Anime 20XX Gaiden 001: “Spider and Tulip”

“Spider and Tulip”

Directed by Kenzo Masaoka

Originally released on April 15, 1943 by Shouchiku Douga Kenkyuusho

Welcome to Anime 20XX Gaiden, where I cover interesting diversions that don’t fit into the structure of Anime 20XX proper.

“Spider and Tulip” has a long history of being released with Momotaro: Sacred Sailors, first appearing with Momotaro on its initial home video releases on VHS in the 1980s. While some of this may be because of their shared staff, as “Spider and Tulip” director Kenzo Masaoka was an animator on Momotaro, an equally likely reason is that both were produced by Shouchiku in the 1940s and their combined length running is a good 90 minutes, the perfect length for an attractive VHS tape purchase. However, it does provide a nice contrast to Momotaro, as we’ll see in a moment, so having the two distributed together is educational as well as entertaining.

But before that, what is the short about? To summarize: a spider tries to trick a ladybug into relaxing in his “hammock” (conveniently made of the webs he uses to catch insects) so he can eat her. The ladybug tries to escape from the spider with the help of the flowers of the meadow, eventually hiding in a tulip. The spider tries to keep the ladybug trapped in the tulip until he can eat her, but is instead blown away by a sudden rainstorm and drowns in a puddle. After having the remaining webbing torn off by a wandering fly, the tulip and the ladybug emerge unharmed, and short ends on a lovely shot of the spider’s rain droplet covered web.

“Spider and Tulip” was made independently from Momotaro, but the two’s long history of being packaged together makes it easy to compare the two and where their differences shine through. For example, “Spider and Tulip” is actually fun to watch! (I’m being mean, but I can say it’s a much better watch than Momotaro with no hesitation) Well, it’s mostly fun to watch. It has one big thing going against it, which is that the spider is clearly derived from the racist depictions of black people that were all too common in American animation during this time period. I’m not sure if this was motivated by any particular ideology or anything - I’ve seen at least one review that suggested the spider was supposed to be a stand in for the terrors of western culture at large - or if it was just used because it was a common visual trope in American cartoons that the animators liked and it’s obvious racist origins didn’t really matter to them. It’s a shame, because the short is really well done otherwise. It moves along at a good brisk pace and the animation itself is stellar. All the characters have their own distinct personality that shines through in how they are animated, especially the spider. You can tell the animators had a lot of fun playing around with all his limbs and making sure they always have something to do in each shot. 

The music is also a highlight of the short, as a chunk of it is told through songs the ladybug and the spiders sing to each other/the audience. They’re short, but well performed (racist stereotyping endemic to the spider aside) and invoke the kind of musical scenes you’d see in music based Fleischer Studio cartoon short (and avoid that strange, out-of-place feeling you get from watching and hearing the songs that Momotaro has). Its short length also works in its favor, it moves at a good steady clip and never has an opportunity to get too slow and overstay its welcome (another advantage it has over Momotaro). While it's unfortunate choice in character design does ultimately hold it back, it’s a really solid effort otherwise. Check it out if you like 1940s animation and similar throwbacks.

“Spider and Tulip” is available on the Momotaro: Sacred Sailors Blu-ray/DVD combo pack from Funimation/Crunchyroll. It can be purchased on Right Stuf and other fine home video retailers.

