I’m a completionist, and I’ve been interested in anime since before I knew what it was. So I’m going to watch it all – every subtitled Japanese animation that I can stream in the UK, in release order. I’m Douglas Howell, and this is DOUGLAS WATCHES EVERY ANIME.
AU DÉBUT: Emile Reynaud
But if I’m going to do this properly, I have to start at the beginning. And the beginning of animation didn’t happen in Japan; it happened in France. The first thing that can reasonably be called a “cartoon” that survives to the present day is Emile REYNAUD’s “Pauvre Pierrot” / “Poor Peter” (1891). The story is simple enough – Pierrot, France’s archetypal sad clown, loses in love to his rival Harlequin. The restored footage is only four minutes long, but Reynaud hand-cranked the film to stretch it out to fifteen, in a way that reminded me of a DJ, mixing and scratching vinyl records. Apparently Reynaud’s techniques were just as hard on the filmstock as that is on the vinyl.
He made eight animations in total, shown to paying customers at his Théâtre Optique / Optical Theatre in Paris’ Musée Grévin from 1892. I’ve watched the four minute version, and all things considered, it’s quite entertaining. I can see why “over half a million people” thought it was worth their time and money. But by 1895, the Lumiere Brothers had worked out how to make live action films. The Théâtre Optique closed in March 1900. Reynaud burned most of his work and threw the rest in the River Seine, so we’re lucky to have what we do.
I’m also lucky to have access to the research done by Dr. Freddy LITTEN. He’s a German historian, who’s spent much of his time in recent years, delving into pre-war anime. Much of the factual information here derives from his work, “Animated Film in Japan until 1919: Western Animation and the Beginnings of Anime.” He’s been kind enough to provide the text for free, and you can find that here.
SHEER LUCK: Katsudo Shashin
So, when does that history start? Well, we are indebted to the luck of MATSUMOTO Natsuki.1 He’s a lecturer on visual culture, and in 2005 he bought a collection of visual media from a dealer in Kyoto. Part of the package was a kinematograph, an early projector, imported from Germany, probably via the British toymaker Bassett-Lowke. There were eleven 35-mm film strips with the projector; four of them were animated, but only three were imported.
The last one is called “Katsudō Shashin” or “the Matsumoto fragment”. There’s no title or attribution on it, though. The former name comes from the subject matter; it’s a three second loop of film, showing a boy in a red cap, writing words on a wall. Those words are “katsu dō sha shin”, or “moving picture”, which is what we called films in those days. Litten argues that, based on other evidence, this was produced between 1907 and 1912, and it was made by whoever sold that projector.
That said, the evidence for longer cartoons made in Japan before 1917 is nil. There was demand for imported cartoons, which is fairly ironic in the circumstances; at least ten shorts imported from Britain, America and France were being shown in Japanese cinemas in May of 1917. How all this equipment and filmstock got to Japan, given the ongoing Great War, is beyond the scope of this review.
THREE STUDIOS
By 1912 there were four major live-action film companies in Japan. Each one produced and distributed their own work, and imported foreign films to show in their own cinemas. In an effort to streamline proceedings, UMEYA Shokichi, the owner of one of the four, managed to buy out the other three to form Nippon Katsudo Shashin KK (Japanese Film Corporation), or Nikkatsu.
I’ve noticed that anime studios tend to break apart and reform like amoeba, and it turns out that they always have. A high-ranking employee of Nikkatsu, one KOBAYASHI Kusaburo, decided that he could do a better job himself. In 1914, he quit his job to start Tennenshoku Katsudo Shashin KK (Natural Colour Film Corporation), or Tenkatsu. Thank heavens for the Japanese love of brevity.
But this new independence doesn’t seem to have been enough for Kobayashi. In under two years, he quit the company he’d founded to create Kobayashi Shokai (Kobayashi Company), and took nearly half of Tenkatsu’s associated cinemas with him. To say this divorce was nasty would miss the opportunity to use the word “bitter”, although things seemed to have calmed down by the middle of 1917.
So, there were three dominant Japanese film studios at the start of 1917. There were exactly zero frames of animation. In order to change that, each company needed a lead director. There would be three pillars of this first phase of Japanese animation. Who would be the first creators, and what would be the First Anime, to emerge?
KITAYAMA – The First Otaku?
KITAYAMA Seitaro was an artist who organised exhibitions in Osaka, and wrote for various publications which span out of those. But after one of his art journals folded in 1916, he had some time on his hands. In what would become a time-honoured tradition, he ended up in the cinema, watching a new kind of film; Western animation. He was sufficiently obsessed that he started hunting new work down at every opportunity. I think that might make him the world’s first Otaku. Seeing a gap in the market for home-grown animation, Nikkatsu hired him as their animation director. But there was a legal problem to overcome.
