation game.) Despite how primitive this sounds, Ofuji is quite adept at the style. If you didn’t know this wasn’t cel animation, nothing would really tip you off to that fact and Ofuji clearly has a lot of fun literalizing and visualizing the lyrics of the songs. The Chinkoroheibei short, on the other hand, was one of the first pieces of anime to be made with cel animation and shows a very strong influence from contemporary American animation, in contrast to the earlier sing-along shorts that were, at least in subject matter, very Japanese. If it weren’t for the music and some of the character designs, this could easily be mistaken for a forgotten short from Fleischer Studios or one of their contemporaries, right down to the weirdly grim violence and silly cartoon shenanigans.
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| He stole the fish's skin to sneak into an underwater palace. How horrifying. |
The other two early ‘30s cut-out animation shorts, Yasuji Murata’s “The Monkey Masamune” (1930) and Kiyoji Nishikura “Chameko's Day” (1931), are also interesting in their own ways. “Chameko's Day” is essentially an adaptation of the 1929 hit song by Hideko Hirai, who plays Chameko in the short, and features Chameko going about her day, interacting with anthropomorphized objects around her house, and going to school and the movies. The whole short comes off as more surreal and artistic than it seems like it was intended to be: Chameko gets dressed by having her cloths grow onto her from her extremities, the anthropomorphic objects all have a unnerving, uncanny vibe and look about them, and the movie she sees at the end of the short is surprisingly violent for something ostensibly aimed at kids. (Assuming this was indeed aimed at children rather than just starring a child. It’s hard to tell sometimes with these old films that date from when things like “intended audience” wasn’t the thing it is now.) It still provides a wonderful example of cut-out style animation and gives some insight into Japanese popular culture of the period, with its references to contemporary movies and celebrities and even features a plug for Lion Toothpaste in what appears to be the earliest known example of product placement in an anime.
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| Advertising! |
While there are a few moments in “Chameko's Day” where you can tell that this is all just pieces of paper being moved around in front of a camera, “The Monkey Masamune” stands out in part because it’s hard to tell that it was done with cut-out animation at all. The characters and action all move with a fluid grace that one usually associates with more technically complicated cel animation. It's a testament to Yasuji Murata's talents as a director that he can make what seems like a less sophisticated animation style look just as good as its nominally more accomplished peers. It’s also interesting to see Murata use techniques that wouldn’t become common in any film medium until much later, such as a scene where a POV shot of the main character looking at the countryside is accomplished via a shaky-cam style shot of the scenery he's looking at.
The final three shorts on the disc, Yoshitaro Kataoka’s “Danemon Ban - The Monster Exterminator” (1935), Kenzo Masaoka’s “Benkei And Ushiwaka” (1939) and Mitsuyo Seo’s “Momotaro's Sea Eagle” (1942) are all cel animated and draw on Japanese folklore for their characters, but use them to extremely different ends. “Danemon Ban” and “Benkei And Ushiwaka” have more in common, being relatively straightforward shorts starring characters from Japanese folklore. Both illustrate how well Japanese animators took to cel animation once it became more readily available in Japan and each shows off the prowess of their respective directors in setting up and paying off action and comedy. “Danemon Ban” in particular shows the the influence of western animation hadn’t died down by the mid-1930s (though as we'll see that will soon change). Danemon Ban is presented as an almost Popeye-esque character, comedic while still being strong and tough (and willing to beat up tanukis who disguise themselves as similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from-Betty Boop) and as much a source of action and fighting as he is jokes. While the obvious western influence isn’t nearly as prominent in “Benkei And Ushiwaka,” it still provides a nice balance of humor and combat. I particularly enjoyed the section when Benkei, a monk on a quest to win 100 swords for Buddha, gets into a few rounds of “But WHY?” with his young apprentice. The fights are equally enjoyable, as Masaoka’s sense of timing and choreography make this feel like version 1.0 of every great ,fantastical fight you’ve ever seen in anime.
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| I was going to show one of the fight scenes, but I decided showing this neat looking boar would be more fun. Look at him and his little tusks! |
But the real noticeable shift in style comes with “Momotaro's Sea Eagle”, at the time the longest animated film created in Japan (though still a few minutes shy of being truly feature length). Unlike the other shorts in this collection, which are clearly made as light entertainment first and foremost, “Momotaro's Sea Eagle” is propaganda for Japan’s involvement in World War II and features Momotaro, the Peach Boy of Japanese folklore, leading a navy of cute, anthropomorphic dogs, rabbits, monkeys, and birds in an attack on “Demon Island”. Demon Island is, of course, an obvious stand in for Hawaii, so much so that I’m almost not sure why they didn’t just straight out call it “Hawaii” outside of wanting to mimic as many elements of the original myth as they could. As propaganda goes its...really weird. The first third or so of the short is made up of the animals preparing for the attack, and by “preparing” I mean “engaging in silly animal hi-jinks,” such as a section where a dog struggles to tie his Rising Sun headband onto his head without it slipping off his ears and a monkey makes fun of him for it. These antics continue into the battle itself and the effect is bizarre, with monkeys running around lighting airplanes on fire and riding torpedoes like horses so that they’ll hit the battleship they’re aiming for. The attack on the stand-in United States even extends to its own animated creations, as the most prominent American sailor featured in the attack is very obviously based on Bluto from Popeye, no doubt picked because his size and general temperament make him the most oni-esque of American cartoon characters and thus the perfect dimwitted foe for the Momotaro navy. Overall, it’s a very surreal experience, made stranger by the quality of the animation itself.
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| I don't think I care for Momotaro's design in this, he's a little to...realistic(?) looking among all the cartoon animals. |
While this was the longest animated film made in Japan at that time and a lot of effort and energy clearly went into it, the animation itself is something of a mixed bag. Some parts look fine, but others seem shockingly amateurish, with characters warping and failing to stay completely on model, frequently within the same shots. None of it looks especially deliberate and suggests that these sections were done by a less skilled animator and that whoever was supervising the movie didn’t feel the need to clean any of it up. Notably, this is the only short on the DVD that has more than one animator credited with working on it and it really shows in this instance. The whole effect reminds me of things like “Story from North America” and similar deliberately crude-looking animated shorts one finds on YouTube, rather than something that had the official backing of the Japanese Ministry of the Navy. It’s certainly an interesting historical piece, especially since Japan’s first feature length animated movie was more or less a sequel to this short made by much of the same staff, but it’s also more of a chore to watch than any of the other shorts featured here and doesn't feel nearly as polished or cared for.
Having said that, I would recommend tracking this DVD down. It's a fascinating piece of animation history and most of the shorts are legitimately entertaining in their own right. Even “Momotaro's Sea Eagle” is worth watching at least once just to see what a weird piece of cinema it is. The DVD is readily available from Zakka Films website and is worth exploring if the history of anime or early cinema in general interests you. It comes with a nice informational booklet that gives background on the early years of anime and gives historical context and trivia about each of the shorts. It even comes with a small photo gallery on the DVD that shows contemporary ads for “Momotaro's Sea Eagle”, including one that literally features Momotaro bombing American cartoon stars and what appears to be a caricature of FDR, which is just something isn’t it.
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| Wild |
If you want to watch more early anime and don’t want to track down either of those box sets I mentioned earlier, you’re in luck! In 2017, the National Film Archive of Japan set up the Japanese Animated Film Classics website, where they host a large number of early anime from the 1910s-1940s, many subtitled in English (assuming they need subtitles) and all with historical notes on the films and their creators. It’s a valuable resource and I highly recommend checking it out.
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