NEXT TIME ON ANIME 20XX GAIDEN: NO IDEA, I’M JUST DOING THESE AS THEY COME TO ME

TUNE IN, SAME 20XX TIME, SAME 20XX CHANNEL

Anime 20XX 001 Momotaro: Sacred Sailors

Momotaro: Sacred Sailors

Directed by Mitsuyo Seo

Originally released on April 12, 1945 by Shouchiku Douga Kenkyuusho

In 1944, the Japanese Naval Ministry, presumably happy with the success of “Momotaro's Sea Eagles,” rehired Mitsuyo Seo to make a loose sequel to that short, but with one key difference. This time, it would be feature length! 74 whole minutes of animation about the glory of Japan and the righteousness of their cause! Completed in 1944 and released in the spring of 1945, it was the first feature length piece of animation made in Japan, a true milestone in the history of anime and world animation in general. Like its predecessor, it uses characters from the Momotaro folktale to show the strength of the Japanese military, but also extends to showing the humanity of the soldiers who are in the fight. The film opens on a quartet of funny animal sailors, coming home to see their families after completing their military training. They catch up with their loved ones, impress their younger siblings with all the tactics and information they’ve learned, and even team up to stop the monkey sailor’s younger sibling from drowning in the river. But the good times can’t last forever, as the sailors are called away to an island in the pacific to plan and participate in a raid on Sulawesi, an island near Indonesia that has been taken over by The British a bunch of oni that look exactly like white men with horns and who all have British accents. After sending scouts to map out the island (and losing one of their pilots in the process), General Momotaro leads his funny animal soldiers on an attack that leaves The British the oni decimated and cowering until they agree to an unconditional surrender.

And how is this important historical milestone? How does it hold up?

Well, it’s…it’s okay, I guess.

You may recall from my last article that “Momotaro's Sea Eagles,” while the longest piece of animation made in Japan up until this point, was noticeably sloppier and cruder looking than many of the shorter animated efforts that preceded it. For better or for worse, this trend continues into this sequel. It’s not terrible looking, but the quality of the animation is all over the place. Close ups in particular seem to suffer from this, as characters' faces will awkwardly shift around within a shot, a factor not helped by how odd looking some of the character designs are. (Momotaro and the monkeys especially suffer from this, as they’re all given prominent lips and teeth that end up being really distracting, in no small part because they sometimes resemble the rejected Sonic model from 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog movie). Admittedly, this can be forgiven given the circumstances that the movie was made under. In addition to its length, the film was made during a period where even the basic materials to make an animated film were scarce. There are even stories of director Seo washing off the cels of already shot scenes so that they could be reused, as that was significantly easier than getting new cels for whatever remained to be animated. I can imagine this didn’t leave a lot or room for corrections or general fussiness with how exactly the final product looked. And it is not as though the movie looks amateurish for its entire runtime. Much of the movie looks perfectly fine and is even beautiful in some parts. There’s several shots of dandelion seeds gently drifting through the air that look absolutely spectacular, even if they are soundtracked by the sounds of soldiers parachuting out of planes to attack their enemy.

Despite its wonky animation, if the movie does have a major fault, it’s mostly that it’s a little dull to watch. Unlike “Momotaro's Sea Eagles,” which for all its flaws at least packed a good amount of comedy and action into its 37 minutes, Momotaro: Sacred Sailors is much slower and surprisingly light on action, or even jokes. It feels like the tone it’s going for is more semi-serious drama about men fighting for their country than the nationalist-oriented wacky animal hijinks of the preceding short. The first fifteen minutes alone are dedicated to the quartet of animal sailors mentioned earlier and the actual attack the movie is leading up to doesn’t happen until over an hour into the movie. The attack itself is also barely a sequence, as it only lasts about 5 minutes and is mostly a one-sided trouncing of the oni by Momotaro. Even a random cameo by Popeye at the end can’t help give it any of the charge that was so abundant in “Momotaro's Sea Eagles.”  There is entertainment to be found, especially in the musical numbers and the nicer parts of the animation, but it’s so weirdly sedate it’s hard to say who this was supposed to entertain. It even lacks the surreal tone that “Momotaro’s Sea Eagles” had just because everything is so po-faced and serious. And even that doesn’t land all that well, as seen in a non-subplot where a bird sailor is constantly shown looking at a photo of his children (or maybe younger siblings? It’s not clear) which seems like set-up for him to tragically die on a scouting mission, but nope, he gets out fine. Maybe the animators got confused and killed off the wrong character.

