The newly started company Zakka Films start their journey by releasing eight of the earliest ever anime shows, one of them being the first ever anime Momotaro’s Sea Eagles (桃太郎の海鷲; momotarou no umiwashi) which really makes me want to add this DVD collection to my already way too filled with necessary and unnecessary stuff and messy room! Whoa, long sentence… Oh yeah, the DVD is called The Roots of Japanese Anime: Until the End of WWII.
An image from Momotaro's Sea Eagles.
With the collection a booklet with early history on Japanese anime that might be interesting to look through. You can get The Roots of Japanese Anime: Until the End of WWII at Film Baby for 34.95 USD, but it seems to be “temporarily out of stock” right now.
Source: Anime News Network
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I like the sequel Momotarō’s Divine Sea Warriors better than Sea Eagles.
http://japansugoi.com/wordpress/japanese-propagada-anime-from-1945/
Just finished watching the first Japanese full-length anime film, a DVD from Earthstation 1, titled “Ocean God Soldier.” A B/W film in which most of the characters are animals, bravely doing their duty in the Japanese army and navy, and depicting the native animals of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” as enthusiastically helping the Japanese invaders, while the Western “colonialists” are depicted as silly cartoon humans or demons. Aside from the wartime propaganda, the film is interesting for a number of elements notable in later japanese anime: careful attention to things like beach waves, flowing streams, wind, sky and clouds, open spaces and natural scenery in general, and at least one scene of eating and drinking. I wonder if all the aerial scenes in this movie were an early inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki’s obvious obsession with flying scenes, and old aircraft in general?
Since the animators were probably classed as “essential civilian workers,” they probably survived the war and were still around 20 and 30 years later… which means they probably were involved in the animated TV serials of the 1950s and 1960s, and could have been teaching younger animators even up to the 1970s and 1980s.
The Disney flavor was apparent in a few spots… like the flying cards when the British fort is invaded… also at least one bit showed an apparent Fleischer schtick, when a speeding truck brakes to a halt and the upper portion bends forward like rubber. The flapping, flexible arms of the surrendering British troops were also reminiscent of early Fleischer stuff. Odd dramatic details such as moving shadows on the ground, “framing” by foreground objects, repeated domestic details like a pet bird hopping around in a cage, etc. might have been picked up from the German filmmakers of the ’20s and ’30s, or might be all local inspiration. One can easily see the obvious traits picked up from the Disney and Fleischer cartoons, but the Japanese animators were already developing their own characteristic anime style.
I guess the jacket blurb by Earthstation 1 is in error– they claim the movie came out in 1942. The Wikipedia entry says it was made in 1944, and released in 1945, when the war was all but over for Japan, although the general populace was unaware of that. One odd note for a war movie (although not surprising in a kiddie movie, I suppose) is that no actual deaths are depicted… one Japanese death is implied (when an observation plane crash-lands all shot up, with dripping fluid and a loose button hanging out through the fuselage), and another scene shows Japanese monkey-soldiers with knives reaching into a British armored car and stabbing someone out of sight, to accompanying “Aaargh” sounds… but no depiction whatever of flying blood, wounds or death, which I suppose was so as not to discourage the kiddies from enlisting. They do show a kitchen scene, but no hospital scenes.
Oddly, they apparently found a native English-speaking actor someplace to play the surrendering British general, with authentic whiny upper-crust accent, while Japanese caption translations appeared to one side of the image. Maybe he was a British prisoner, or a turncoat collaborator.