Ari-chan (アリチャン, 1941)

The anime pioneer Mitsuyo Seo (瀬尾 光世, 1911-2010) is best known in the English speaking world for his wartime propaganda films Momotarō’s Sea Eagles (1942) and Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors (1945), but these films are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of Seo’s contributions to early animation history.   Ari-chan (アリチャン, 1941) tends to get only a passing reference in English guides to anime history as the first Japanese animation to use a multiplane camera for the entirety of the film, but little has been written in English about the style and content of this film.

Multiplane Animation

The film was made by the studio Geijutsu Eigasha (芸術映画社), or GES for short, and was financed by the Ministry of Education’s film department Monbushō Eiga (文部省映画).   The animator assigned to assist Seo on Ari-chan was GES’s new employee Tadahito Mochinaga (持永 只仁, 1919-1999), fresh out of art school.  Mochinaga had fallen in love with Disney animation as a child, citing the Technicolor film Water Babies (Wilfred Jackson, 1935) from the Silly Symphony series as having inspired him to become an animator himself.  He dedicated his free time to the study of animation, making a short film How to Make Animated Films (1939) as his graduation project from his three year degree at Nippon Art College (today’s Nichibi).  (see: Kosei Ono article)

For Ari-chan, Mochinaga put his research into practice for the first time by designing, building, and using a four level multiplane camera.   The project was funded by the Ministry of Education, who wanted a short film for children.   The original scenario for Ari-chan was conceived by Mitsuyo Seo.  According to Mochinaga’s posthumously published autobiography, he was interested in working on the film because of Seo’s description of the final scene: a field of cosmos flowers set against the moon in the background.  These flowers had a personal meaning for Mochinaga because he had fond memories of playing in fields of cosmos when he was a child in Manchuria.  Mochinaga felt that the best way to achieve this scene was by using a multiplane camera.  Seo was won over by the idea, but he had some push back from the studio.  In the end, Seo invested his own money in the venture so that Mochinaga would have creative control.  The production did not run smoothly however, because part way through the shoot GES merged with Asahi Kinema and they had to take the multiplane camera apart and move it to a new studio and reassemble it.  Mochinaga also nearly ran out of the paper he was using for the watercolour backgrounds (see: Mochinaga). 

Influence of Disney’s Silly Symphonies

It is likely that Seo and Mochinaga were influenced by the Walt Disney Silly Symphony series for both the style and format of Ari-chan.  Disney’s first use of the multiplane camera was in their Oscar award winning short The Old Mill (1937) – a film that many Japanese animators have cited as influential on them creatively.  Just like the Silly Symphonies, Ari-chan pairs music and animation, is aimed at children, and uses anthropomorphic insects.  In fact, I was struck during the opening sequence of the obvious similarities between Ari-chan and Disney’s The Grasshopper and the Ants (Wilfred Jackson, 1934).  

This Silly Symphony is based on the famous Aesop fable The Ant and the Grasshopper (note: for some strange reason this story is called The Ant and the Katydid アリとキリギリス in Japanese) about a lazy grasshopper who spends the summer months at play while the ants use the time to work hard to prepare for winter.  As in The Grasshopper and the Ants, Ari-chan opens with a shot of the base of an enormous tree where ants are busy at work.  The film also features grasshoppers that play fiddles, and the usual pratfall humour of animated shorts, but that is where the story similarities end.

The Story

Instead of being lazy, the grasshoppers in Ari-chan are depicted as dedicated musicians.  The story focusses on the title character Ari-chan, or “Little Ant”, a child ant not yet old enough to help the colony with their work.  Ari-chan rolls up on his tricycle and tries to help the grown-ups, but when his efforts fail he goes off into the field of flowers to play.  He blows the seeds off a dandelion and chases the parachuting seeds until he discovers a little garden with a sandbox of toys.  A fiddle lying on the ground catches his eye and he decides to take it.