I don’t want to make it sound like this movie fails on all levels though. Even for its faults, it still has some appeal outside of pure historical interest. As noted, some of the animation is quite beautiful and its flaws came across less as a sign of true ineptness and more a side effect of the movie propaganda piece that was cranked out quickly by artists who weren’t used to making anything this long. The music throughout is quite well done and the songs do bring back that surreal mood that made “Momotaro’s Sea Eagles” so fascinating. (Watching a bunch of animals the live on a South Pacific island, but not native to the South Pacific, sing about how happy they are to work for their new Japanese overlords is quite the sight.) The voice acting is also solid, with a special credit to whoever voices the cowardly oni during the surrender scene at the end, who has a very convincing British accent and grasp of English for a film from 1940s Japan (to the point some have speculated this might be an British expat or POW rather than a Japanese actor).

One of the more interesting aspects is how director Mitsuyo Seo’s own politics come through in the movie. While best known for these two propaganda pieces, Seo himself had pretty left leaning politics, to the point that he was briefly arrested and jailed in the 1920s for his involvement with the Proletarian Film League of Japan. His involvement in these much more politically conservative and nationalistic movies seems to be a function of that being the only real work he could get at the time. As a result, he tried to imbue the movies with a sense of optimism for the children they were aimed at, to look forward to the future and not give up on their dreams. This does come through in the movie, even if who was financing it means that it’s bolted to the pro-imperial and pro-war attitudes that the movie was always going to contain. This also ended up being something of a last hurrah for Seo, who’s next movie, an adaptation of of the Emperor’s New Clothes titled Ōsama no Shippo was unceremoniously dropped by it’s distributor, Toho, after it was deemed too leftist. Seo, along with a number of other major animators who worked on the movie, responded by quitting the animation industry and becoming an illustrator for children’s books. As Ōsama no Shippo was never released (and doesn’t seem to have survived in any form as far as my internet searching has found), it’s a shame that his last animated work is a movie that’s both so notable and such a mess for what it is, rather than something he made on his own terms.

All of that said, I am glad that this movie is now so readily available to watch for anyone interested in anime and animation history (even if it’s not anything I’d say you need to go out and see immediately). Frankly, that this movie survived to the present day at all is pretty astonishing, especially since its spring 1945 release meant that it was not widely shown, as there were few running cinemas left in Japan for it to play at. It was also not widely seen where it was showing, as much of Japan’s youth population had been evacuated out of cities or, if old enough, had been sent to work in factories for the war effort. (I would also speculate that an optimistic war propaganda movie was probably not exactly what people wanted to see in Japan in 1945, but that’s just a guess). It was actually presumed to be lost for many years, either destroyed during the war itself or by the occupying American forces after the war, until a copy was found in the 1980s and has been around on home video ever since. Heck, in the US it was put out by Funimation, at the time the longest lasting and biggest of the anime home video distributors. (And still technically are, since the current incarnation of Crunchyroll is mostly Funimation’s corporate structure with Crunchyroll’s branding pasted on top.) Indeed, you can still get this movie on Blu-ray/DVD from Funimation right now. (Only time will tell if the Funi/CR merger will affect this, so maybe snag it soon if it seems like something that would interest you.) It’s a nice package too, coming with a nice thick booklet that includes an essay on the film by anime historian Helen McCarthy and a piece on the film’s history and restoration by Mika Tomita of the National Museum of Modern Art and even comes with an acclaimed early anime short from around the same period called “Tulip and Spider”. If nothing else, it’s definitely the most “Criterion” home video release any anime I’ve bought has gotten, barring maybe a few of the fancier releases by Disctok and GKids/Shout Factory.

Momotaro: Sacred Sailors is available as a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack from Funimation/Crunchyroll. It can be purchased on Right Stuf and other fine home video retailers.

NEXT TIME ON ANIME 20XX: THERE’S A NEW KID IN TOWN AND HIS NAME IS TOEI DOGA.

TUNE IN, SAME 20XX TIME, SAME 20XX CHANNEL