The Dawn of Moving Pictures — The Birth of Japanese Animation

Today, Japanese anime has become a culture that captivates people all over the world. Yet the beginning of it all was a modest movement of pictures, drawn by hand one frame at a time. In 1917, in the midst of the new Taisho era, strange pictures began to move on a movie screen in Asakusa, Tokyo. Figures walked, expressions changed, and stories came to life on paper. The first to attempt this were just a handful of young cartoonists. They had no models and no textbooks — only fragmentary information arriving from abroad, and their own two hands. This story begins with that hand-drawn dawn.

The Three Pioneers

Japanese animation is said to have been born in 1917. In that year, at almost the same time, three cartoonists each created moving pictures by their own original methods. Oten Shimokawa, Seitaro Kitayama, and Junichi Kouchi — these are the people who would later be called the founders of Japanese animation.

The first to be released is said to have been Oten Shimokawa’s work. It is said to have premiered at a movie theater in Asakusa in January 1917, but records from the time are scarce, and today there are various accounts of the details. Seitaro Kitayama and Junichi Kouchi then released their own works one after another. Each of the three devised his own technique by trial and error, and none of them taught the others. That is precisely why no single individual, but all three together, are positioned as the fathers of the founding era.

All they had to draw on were a few fragments of short animated films imported from abroad. By drawing many pictures per second and projecting them in succession, the pictures appear to move — they verified this principle for themselves as they made their works. Drawing each picture by hand required dizzying patience, and the resulting footage lasted only a few minutes. Even so, when the pictures on paper moved like living things, the audience is said to have truly felt surprise and delight.

Lost Works, One Surviving Film

A great sorrow clings to the animation of the founding era: most of the early works no longer survive. Film of that time was flammable, and the concept of preservation was not yet established. In the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, Tokyo, the center of production, suffered enormous damage, and many precious films and materials are thought to have been lost. Even Oten Shimokawa’s work, said to have been the first released, no longer survives in its original form.

Amid all this, there is one film that was miraculously discovered in recent years: Junichi Kouchi’s ‘Namakura Gatana’, released in 1918. It is a humorous short film in which a samurai repeatedly fails as he tries out a new sword, and its whereabouts had long been unknown. When it was found among old films, it proved, in visible form, that Japanese animation has a hundred-year history. Though a short work, it harbors throughout the early ingenuity of trying to make pictures move, and stands as a precious record that conveys the breath of the founding era to this day.

When one considers how much has been lost, the weight of the one surviving film is great. The reason we can speak of a hundred years of Japanese anime is thanks to the films and the few records that barely survived. History becomes richly visible only when we imagine not only what remains, but also the existence of what was lost.

Lyricism Blooming Under Wartime

As the era advanced, new technology entered animation too: the arrival of the talkie, which recorded sound simultaneously with the image. In the 1930s, Kenzo Masaoka and others took on this new technology, exploring animation united with music and voices. Masaoka would eventually become known as a father of Japanese animation.

One culmination of this was ‘The Spider and the Tulip’, released in 1943. A spider courts the daughter of a ladybug, and the daughter fends him off — it is a lyrical, gentle short film that unfolds with songs woven through it. Carefully drawn cel by cel, this work has been praised as having a refinement far above others for its time. What deserves attention is the fact that it was made in the very midst of the Pacific War. In an age when many works were required to have content that boosted morale, Masaoka portrayed the modest story of insects with a quiet beauty.

Of course, the animation of this period was not unconnected to the war. Under national policy, many works for propaganda and documentation were also made. We must not forget that the medium of animation could be used both to encourage people and to lead them in a certain direction. Light and shadow had walked side by side since this dawning era. Even so, the birth of a work like ‘The Spider and the Tulip’ under wartime shows that Japanese animation was growing beyond a mere curiosity into an art that touches the human heart.

And so, Japanese animation, which began with modest hand-drawn experiments, grew over a quarter of a century into something capable of producing works that linger in the heart. Yet this was still a world of short films lasting only a few minutes. Eventually the war ends, and from the ashes, people begin to dream a larger dream. Could a long story be drawn in animation as a single film? The next chapter is the story of that great challenge.