The Challenge of the Feature Film — The Age of Toei Doga

When the war had ended and people were trying to rise from the ashes, Japanese animation still remained within short films of only a few minutes. Across the ocean in America, Disney was captivating audiences around the world with vividly colored feature films. Could we not make those dreamlike films with our own hands? People who held such grand ambitions gathered into a single company. That was Toei Doga, which would later become the cornerstone of Japanese anime. From short hand-drawn experiments to feature animation that carries the audience into the world of a story as a single film — this chapter is the story of the people who took on that great leap.

Aiming to Be the Disney of the East

In postwar Japan, movies were a great pleasure for people. Among the many film companies, Toei saw future potential in animation. In 1956, Toei established Toei Doga, a company for producing animation. The goal it raised was to become the Disney of the East. It was a grand dream to produce in Japan, too, the colorful and highly narrative feature animation that America’s Disney made.

In Japan at the time, there was almost no one with experience making feature-length animation. In an age when even shorts were handled by only a limited few, finishing a work of dozens of minutes — and in full color, no less — was an immense challenge. A single feature requires a dizzying quantity of pictures. People to draw the backgrounds, people to draw the key frames, people to draw the in-between frames that connect them — many hands and a meticulous division of labor are essential. Toei Doga built up such a production system from scratch.

This company was not merely a place to make works, but came to serve a role like a school that trains people. Veteran creators instructed newcomers, and technique was handed down on the floor. The foundation on which Japanese animation rose as an industry was shaped here.

‘The Tale of the White Serpent’, a Dream of Color

And then, in October 1958, that dream finally took shape: the release of ‘The Tale of the White Serpent’, Japan’s first full-fledged color feature-length animated film. Based on an old Chinese legend, it was a story depicting a love that crossed time between a young man and a girl who was the incarnation of a white serpent.

The labor poured into this single film was extraordinary. The number of in-between drawings spent on its completion reached tens of thousands, and combined with the key frames, it was an immense accumulation of handwork. Popular actors of the day were cast to provide the voices. Preparation is said to have proceeded over about two and a half years, and the actual drawing too required long months. Drawing every picture by hand, coloring each one, and assembling them into continuous movement — at the end of that immense labor, the audience encountered a vividly colored, moving story.

‘The Tale of the White Serpent’ was also entered in an overseas film festival ahead of its release, and is said to have received a special prize. It was the moment when Japanese animation finally reached the stage of being evaluated, at home and abroad, as a single film. Yet the true significance of this work does not stop at box office or awards. The colorful world projected on the screen would light an unquenchable fire in the hearts of many future creators who were still children.

A Place Where Talents Gather

Spurred by ‘The Tale of the White Serpent’, or drawn by longing for the new workplace that was Toei Doga, young talents gathered one after another. In 1959, Toei Doga held a broad open recruitment for assistant directors. Among them were the figures of people who would go on to carry Japanese animation.

For example, one young man who would later create numerous masterpieces has said that he watched ‘The Tale of the White Serpent’ at a theater in his student days and resolved to become an animator. Another young person joined Toei Doga and accumulated experience on the floor as an assistant director. They would eventually come to aim for animation with deep narrative qualities, not confined to works for children. One crystallization of that challenge was ‘The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun’, released in 1968. With its long production period and many hardships, this work is said to have struggled at the box office, but with the ambition of its expression and the depth of its craftsmanship, it left a great influence on later generations.

Here, there was not only light but also shadow. Animation production requires immense handwork, and the workplace was by no means easy. At Toei Doga, labor union activity was also carried out over treatment and working conditions, and there were scenes, it is reported, in which creators raised their voices. The passion to pursue an ideal, and the harshness of the workplace that supports it — these two tensions became an assignment that Japanese anime would carry for a long time to come. Yet it was precisely because of this that the talents who grew in this period, knowing the creaking of the workplace firsthand, would go on to pioneer the next era.

And so, Japanese animation, which began with short hand-drawn experiments, gained the workplace of Toei Doga and built the strength to produce a feature-length film. A colorful story carries the audience to another world. That was certainly a great achievement. Yet the place where people meet anime would eventually no longer be only the movie theater. Into a small box set in a corner of the home — in the next chapter, let us look at the revolution that took place on the new stage of television.