Ari-chan runs through the flowers, playing the fiddle as he goes.  Meanwhile, through a crosscut we see the owner of the fiddle discovering the theft and appearing distressed.  Ari-chan is oblivious to the pain he has left in his wake and continues on his merry way until he discovers his friends at play.  They also want to play with the fiddle, but Ari-chan shakes his head “no”.  The butterfly offers him the sweet nectar of a flower, and this is all it takes to convince Ari-chan to share his treasure.  The butterfly (chō) plays the fiddle beautifully, strumming it as if it were a harp.  Next up are the mantis (kamakiri) and the ladybug (tentō-mushi), who play a more country style melody, with the mantis jumping on the strings and the ladybug playing on the fret.  Finally, the rhinoceros beetle (kabuto-mushi) gives it a go, but his long horn comically gets in the way.  He struggles to disengage himself, causing the fiddle to go flying and breaking its strings.  Ari-chan tries desperately to repair the fiddle.

The moon comes out, and the grasshopper orchestra begins to play its magical melody on a variety of string instruments (violins, violas, cellos).  Inspired by this, Ari-chan plucks a blade of grass to try to play the fiddle in the same way.  Just then, an ominous black shadow of a hand interrupts the proceedings.  It is the hand of a small child trying to capture an insect for his bug cage.  The insects run for their lives in a dramatic sequence.  After a close call, Ari-chan climbs on the back of the grasshopper conductor and they escape together.  The grasshopper conductor pats Ari-chan’s head then goes back to conducting.   Ari-chan once again tries to join in, but suddenly realizes the value of the fiddle.  In another dramatic sequence, he rushes back to the home where he found it and discovers the fiddle owner in tears.  Without drawing attention to himself, he quietly slips the fiddle into the house and returns happily to playing with the dandelion seeds.  The final sequence is a multilayered image of the orchestra playing superimposed with cosmos flowers and the moon.  The young female grasshopper reunited with her instrument joins in.  The film concludes with Ari-chan running home to his mother’s embrace. 

Music

The score for Ari-chan was composed by Tadashi Hattori (服部正, 1908-2008).  Hattori composed the scores for many films in the 1940s and 1950s including several by Akira Kurosawa (The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, Those Who Make Tomorrow, No Regrets for Our Youth, and One Wonderful Sunday), as well as animated shorts by Seo’s mentor, Kenzō Masaoka (Tora-chan, the Abandoned Kitten, and Tora-chan and the Bride).  Hattori stands out among other composers for his love of the mandolin, composing many pieces for mandolin orchestras (watch the Amedeo Mandolin Orchestra perform Hattori’s Italian Fantasy here).  As a lover of string instruments, he was the ideal candidate to collaborate on the music.  The music matches the screen action perfectly.  There was by 1941 already a tradition in Japan of pairing music with animation, dating back to the record talkies of the late 1920s / early 1930s, but this is the earliest animation that I have seen from Japan where the music has so perfectly been composed for the animation with music as a central theme to the plot.  They have clearly made an effort to emulate the Disney style, and have done a brilliant job of it considering their technical limitations: no colour film stock, limited celluloid, and a very small crew. 

Mixed Media

Like the early Disney films (Silly Symphonies, Snow White) Mochinaga did the backgrounds using watercolour on paper.  Although Snow White (1937) predates Ari-chan, it is unlikely that Mochinaga and Seo would have seen it.  Due to the war, Snow White was not distributed in Japan until 1950.  It is certainly possible that they had read about the film and the techniques that it used. 

One obvious difference between the Disney style and this film is the use of cutouts for certain effects.  To my knowledge, Disney did not use cutouts on the multiplane camera, just celluloid painted with acrylic and a watercolour background.  One of the most obvious uses of cutouts in Ari-chan is in the simulated “iris” transition done between Ari-chan discovering the fiddle and Ari-chan running through the flowers.  In some of the garden scenes, the plants and flowers look too textured to have been merely drawn on cel.  He also gives the image more depth in the final musical sequence by using superimposition.  It seems likely given Mochinaga’s limited resources that he took whatever measures necessary to give each scene the look that he wanted.  The result is an engaging short that would be absolutely stunning if digitally restored. 

