Sometimes a cartoon, or a part of one, survives without much in the way of background material. Four animations from 1931 have made it to the present day, but their directors or studio names are unknown. But this isn’t Douglas Watches The Anime He Can Be Bothered With, even if I did throw in the towel on that interminable political speech from Goto. So here they are.
“The Candy Man’s Raccoon Dog Dance”
“Manga Ameya Tanuki” / “The Candy Man’s Raccoon Dog Dance” (Jujiya Kogataeiga Division, 1931) is important enough to be on the Japanese Film Archives website, even if the production credit is a problem I couldn’t solve. The cartoon is easy though. This is another record talkie. But I didn’t like the animation style, and without the record, the plot is incomprehensible. So I didn’t score it.
“The Unlucky Butterfly”
While neither the director or studio that made “Chou no Sainan” / “The Unlucky Butterfly” (unknown studio, 1931) have survived to the present day, the film itself is a pleasant surprise. It’s eight and a half minutes long, with the sound intact. A butterfly tends her flowers, until the grinning sun is covered up by clouds. The butterfly hides from the rain, and then leaves its wings up to dry.
A mouse arrives on a scooter and steals the wings, forcing the butterfly to gather food and drink for him, before he’ll give them back. She does, and in the first Great Anime Betrayal, the mouse runs off with the wings, locks them up and swallows the key.
Then a cat businessman turns up to – I didn’t believe this! – the main theme from Paul DUKAS’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. This is a full decade before Disney used it for “Fantasia”! The cat comforts the butterfly in a very deep voice, and chases the mouse into a forest. After the mouse teases the cat, a couple of crows attack him and he drops the key for our besuited hero.
Best of the bunch
This was fantastic! It had a villain who felt genuinely mean. This could have been an overly saccharine bugs-frolic-in-the-forest cartoon. Instead, it felt a lot more meaningful and had plenty of punch. There were a couple of very clever visual gags, and the chase scene was resolved in a satisfactory way.
The animation was excellent, the plot made sense, and the mouse wasn’t obviously inspired by Mickey in the way that other Japanese creators were. But we don’t know who made it! If evidence emerged placing this cartoon much later in the decade, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. But every source says 1931, so here we are; “The Unlucky Butterfly” scores 8/10.
“The Duckling Saves The Day”
Next comes “Ahiru no Otegara” / “The Duckling Saves The Day” (unknown studio, 1931). A chicken hatches her eggs, and a long-beaked duckling emerges from one of them. The hen drives it out, and then a tornado rips through the farm. It drags the henhouse away with the chicks still in it and drops it in a wide river. After some waterfall-related peril, the duckling realises it can swim. Thanks to a very clever sight-gag involving a bellows, the hero duck sculls its siblings to safety. Mother hen embraces her strange child, and the film ends.
This is exactly the sort of cartoon that drives me nuts. The plot is great, and feels like a very good adaptation of “The Ugly Duckling” to Japanese sensibilities. Despite the iffy conversion, the animation is so good that I’m personally convinced this was made by an established director and studio. I would love to give it high marks. But it’s equally clearly a ten minute cartoon of which only 71 seconds survive, and there is no way I can score it.
“The Bat”
The year’s last surviving unattributed animation that I was able to watch was “Koumori” / “The Bat” (unknown studio, 1931). But please read or listen to this review before you try and watch it. That’s not because of the content. This is a ten-minute long jidaegeki piece, telling of “a great battle between birds and beasts”. But if the subtitles hadn’t told me that, I wouldn’t have had a clue.
The conversion of what little of the cartoon remains is frankly awful. It was so bad that it gave me a headache, and I had to stop watching. What made that particularly frustrating was – I’m pretty sure I recognised the art style. I’m familiar enough with MURATA Yasuji’s work for Yokohama Cinema Shokai by now to recognise their long-eared rabbits and non-racist monkeys. I think they were involved in this. But everything on my screen was literally, painfully vague. I couldn’t even tell if it was propaganda. So no score, but for once I’m not sure exactly sure why.
Finally for this section; it’s possible someone made a version of “Saru Kani Gassen” / “The Monkey And The Crabs” in 1931. But next to nothing of it survives. I’ve been wondering if this is a fragment of the 1927 version of the story, again by MURATA Yasuji and Yokohama Cinema Shokai. But we don’t know.
fin
Unfortunately, we do know exactly what Murata was up to in 1931. And that’s what I’ll get into next time around. As always, I must thank AniDB, who have helped me work out what to look for, and the Japanese Film Archive, who have given me the material to actually watch.
The image from “The Unlucky Butterfly” is from The Anime Database Wiki.