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Up to an Edge of Anime
Not quite two years ago, as I wrote up another “quarterly review” of anime watched I mentioned how I’d managed in the space of three months to see at least a bit of anime made in each of the decades from the 1960s to the current day. The next year, I just happened to be able to stop by those decades again and then add one more to them, if only by calendar digits. Three months later, I topped myself again by contriving to watch the first full colour feature-length animated film made in Japan at the end of the 1950s.
However, even if I’ve noticed enough muttering about “other fans who won’t watch anything but the newest anime when these classics are better in every way that counts” to think ranging through time the way I manage is a little unusual, I’ve also seen a certain number of warnings “not to let something so narrow and trivial as your light entertainment tastes define you,” and I kept pushing back uneasy thoughts my whirlwind tours were just tiny almost-boasts. With Hakujaden watched I did suppose I was about finished anyway; to go further back again seemed to mean getting to “World War II and its lead-up,” and my first thought there was of a black-and-white feature-length animated film potential “propaganda strangeness” just seemed spread out over too great a length to interest me, and a society drifting into something it might take more care than I can muster to further describe without raising its own trouble.
Then, though, I did pick up on some pieces of animation from Japan as far back at the late 1920s. “Almost a century” was something, but even as I started toying with new thoughts I discovered I wouldn’t have to make do with that particular qualifier. A panel from a “streaming convention” pointed me to bits of animation that had survived the 1923 Tokyo earthquake and fire all the way to the point of official online availability. Encompassing “more than a century” would top myself once and for all, although I then happened to think I could also get around to some short American animations of comparable vintage too.
I started off with the fifty-frame strip of film of a boy in a sailor suit writing the kanji for “moving picture” that might be from the first decade of the twentieth century but also might not and a short clearly dated to 1917 with a caricatured foolish samurai (with a more traditional tonsure than the stylish ’dos of today’s anime swordsmen), counterprogramming the French Fantasmagorie and Winsor McCay’s Sinking of the Lusitania afterwards. From the 1920s I settled on some shorts retelling traditional Japanese folklore or presenting fables also familiar over here in Japanese styles, although I have to admit multi-minute animation totally without sound was already getting a bit tough to watch. I do know Japanese silent films could have not just live musical accompaniment but also a benshi narrator reading the intertitles and improvising character voices. The Koko the Clown shorts I’d found were a bit more interesting for having music added, although one talked up in Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic happened to have a lot of extra material in between the moments that had been most worth describing.
There still wasn’t a lot of sound in the Japanese animation from the 1930s with sound, although in spot-checking one short whose synchronized record had vanished long ago I wondered about its human girl characters looking stylized enough in long shots to allow wild claims of “that might be a first step to what you’d call ‘anime character designs.’” I also just happened to take in a rather early animated baseball game (with anthropomorphic animal players) and accepted pointers to several abstract animations from Shigeji Ogino, including one flickering between red and green frames to provide a bit of colour. With that seen, I decided to add Oskar Fischinger’s experimental short for MGM, An Optical Poem, to the first two-reel colour Popeye special.
With that, it was into the 1940s. Emphasizing that as if to expect ominous clouds is, of course, a (North) American fallacy with Japan having spent most of the previous decade invading China. Still, an animated short called Arichan the Ant, character designs reminiscent of my impressions of American cartoons from a decade earlier, had me thinking propaganda hadn’t all but taken over. With that seen, though, I was ready to think that even if an hour-plus of “funny animals bringing (Japanese) civilization to Southeast Asia” would be too much, under an hour of “funny animals attacking what’s instantly recognizable as Pearl Harbor and Battleship Row” wouldn’t, and watched Momotaro’s Sea Eagles. It still felt a bit stretched out, but that didn’t overwhelm the certain outrageousness to it (although part of that just might have been a full measure of “this is a cartoon for kids; nobody ever dies in a cartoon.”) Now, I could mention the controversial content of certain American cartoons from the war I’ve heard about if not seen. I had three altogether different American shorts in mind to see, though, watching a black-and-white Looney Tunes (with a quick allusion to rationing), the “Sport Goofy” hockey game (with fragments of Victory Through Air Power added from the company vault to make the final brawl that much more overwhelming), and a Tom and Jerry cartoon (which was at least made after the war).
Things did change in the 1950s. I’d managed to happen on a Japanese short from the beginning of the decade recognizable as a knock-off of the Fleischer brothers’ feature-length Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Clements’s Anime: A History had pointed out that movie had made it over to Japan just a few years before), but with a definite message about proper industrial policy and overseas trade restoring prosperity. Skipping ahead to the end of the decade, I stepped into familiar territory at last watching Shonen Sarutobi Sasuke, the second colour feature-length animated film made in Japan and the first to be imported into the United States for localization, if not by long. Where Hakujaden had been set in China as something as an effort at reconciliation, this movie was set in Japan with its title character developing fantastical ninja skills. Perhaps that, too, might have made it seem a bit more of “another step towards anime as most would see it.” The animation was quite elaborate, although its human character designs still raise the possible risk of sticky claims “they look more ‘Asian’ than anime character designs from a decade later were passed off as in localization.” (The numerous animals don’t have quite that same sense to them, distinct from Hakujaden’s animals.) Along the way, though, I did get to contemplating how the mother of a young fawn is devoured by an underwater monster and a wicked witch shows up, which could allow for several resemblances to American animated features to be claimed. To go along with this I returned to two titles off my DVD set of UPA shorts, which I haven’t seen for a while.