Opening and Closing Titles

The credits look as though they were written on a chalkboard then superimposed onto the film.  The opening and closing titles are mostly in katakana written left to right, with kanji used for the name of the director and the film’s sponsor (Monbushō Eiga).  Reading horizontally from right to left has become rare in Japan, although you still see it on some signs like ramen restaurants and police car doors.  Japanese these days is more commonly read/written vertically (top to bottom / right to left), or Western-style horizontally (right to left / top to bottom).  The choice of katakana for the title indicates that the film was intended for children.  Children’s literature today is usually written in hiragana, but in the 1930s they preferred katakana.  The title also uses archaic katakana forms such as ヱ (ye), ヲ (wo), and ハ (ha) for “wa”.  At the end of a Japanese animation it is common to see “Owari” (The End) written in various ways: おわり (hiragana), オワリ (katakana), or 終わり/ 終 (kanji).  In Ari-chan they use an archaic form ヲハリ written right to left リハヲ. 

It took some time for my friend and colleague, Keiko Sasaki, and I to figure out that the first title card モンブシャウ　ヱイグワ reads Monbushō Eiga (文部省映画).  The modern reader would pronounce it “Monbushau   Yeiguwa”.  The only place one sees “ye” ヱ regularly these days is the archaic form of Ebisu used by Yebisu Beer (ヱビスビール).   The use of ウ to indicate a long vowel sound in katakana has been replaced by ー in modern Japanese.   I don’t know why they use シャウ (shau) instead of シヨウ (shō) and グワ (guwa) instead of ガ (ga), but it is certainly fascinating how much Japanese has changed since the war. 

Availability

The film is in the archives of the NFC and appears on Disc 3 of the Japanese Art Animation Film Collection. 

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2015

References:

Hu, Tze-Yue G.  Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building.  Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2010. 

Mochinaga, Tadahito.  Animēshon Nitchū kōryūki: Mochinaga Tadahito jiden. Tokyo: Tōhō Shoten, 2006.  

Ono, Kosei.  “Tadahito Mochinaga: The Animator Who Lived in Two Worlds.”  AWN. 4.9 (December 1999).

Belly Drum Dance at Shojoji Temple (證城寺の狸囃子, c.1933)

In mid-October every year, local children gather at Shojoji Temple in Kisarazu, Chiba Prefecture to dance and drum on their bellies like the legendary tanuki (racoon dogs).  The legend is of uncertain origin.  It is one of many legends found throughout Japan about the tanuki drumming on their bellies.  The locals say that this particular story of tanuki standing on their hind legs and drumming on their bellies developed from local villagers speculating about the unusual Buddhist music they could here coming from the temple.  The story became widely known in Japan because of the popular children’s song “Belly Drum Dance at Shojoji Temple” (證城寺の狸囃子/Shōjōji no Tanuki-bayashi, 1925). The song began as a poem written by Ujō Noguchi (野口雨情, 1882-1945) in 1919 based upon materials he gathered during a visit that year to Kisarazu.  The composer Shinpei Nakayama (中山晋平, 1887-1952) set the poem to music in 1925.  (Source: Shōjōji Temple History)

In the early 1930s, animation pioneer Ikuo Ōishi (大石郁雄, 1901-1944) adapted Belly Drum Dance at Shojoji Temple (c.1933) into a “record talkie” for the studio Banno Shōten (伴野商店).  Anyone who is a scholar of early cinema will tell you that the term “silent cinema” is actually a misnomer.  Silent films were never screened silently.  They always had some kind of sound accompaniment such as a piano, an orchestra, a narrator (benshi) and sometimes even recorded sound as in the sound-on-disc technologies such as Gaumont’s Chronomégaphone.  Some of the most delightful films of Japan’s “silent era” are the record talkies (レコードトーキー) that were made in the late 1920s and early 1930s.  The short animated films were a maximum of 3 - 6 minutes long – Belly Drum Dance at Shojoji Temple has a running time of only 1’11” – and were designed to be played synchronously with gramophone records.  They often involve read-along text (The Village Festival and Song of Spring) and dancing characters.  The record talkies are an early example of the now ubiquitous “film tie-in” because people who enjoyed the film could also buy the SP record.

