THE ANIMATED LEFT: TANAKA YOSHITSUGU
In 1875, Joseph Hardy NEESIMA, who despite his name order was a Japanese Protestant missionary, returned home to found the country’s first Christian university. By the time 1930 rolled around, Neesima had passed away. But he succeeded. Doshisha University was and is privately run, based on a combination of Christian principles, liberalism and internationalism.
If you’ve been reading my reviews in order, you’ll already know the next verse. These goals were the antithesis of the aims of Japan’s Ministry of Education. As a result, Doshisha’s students found themselves on the front line of an argument about the soul of their country. And that’s where director TANAKA Yoshitsugu comes in. His article on Japanese Wikipedia suffers badly from linkrot, but I think he’d fallen ill while working for troubled live-action studio Imperial Kinema. And he made friends with students at the university film club.
Together with them, working as Doeisha, Tanaka made “Entotsuya Pero” / “Chimney Sweep Pero” (Doeisha, April 1930) using shadow cutouts. According to Under Southern Eyes‘ reviewer nausika, it’s the tale of a man who falls into various tragedies but escapes through the luck given to him by his magic egg. It explores the true terrors of war, which given the direction Japan was heading in at the time, was a brave thing to do. But it didn’t have any English subtitles! By policy: no subtitles, no score.
Ironically, the next time we’ll see Tanaka, he’ll be credited as an animator on a piece of notorious propaganda from 1934. But something tells me his heart won’t be in it.
THE UNKNOWN AND THE LOST
There’s only one more cartoon to look at for these two years, but no-one’s sure who the director involved was. “Issunboushi no Shusse“/ “The Tiny One Makes It Big” (Nakano Mangasha, 1929), is the first animated appearance of Issunboushi, “One-Sun Boy”. A sun is an old Japanese unit of measurement, which was about 3cm or an inch in length, and our Tiny One occupies a similar place in Japanese fairy-tales as Tom Thumb does in the West.
Someone found the 70-odd seconds of this short story which remain. Sorry. While they’re a bit indistinct, our inch-high samurai sails down a river in a rice bowl. He meets a princess, and then gets attacked by an oni who stomps his way right into the camera’s eye. Quite a gruesome fight follows, and once our hero wins, the princess magicks him up to full size. Not enough there to grade, of course, but there’s the sense that this was a great deal of fun. Nakano Mangasha don’t appear to have had any other productions, either.
fin
And that’s it for 1930. I would like to give special thanks to two of this blog’s pillars; AniDB, whose peerless database has helped me work out what to look for, and the Japanese Film Archive who have allowed me to watch at least some of it. In addition this time around, I would also like to thank the Kobe Film Museum.
Italian site animeclick provided the image.
I’ve been Douglas Howell, and I’ve been watching 1920s Japanese animation. Join me next time, as a disaster that’s been on the horizon for quite some time now, finally happens. Peace; out.