On One Edge of Anime: Hakujaden
Oct. 9th, 2020 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerEvery so often I run across comments chiding “making a big deal of entertainment consumed,” and the latest one of them was just in time to have me supposing “watching particular bits of anime from a range of different decades in the space of three months” had been a bit of a stunt. Not about to dismiss the whole thing, though, I could at least tell myself I’d found some enjoyment in the oldest works I’d seen. Along with that, however, I’d already laid plans to stop by one more decade. The earliest feature-length, full-colour animated features made in Japan were from the end of the 1950s, and I had access to the first of them, Hakujaden. It’s no more “the beginning of animation in Japan” than Mighty Atom. (Nor is Momotaro: Sacred Sailors, the black-and-white feature screened just months before the end of World War II and now officially available over here if with a certain amount of “now here’s a foreign curiosity for you” rhetoric and reactions; I have to admit, though, to some reluctance to watch it whether by itself or even contrasted to Hollywood animation from the war; it would feel that much more like another empty boast.) Knowing Hakujaden had been made five years before the much more limited animation of the black-and-white TV series with its Osamu Tezuka character designs and having seen some stills from it, however, I suppose my curiosity about the movie included the thought it would “look distinct from anime as it developed,” even if I fear trying to explain that might look indelicate in brief but ramble at length.
So far as “looking different” went, the first minutes of the movie looked to have been made with dissolves between something like cutouts, telling the story of a boy in folktale China being forced to abandon a white serpent. It then moved to full animation as the white serpent changed into a young woman and started trying things over again. As the tale unfolded I kept supposing the male character designs ranged from “at once bland yet distinct” to “cartoony-to-grotesque” (including a meddling monk the closest the story came to an antagonist) and noting a good many animals just a bit different in design from “Disney-esque” (and remembered how the movie was imported into America just a few years after it was made with the name “Panda and the Magic Serpent”), with the word kawaii once used to describe a few of them, a word that would become very familiar in anime. While the two main female character designs weren’t that close to anime-as-we-know-it either, though, I did get to thinking they were both interesting in their own ways (although the second of them had me thinking a bit of Lucy van Pelt, if much more through “colour and general design” than “personality.”)
Something about the movie’s structure did have me thinking I’m not as familiar with the classical Disney animated features as some, understanding Toei had built up an animation studio, working from previous foundations, to compete with imports from America. At the same time, there was enough ambiguity about just who was “good” and “bad” among the characters to make the story feel a bit more than “kids’ stuff.” In the end, watching this particular movie and this particular preserved moment from the development of animation in Japan seemed to offer a bit more than “saying I’d done it.”
So far as “looking different” went, the first minutes of the movie looked to have been made with dissolves between something like cutouts, telling the story of a boy in folktale China being forced to abandon a white serpent. It then moved to full animation as the white serpent changed into a young woman and started trying things over again. As the tale unfolded I kept supposing the male character designs ranged from “at once bland yet distinct” to “cartoony-to-grotesque” (including a meddling monk the closest the story came to an antagonist) and noting a good many animals just a bit different in design from “Disney-esque” (and remembered how the movie was imported into America just a few years after it was made with the name “Panda and the Magic Serpent”), with the word kawaii once used to describe a few of them, a word that would become very familiar in anime. While the two main female character designs weren’t that close to anime-as-we-know-it either, though, I did get to thinking they were both interesting in their own ways (although the second of them had me thinking a bit of Lucy van Pelt, if much more through “colour and general design” than “personality.”)
Something about the movie’s structure did have me thinking I’m not as familiar with the classical Disney animated features as some, understanding Toei had built up an animation studio, working from previous foundations, to compete with imports from America. At the same time, there was enough ambiguity about just who was “good” and “bad” among the characters to make the story feel a bit more than “kids’ stuff.” In the end, watching this particular movie and this particular preserved moment from the development of animation in Japan seemed to offer a bit more than “saying I’d done it.”