Lyrics

Sho-Sho-Shojoji, in the garden of Shojoji!

The moon, the moon is out!  Everyone, come out!

We’re all friends!  Friends, drum your belly!

Pom poko pon no pon!

Never! Never! Don’t let the monk beat you!

Come, come! Gather around!

Everyone, come out!

Sho-Sho-Shojoji, the bush clovers of Shojoji!

Look!  Look at the flowers in the moonlight!

We’re so excited!  Friends, drum your belly!

Pom poko pon no pon!

(Source:  Digital Meme DVD)

The sound recording was produced by Victor Records (ビクターレコード), a subsidiary of the American company whose Japanese branch (known today as JVC) formed in Yokohama in 1927 but severed ties with its parent company during the Second World War.  The recording features the voice of child star Hideko Hirai (平井英子, b.1918) – a popular singer who also sang Black Cat and Chameko’s Day.  The title screen introduces the animation as a “baby talkie” (ベビートーキー).   A “baby talkie” was actually a kind of gramophone crossed with a Zoetrope that appeared in Japan in the late 1920s as a kind of “home talking picture experience” (source: FIAF Symposium 2007).  You could watch an animation loop as your phonograph record plays.  I am not sure what the connection is to Oishi’s animation, but it is definitely something I plan to look into the next time I’m at the NFC.

Like the song itself, the animation is simple and repetitive.  In addition to the sweet, cheerful voice of Hideko Hirai, the song is orchestrated with a piano and other percussion instruments.  First a lone tanuki dances and drums on his belly.  He is then joined by more tanuki who join in the dancing and drumming.  As the song progresses, the tanuki continue to multiply and make patterns with each other as they dance.  There is a brief cutaway to the silhouette of a Buddhist monk drumming in the window of the temple – an allusion to the legend that the tanuki were inspired by the music of the monks of Shojoji Temple.  The short short ends with an iris out to an "owari" (the end) title card.

The song is short and sweet, but very catchy.  Here is some sheet music if you would like to sing along or play it yourself.  Fans of anime will recognize the “Pom poko pon no pon!” refrain from the Studio Ghibli film Pom Poko (Isao Takahata, 1994) about tanuki in the Tama Hills fighting urban sprawl.  The “pom poko” in the title is a direct reference to the song “Belly Drum Dance at Shojoji Temple” and the song is sung, with new lyrics, at times of celebration in the film.  Just a cursory web search turns up many more shorts inspired by the song.  This simply executed animation even uses very similar imagery to Oishi’s film including an almost identical silhouette of a monk beating a drum.

Note 1:  there is some confusion over the exact date this film was released.  Digital Meme lists it as 1933, the National Film Centre as in the early 1930s, the imdb has it at 1935 and Wikipedia as 1931.  

 Note 2:  Hideko Hirai's name is credited as "Eiko Hirai" on the Digital Meme DVDs.  Although this is a logical error to make, her given name is actually read "Hideko".  Remarkably, she still seems to be alive at the ripe old age of 95.  Trivia:  Hirai retired from singing after her marriage to the composer Seiichi Suzuki (1901-80), who composed the soundtracks to many films including Akira Kurosawa's Sanshiro Sugata (1943)  

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013

Read about other record talkies:

Black Cat (黒ニャゴ, Noburo Ofuji, 1929)

The Village Festival (村祭, Noburo Ofuji, 1930)