Back in 1911, confronted with a brand new medium of entertainment, the Japanese government decided to take action. They passed a new censorship law; the “Regulations for Inspection of Magic Lantern and Moving Picture Shows” forbade, among other things, “anything that would promote mischief among children”2. Jonathan CLEMENTS argues in his indispensable “Anime: A History” that this “must have seemed crippling to early animators”.3 It’s hard to disagree.
So Kitayama’s boss at Nikkatsu, MAKINO Shōzō, decided that if you couldn’t beat them, you should join them. So he arranged a contract with the Ministry of Communications for a series of cartoons,4 beginning with “Itazura no Post” / “
Mischievous Post” (Nikkatsu, 1917). In what will become a painful tradition for this blog, I have to tell you that the film is lost. Kitayama would go on to make a total of 22 films with the studio. But “Mischievous Post” was the start of a long association between an animation industry desperate for funds, and various branches of the Japanese government.
Kitayama Eiga Seisakujo – The First Studio
By the middle of 1918, Kitayama had fallen out with Nikkatsu. Perhaps that was because Makino was considering leaving the company to make films independently, as he would in 1919. Perhaps it was because of Kitayama’s divorce, following the discovery of his mistress and their three children. Perhaps it was because the War ended and there were more opportunities that Kitayama wanted to take up.
Japanese culture is rather small-c conservative at the best of times. So personally, I lean towards the whole mistress and kids thing. Regardless, in 1921 he founded Kitayama Eiga Seisakujo / Kitayama Movie Productions. Most importantly, he was able to bring YAMAMOTO Sanae on board, whose work will feature heavily in this blog’s future.
I completely agree with Clements’ definition of Kitayama Eiga Seisakujo as the “first Japanese animation studio” 5. I don’t think it’s an anime studio, not yet. But the anime production tradition of “nick all the best staff and set up your own business” clearly has very deep roots. Sadly, for reasons which will soon become obvious, Kitayama left his Tokyo studio behind, and quit animation for good.
SHIMOKAWA – An Awful Mistranslation
The next pillar was SHIMOKAWA Sadanori. He was a student of mangaka – cartoonist, if you like – KITAZAWA Rakuten. He created manga stories in Kitazawa’s magazines, “Tokyo Puck” and “Rakuten Puck”. Most of them starred lovable loser Imokawa Mukuso, and his dog, Bull. His manga work was good enough for Tenkatsu to hire him as their main animator. Shimokawa was able to make several films for Tenkatsu. Litten says it was five, and Clements says it was seven, and Imokawa was in most of them.
Unfortunately, that also marked the end of his career in animation. In 1916, Scientific American published an article about “Animated Cartoons In The Making”, and it was translated into Japanese by a magazine called “Katsudo gaho” (Film Illustrated). Tragically, the magazine mistranslated a key term when describing animation equipment. So instead of using a semi-opaque, ground glass easel lamp, Shimokawa followed the magazine’s instructions exactly. He spent six months working with a clear glass lamp, with no protection for his eyes.
Shimokawa lost the vision in his right eye completely, probably as a result of that lamp. A combination of that, and other ill health, cost him his job with Tenkatsu. I’m only guessing, but words like “depression” and “mental health” crossed my mind while writing this. Shimokawa quit the industry and returned to drawing manga and political caricatures for various newspapers. He passed away in 1973, largely forgotten. It’s doubly tragic that his career was so short and unregarded, in the circumstances.
KŌUCHI – First To Be Banned?
The last of the trio is obscure even by the standards of the period. KŌUCHI Jun’ichi was a watercolour painter who lived in Tokyo, and by 1908 he had joined Shimokawa as a student writing manga for Rakuten’s “Tokyo Puck”. After Rakuten left the magazine in 1912, Kōuchi quit too, and spent the next few years drawing political caricatures for a newspaper. But his fortunes changed in February 1917.
Kobayashi Shokai hired Kōuchi to animate a version of “Ushiwaka to Benkei”, the story of how two semi-mythical Japanese warrior heroes first met. That… is not what got made. Instead, Kōuchi produced three short films under the Kobayashi brand. They’re all interesting in their own ways. In the summer of 1917, “The Kappa Festival” came out, presumably at the right time to match the real-life summer festival in Tokyo. But there are no records of exactly when.