After watching all of this theatrical animation I’ve been tempted to continue into subsequent decades sticking with anime movies. There are some ten-year stretches where my sources get thinner, but I do have ideas in mind. However, I’m facing the thought of having to turn from American animated shorts to the patriotic option of the National Film Board of Canada. That relocation, though, can remind me there’s a whole world of animation out there too, which just brings me back to cautions about making too big a deal of what I’ve been managing.
However, even if I’ve noticed enough muttering about “other fans who won’t watch anything but the newest anime when these classics are better in every way that counts” to think ranging through time the way I manage is a little unusual, I’ve also seen a certain number of warnings “not to let something so narrow and trivial as your light entertainment tastes define you,” and I kept pushing back uneasy thoughts my whirlwind tours were just tiny almost-boasts. With Hakujaden watched I did suppose I was about finished anyway; to go further back again seemed to mean getting to “World War II and its lead-up,” and my first thought there was of a black-and-white feature-length animated film potential “propaganda strangeness” just seemed spread out over too great a length to interest me, and a society drifting into something it might take more care than I can muster to further describe without raising its own trouble.
Then, though, I did pick up on some pieces of animation from Japan as far back at the late 1920s. “Almost a century” was something, but even as I started toying with new thoughts I discovered I wouldn’t have to make do with that particular qualifier. A panel from a “streaming convention” pointed me to bits of animation that had survived the 1923 Tokyo earthquake and fire all the way to the point of official online availability. Encompassing “more than a century” would top myself once and for all, although I then happened to think I could also get around to some short American animations of comparable vintage too.
I started off with the fifty-frame strip of film of a boy in a sailor suit writing the kanji for “moving picture” that might be from the first decade of the twentieth century but also might not and a short clearly dated to 1917 with a caricatured foolish samurai (with a more traditional tonsure than the stylish ’dos of today’s anime swordsmen), counterprogramming the French Fantasmagorie and Winsor McCay’s Sinking of the Lusitania afterwards. From the 1920s I settled on some shorts retelling traditional Japanese folklore or presenting fables also familiar over here in Japanese styles, although I have to admit multi-minute animation totally without sound was already getting a bit tough to watch. I do know Japanese silent films could have not just live musical accompaniment but also a benshi narrator reading the intertitles and improvising character voices. The Koko the Clown shorts I’d found were a bit more interesting for having music added, although one talked up in Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic happened to have a lot of extra material in between the moments that had been most worth describing.
There still wasn’t a lot of sound in the Japanese animation from the 1930s with sound, although in spot-checking one short whose synchronized record had vanished long ago I wondered about its human girl characters looking stylized enough in long shots to allow wild claims of “that might be a first step to what you’d call ‘anime character designs.’” I also just happened to take in a rather early animated baseball game (with anthropomorphic animal players) and accepted pointers to several abstract animations from Shigeji Ogino, including one flickering between red and green frames to provide a bit of colour. With that seen, I decided to add Oskar Fischinger’s experimental short for MGM, An Optical Poem, to the first two-reel colour Popeye special.
With that, it was into the 1940s. Emphasizing that as if to expect ominous clouds is, of course, a (North) American fallacy with Japan having spent most of the previous decade invading China. Still, an animated short called Arichan the Ant, character designs reminiscent of my impressions of American cartoons from a decade earlier, had me thinking propaganda hadn’t all but taken over. With that seen, though, I was ready to think that even if an hour-plus of “funny animals bringing (Japanese) civilization to Southeast Asia” would be too much, under an hour of “funny animals attacking what’s instantly recognizable as Pearl Harbor and Battleship Row” wouldn’t, and watched Momotaro’s Sea Eagles. It still felt a bit stretched out, but that didn’t overwhelm the certain outrageousness to it (although part of that just might have been a full measure of “this is a cartoon for kids; nobody ever dies in a cartoon.”) Now, I could mention the controversial content of certain American cartoons from the war I’ve heard about if not seen. I had three altogether different American shorts in mind to see, though, watching a black-and-white Looney Tunes (with a quick allusion to rationing), the “Sport Goofy” hockey game (with fragments of Victory Through Air Power added from the company vault to make the final brawl that much more overwhelming), and a Tom and Jerry cartoon (which was at least made after the war).
Things did change in the 1950s. I’d managed to happen on a Japanese short from the beginning of the decade recognizable as a knock-off of the Fleischer brothers’ feature-length Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Clements’s Anime: A History had pointed out that movie had made it over to Japan just a few years before), but with a definite message about proper industrial policy and overseas trade restoring prosperity. Skipping ahead to the end of the decade, I stepped into familiar territory at last watching Shonen Sarutobi Sasuke, the second colour feature-length animated film made in Japan and the first to be imported into the United States for localization, if not by long. Where Hakujaden had been set in China as something as an effort at reconciliation, this movie was set in Japan with its title character developing fantastical ninja skills. Perhaps that, too, might have made it seem a bit more of “another step towards anime as most would see it.” The animation was quite elaborate, although its human character designs still raise the possible risk of sticky claims “they look more ‘Asian’ than anime character designs from a decade later were passed off as in localization.” (The numerous animals don’t have quite that same sense to them, distinct from Hakujaden’s animals.) Along the way, though, I did get to contemplating how the mother of a young fawn is devoured by an underwater monster and a wicked witch shows up, which could allow for several resemblances to American animated features to be claimed. To go along with this I returned to two titles off my DVD set of UPA shorts, which I haven’t seen for a while.
After watching all of this theatrical animation I’ve been tempted to continue into subsequent decades sticking with anime movies. There are some ten-year stretches where my sources get thinner, but I do have ideas in mind. However, I’m facing the thought of having to turn from American animated shorts to the patriotic option of the National Film Board of Canada. That relocation, though, can remind me there’s a whole world of animation out there too, which just brings me back to cautions about making too big a deal of what I’ve been managing.