Song of Spring (春の唄, Noburo Ofuji, 1931)

The National Anthem: Kimigayo (国歌 君か代, Noburo Ofuji, 1931)

Chameko’s Day (茶目子の一日, Kiyoshi Nishikura, 1931)

The National Anthem: Kimigayo (国歌 君か代, 1931)

In 2010 Kinokuniya released a DVD dedicated to the works of animation pioneer Noburo Ofuji (大藤信郎, 1990-61).  At 161 minutes, this is only a selected works of this early master of chiyogami and silhouette animation.  Many more of Ofuji’s films have been preserved and the animated short The National Anthem: Kimigayo (国歌 君か代/ Kokka Kimigayo, 1931) appears on Digital Meme’s Japanese Anime Classic Collection with subtitles in English, Chinese, and Korean.  This release of the film includes a soundtrack of Kimigayo performed by Joichi Yuasa.

The national anthem, Kimigayo, is believed to be one of the oldest – and lyrically among the shortest – national anthems still in use today.  At the time at which this animated short was made, it was the national anthem of the Empire of Japan (1867-1947).  As such, the film’s key motif is the chrysanthemum.  The emperor’s throne has been known as the Chrysanthemum Throne for centuries with the Imperial Seal of Japan being a yellow chrysanthemum.  One encounters the chrysanthemum regularly in Japan as it appears on everything from 50 yen coins to traditional cloth.

Ofuji depicts the chrysanthemum using his trademark chiyogami cutout animation style.  As he only had black and white film stock to work with in 1931, the result is not nearly as striking as his postwar films such as Whale (1952) and The Phantom Ship (1956), but his techniques are still very impressive in this film. 

The chrysanthemum chiyogami sequence is followed by a mysterious silhouette animation sequence bathed in mist which depicts the famous dripping spear scene from the Japanese creation myth.  The gods Izanagi and Izanami are said to have stood on a floating bridge of heaven and stirred in the sea with a spear.  The brine that dripped from the spear formed into the first island, followed by the other islands which created the Japanese archipelago (Kuniumi). 

The film appears to have been designed to accompany a performance or a recording of the national anthem. This is made clear by a sequence in the middle of the film where the song`s lyrics appear on the screen character by character in traditional Japanese writing order (up→down, right→left).  At this time, Ofuji was making many animated sing-along films for children including the chiyogami record talkies The Village Festival (1930), which employs a follow-the-bouncing ball technique, and Song of Spring (1931).

After the sing-along section, Ofuji returns to symbolic national symbols and stories.  In another beautiful silhouette animation sequence he depicts part of the legend of the sun goddess Amaterasu who, after a deadly attack on her property and attendants by her brother, hides inside the Ama-no-Iawato (heavenly rock cave) which causes the sun to be blocked out.  Ofuji depicts the moment when Amaterasu is persuaded to leave the cave, returning the sun to the world. 

 This is followed by a sequence depicting symbolism associated with Emperor Jimmu – the legendary first emperor of Japan.  Although the imperial house of Japan has traditionally claimed its descent from Jimmu in about 60 BC, most researchers see his tale as being based more in myth than in historical reality.  According to Shinto belief, Jimmu is said to be a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu.  In addition to the continuing to use the sun motif, this sequence adds symbolism associated with Jimmu: his emblematic long bow and the famous three-legged crow yatagarasu which is said to have been sent from heaven to guide Emperor Jimmu. 

I was struck by the similarity of the dark bird with spread wings to the eagle which is the national symbol of Germany.Of course, Japan and Germany were not yet military allies in 1931 – the National Socialists were not yet even in power; however, film was already being used as a medium to further nationalist ideology in both countries.  During the Meiji period, the government proclaimed 11 February 1966 as the foundation day of Japan and in the 1930s Kigensetsu (Era Day) was celebrated annually as the day that Jimmu ascended the throne.   This was halted for a time when Japan lost the war but since 1966, the date continues to be observed as National Foundation Day but with less fanfare than the overt nationalism of the 1930s and 40s.   According to the Japanese Movie Database, Ofuji’s Kimigayo was released on May 1^st, 1931.  Nationalist propaganda was pretty prevalent in Japan at this time because Japan during the run up to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931.  