Kōuchi’s “Playful Boy’s Airgun”, from August 1917, might have been the first anime to be banned. It depends on who you ask: Litten says there’s no evidence, and Jonathan Clements and Helen MCCARTHY, in their frankly essential “Anime Encyclopedia”, claim that it was banned without providing any evidence6. I think the jury must remain out on the matter. As for the work he actually made first – I’ll come around to that shortly.
The Future – Kōuchi & Ofuji
While Litten says that Kōuchi’s “films during the 1920s do not seem to have been noticed much – or were not associated with animation by the general public.”7, he did continue to work in animation until 1930. That means I’ll be looking at a bit more of his work in the next few weeks. That said, his biggest influence on what was to come wasn’t tangible. It isn’t clear exactly when, but we know that OFUJI Noburo studied under Kōuchi at some point, and that is a name you’ll be seeing in my reviews for a long time to come.
What you haven’t seen so far is any definitive statement about which studio and director actually made the first “anime”. That’s partly because it was a hotly debated topic in animation studies. Springing out of Dr Litten’s work, a team of researchers funded by The Association of Japanese Animations, a trade association comprising all the biggest names in anime production today, were able to settle the matter to their own satisfaction.
FIRST ANIME?
So who did they land on? Shimokawa Sadanori was their pick. His cartoon, “Imosuke inoshishigari no maki” / “Imosuke Hunting A Wild Boar” (Tenkatsu, January 1917), was the first. Shimokawa and Tenkatsu released seven completed animations in 1917. Not a single frame of them have survived to the present day.
Kitayama Seitaro was next over the line; “Saru to kani no gassen” / “The Battle Of Monkey And Crab” / (Nikkatsu, May 1917). It’s based on a Japanese fairy tale, but it came out to mixed reviews, even at the time. While we know that Kitayama kept making animation until 1923, none of his work has made it to the 21st century either. This is not a coincidence.
Finally, Kōuchi Jun’ichi’s first work made its premiere that summer: “Namakuragatana” / “The Dull Sword” (Kobayashi Shokai, June 1917). And I’m going to talk about “The Dull Sword” at relative length, because this is the oldest surviving Japanese animation8. HONCHI Akihiko, a film history researcher, was able to find additional footage of this one in 2017, so we now have as full a version as we’re likely to get.
“The Dull Sword”
Our protagonist is the frankly dim ronin – or wandering samurai – Flatnose, whose sword has dulled. He pays for a new one and decides to test it, in the traditional manner, by killing someone random and helpless with it. He utterly fails twice, and the second person he tries to kill bends his sword into uselessness.
It’s too simple to be funny, but I imagine that at the time, and if I could hear the benshi or narrator telling us what the characters are saying – and that text has been lost – I would be enjoying myself. I nearly missed a joke, too; Kōuchi is using his skills as a caricaturist. Flatnose was based on ONOE Matsunosuke, one of Tenkatsu’s biggest live-action stars. That’s the kind of petty stab I’m certain Kobayashi could easily have asked for.
It’s also a jidaegeki, a “period drama”, set before the Meiji Restoration which centralised power in Japan under the rule of a single emperor and bureaucracy. Flatnose is inept, but he’s clearly a samurai of some kind. This genre had been clearly defined by 1917, through stageplays and early live-action films. So an animated satire like “The Dull Sword” could work.
Technique and Technology
The key breakthrough that Kōuchi makes here, as Dr Litten points out, is the choice to use cutout animation; instead of just drawing everything frame by frame, he used hand-drawn backgrounds combined with carefully cut paper for anything that moved. According to an interview Kōuchi gave in 1930, he needed as many as a hundred pieces, just for one character’s hands9. This technique would become the industry standard in Japan for nearly 20 years.
Even at the time, this film was seen as a huge step forward compared to its peers, partly due to the animation quality, and partly because they had picked an unmistakably Japanese story. Everyone, even the other artists I’ve talked about here, agree that this was something new and special.
But it ultimately didn’t go anywhere. Part of that was because the techniques being used by all three studios were labour-intensive and expensive. The most damning conclusion in Litten’s entire paper is a simple one; all three artists “had equally failed in putting Japanese animation production on a solid basis.”10 In that same interview with Kōuchi in 1930, he claimed that his studio was producing 50 feet of film a day. To be profitable, the studios needed a hundred. Thirteen years earlier, with less experience and inferior technology, it would have been impossible. They couldn’t get there from here.
