Anime 20XX Gaiden 001: “Spider and Tulip”

“Spider and Tulip”

Directed by Kenzo Masaoka, produced by Shōchiku Dōga Kenkyūjo

Originally released on April 15, 1943 by Shôchiku

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, produced by Shōchiku Dōga Kenkyūjo

Originally released on April 12, 1945 by Shōchiku

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

Anime 20XX 000. The Roots of Japanese Anime Until the End of WWII

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 Noburo 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

NEXT TIME ON ANIME 20XX: MORE FOLKLORE-BASED PROPAGANDA.
TUNE IN, SAME 20XX TIME, SAME 20XX CHANNEL

Anime 20XX: An Introduction

A few years ago the digital magazine Paste ran an article about the top 100 anime movies of all time. It’s a solid list, if a little predictable, but it did get some traction for being co-curated by Jason DeMarco, the man who co-created Toonami on Cartoon Network and the guy in charge of selecting all the anime that airs on Toonami and Adult Swim (or at least all the anime he suggests that network thinks will do well). You can find the list here if you're interested in reading it yourself. A few months after that ran, Anime News Network writer and all around great guy Mike Toole wrote a series of articles in response to that past article. Essentially, he noted how lists like “Best anime movies” tend to be easy to predict since almost half of it will inevitably be some combination of films by Ghibli/Hayao Miyazaki, Satoshi Kon, Mamoru Oshii, Mamoru Hosoda, and Makoto Shinkai. After thinking about it and getting an indirect challenge about it on Twitter, Toole decided to see if he could write an alternative top 100 list that didn’t repeat anything from the Paste article, which he did. You can read part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 and I recommend you do, because they’re good lists, like anything Mike Toole writes.

Reading these got me thinking about anime films, specifically that of the 200 movies and OVAs listed in those articles, I hadn’t actually seen all that many of them. Sure, I’d seen a bunch of the obvious ones, but that was still a small minority of both lists and even some of the obvious ones that “everyone” has seen had still managed to slip by me. So I decided to put a little project together that I’m calling “Anime 20XX” where I’ll combine the Paste list and Mike Toole’s list together, arrange them in chronological order, and watch and write about as many as I can until I finish or get too busy to continue doing this. And then it took about 3 years for everything to get off the ground cause I need to see what was in print in the United States and how easy it would be to get some of these movies and suddenly it’s 2020 already. But hey, at least I’m finally starting it. So come back here later today (probably) for the first entry in Anime 20XX, which according to my notes will be about...none of the movies mentioned in either list, but a short overview of some notable early anime shorts that predate the first feature length anime film.

…Yeah, that sounds like something I’d do. See you later today!