In a much more positive connection to Germany, this is the earliest film by Ofuji that I have seen where the influence of Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981) is obvious.  Reiniger started making silhouette animation shorts in the 1910s and her feature film The Adventures of Prince Achmed was released in 1926.  Her films were shown in Japan in the 1920s inspiring both Ofuji and another early animator Wagoro Arai (1907-94), to try their hand at silhouette animation.  The results are simply astonishing, with their films additionally demonstrating the influence of traditional Japanese traditions of kirigami /kiri-e (paper-cutting art) and silhouette/kage-e (影絵/shadow art).

The National Anthem: Kimigayo was made by Ofuji at his independent studio Chiyogami Eigasha. To learn more about Ofuji, check out my reviews of his other films and my ongoing series about the films awarded the prize named in his honour.          

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013

Other Ofuji reviews:  Whale (1952), Song of Spring (1931), The Village Festival (1930)

Ofuji on DVD (JP only):

NIPPON NO ART ANIMATION OOFUJI NOBUROU

Animation

The Black Cat (黒ニャゴ, 1929)

The Black Cat (黒ニャゴ/Kuro Nyago, 1929) is a record talkie from the silent film period.  A record talkie was a silent film played synchronously with a phonograph record.  Like today’s music videos, record talkies were designed as promotional devices for record companies and their songs.  People who enjoyed The Black Cat animation could have bought the record and played it on their own gramophone (record companies also manufactured gramophones) at home.

The children’s song The Black Cat was written by Kōka Sassa (佐々紅華, 1886-1961), husband of the popular Asakusa Opera singer Ruby Takai (高井 ルビー, 1904-unknown), with lyrics by Otowa Shigure (時雨 音羽, 1899-1980).  It was released by Victor Records and features the vocal talent of child star Hideko Hirai (平井 英子, b. 1918).  Hideko Hirai also features with Ruby Takai in the Kōka Sassa hit Chameko’s Day, which was made into an animation directed by Kiyoshi Nishikura (see review) in 1931.

On the other side of the Pacific, Walt Disney had made splash a year earlier with the release of Steamboat Willie (1928) which he co-directed with Ub Iwerks.  While not the first animated film to have a synchronous soundtrack, Steamboat Willie was certainly the most successful and marked the debut of the iconic Mickey Mouse.  Sound on film technology was much slower to come to Japan – not only because of a lack of technology but because of the tenacity of the benshi tradition.  The first animated film with a synchronous soundtrack would not be made in Japan until 1933: Kenzō Masaoka’s lost film The World of Power and Women (Chikara to Onna no Yo no Naka).  The first step towards sound films in Japan were the record talkies, and The Black Cat is believed to be the first of its kind.

The film is directed and animated by the legendary Noburo Ōfuji (大藤 信郎, 1900-61) in his signature chiyogami cutout animation style (cutouts using traditional Japanese paper).  Due to the expense and relative scarcity of celluloid in Japan in this period, cutouts were a common method for making animated films.  It was shot on 9.5mm film on a Pathé Baby.   I watched the film on the Kinokuniya DVD Ōfuji Noburō: Kūkō no Tensai (2010). The film was digitized by the National Film Center and synchronized with the original Victor record.  Both the soundtrack and the film show their age with much popping and scratching, but as so many films from this era have been lost we are lucky that the film survives in a relatively complete condition.