An Apology
I’ve cheated for the sake of clickbait. I apologise. It was remarkably easy to frame the various artists and studios involved as being in competition to get the first “anime” out. A century and more later, it’s hard not to think that First was all that counted. Dr Litten believes that there was no race, and that it was only after Shimokawa and Tenkatsu had proved that home-grown animation was even possible, that the other studios and creators realised they could turn their hands to it.
THE BUBBLE BURSTS: DISASTER
There are two reasons I’m not going into details about any other films from the period. The first is that, as soon as it dawned on them that it was impossible to turn a profit from animation, the studios pulled the plug. Only Kitayama and Nikkatsu seem to have bothered after the 1917 bubble burst, and they stopped distributing to theatres in the following year. Even Kitayama’s spin-off studio didn’t try and go back to commercial cinema shorts. The second is the tragedy.
All three studios were based in Tokyo, and naturally, that’s where much of their work was stored. In 1923, a 8.3 magnitude earthquake hit Japan. What’s now called the Great Kanto Earthquake killed 105,000 people and left nearly 2 million homeless across the Kanto region, which includes the port city of Yokohama and Tokyo itself. It’s possible there were no copies of the 1917 cartoons intact by then anyway, but being caught in a natural disaster can’t have helped.
Between the bubble, the earthquake, and the perishable nature of the silver nitrate filmstock that was universally used at the time, only four pieces of Japanese animation from before 1924 are known to survive: that first film-strip, “Katsudo Shashin”, “The Dull Sword”, an unattributed fragment of a fairy-tale called “Urashima Taro”, and an advert for soap from 1921. Following the quake, Kitayama folded his studio and relocated to Kyoto. He seems to have quit animation altogether in favour of live-action work. Kitayama Seitaro passed away in 1945, from a brain tumour.
Two Companies Fall
I’ve talked about the fates of the creators; now it’s time for the companies, who didn’t fare much better. Kobayashi Shokai managed to get Kōuchi’s three films out before Kobayashi’s dodgy business dealings forced his company into bankruptcy.
Universal Studios bought Kobayashi Shokai out in 1917. Kobayashi somehow managed to buy the Japanese rights to D. W. GRIFFITHS’ three and a half hour silent film, “Intolerance”, and got cinemas to charge ten times the normal ticket price to get in. That money allowed him to found the Kokukatsu studio, which bought Tenkatsu out in 1919. But his financial shenanigans continued, and Kobayashi left the studio soon afterwards. Both Kokukatsu and its founder declared bankruptcy in 1925, and he would eventually pass away in 1961.
On the other hand, Nikkatsu would return to the animation business in 1928, and I’ll be discussing that when I get there. But I’ll warn you in advance; in the long run, despite a studio using the name and still making animation today, their fate is arguably the most tragic of the three.
fin
So, the 1923 Kanto earthquake has destroyed almost the entire history of Japanese animation to date. Two of the three biggest names in the business have quit, and the big three Japanese studios can’t make animation pay. This is animation history, not anime, not yet. Most of the next steps would be taken by an new generation of artists, producers and studios.
And that’s who I’ll be talking about next time. I would like to give special thanks to the Japanese Film Archive, without whom I wouldn’t have been able to watch what I have, to Jonathan Clements & Helen McCarthy for their “Anime Encyclopedia” and his “Anime: A History”, and most importantly, to Dr Frederick Litten, whose original paper sent me down a century-deep rabbit hole. His subsequent guidance means that any remaining errors are my own.
Until next week, then; I’ve been Douglas Howell, and I’ve been watching Japanese animation. Peace; out.
- For future reference, I’ll be putting everyone’s family name in BLOCK CAPITALS when I put them on-screen. ↩︎
- Makuro Mamoru, “On the Conditions of Film Censorship in Japan before its Systemization”, in Aron Gerow and Mark Nomes (eds), In Praise Of Film Studies p.54, (Yokohama: Kinema Club), in Jonathan Clements, “Anime: A History”, p. 44. ↩︎
- Jonathan Clements, “Anime: A History”, Second Edition, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), p. 44 ↩︎
- Jonathan Clements, “Anime: A History”, Second Edition, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), p. 49 ↩︎
- Jonathan Clements, “Anime: A History”, Second Edition, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), p. 55 ↩︎
- Jonathan Clements & Helen McCarthy, “The Anime Encyclopedia“, Third Revised Edition, (Stone Bridge Press, 2015), p. 400, epub ↩︎
- Litten, p. 75 ↩︎
- The Dull Sword [the longest, digitally restored version] | Details of the work | Japanese Animated Film Classics ↩︎
- Litten, p.92 ↩︎
- Litten, p. 117 ↩︎
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