The opening shot is of chiyogami cherry blossom trees shedding a few petals.  Some boys walk along and sing of their desire to have a black cat with a red collar who dances.  A black cat appears and sings and dances for them.  The cat then introduces her brother, a tabby cat, who also sings and dances for them.  The boys also join in with the dancing and singing.  As with any successful children’s song, The Black Cat has a catchy tune and is repetitive.  It alternates between song and dialogue.  One can imagine children of the era mimicking the cat’s dance, not to mention the cry of the cat as she sings.  The bouncy rhythm of the song would also encourage clapping.  The second refrain might have inspired the children to leap like the cat’s tiger ancestors, while the third refrain might have gotten a bit wild with children pretending to throw a mouse just like the cat.

Examples of mattes being used in The Black Cat

The character movement is less complex than later Ōfuji films, but it is still very charming.  Ōfuji uses two main set-ups for the piece: a cherry tree orchard and a bamboo forest.  Some of the more complicated sequences involve spinning chiyogami paper and the “tracking” shots of characters walking.  I put “tracking” in brackets because it is not actually the camera that is moving, but the paper under the camera between shots – but this animation technique creates the illusion that the camera is moving over the scene.  As is typical for films of this era, mattes are used in lieu of close-ups.  There was no such thing as a zoom lens in the 1920s and it would have been more cost effective / time efficient to matte the image than to change the camera set-up for a close-up. All in all, it is a delightful piece of early animation history.

In addition to the DVD Ōfuji Noburō: Kūkō no Tensai, The Black Cat appears on the Digital Meme Box Set Japanese Anime Classic Collection.  A sample of the film with English subs can be screened on Crunchyroll.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Song of Spring (春の唄, 1931)

Noburo Ofuji (大藤 信郎, 1900-1961) is one of Japan’s top animation pioneers. His innovative chiyogami films represent some of the best in pre-Toei Doga animation. Cutouts were a common animation technique in the 1920s and 1930s because of their cost effectiveness. Not only was celluloid expensive because it needed to be imported, but cutouts can be used over and over again, reducing the more time-consuming manual labour of drawing individual frames for cel animation.

Song of Spring (春の唄/Haru no uta, 1931) demonstrates how Ofuji’s films stood out from those of his contemporaries because of his use of the unique textures and shapes of chiyogami. Originating in the Edo era, chiyogami is a brightly coloured type of paper traditionally printed using woodblocks. In Song of Spring, the use of chiyogami complements the aim of the film to teach children about national symbols (cherry blossoms, the hinomaru) and traditions (kimono costume, dancing and celebrating the arriving of spring).

Like his earlier work The Village Festival (村祭, 1930), Ofuji’s Song of Spring is a sing-along animated short aimed at a young audience. Instead of the “Follow the Bouncing Ball” technique which Ofuji used in The Village Festival, Song of Spring opens with a sheet of music onto which katakana appear one by one, spelling out the lyrics to the first verse.

The land of cherry blossoms

Sakura, Sakura

Flower blossoms blow in from east and west

Covering the asphalt here as well

My step turns wild amidst whirling cherry petals

The land of cherry blossoms

Sakura, Sakura

I think of you as spring bursts forth

A chandelier shining in my dreams

A bright kimono amidst the whirling cherry petals

The song, performed by Kikuko Inoue of the Asakusa Opera, is very catchy. While the song’s themes may be very Japanese, the song has a Western flavour to the performance style. I was reminded of patriotic music invoking nature from other countries like Flower of Scotland, Canada’s The Maple Leaf Forever, or Vera Lynn’s The White Cliffs of Dover. In fact, I would describe Inoue’s singing style as a kind of high-pitched Vera Lynn. In the DVD notes, Aaron Gerow mentions that the Asakusa Opera played an influential role in introducing Western music and musical theatre to Japan (p. 5).

The complexity of Ofuji’s cutout technique is apparent during the opening credits where he has movement happening in more than one part of the frame. Each section of the film is given its own scene. The first verse and its repeat are illustrated by the music score with lyrics and a cute sequence of dancing cherry blossoms with feet. During the instrumental bridge, Ofuji has designed a lovely sequence using cherry blossom shapes that move and develop like a kaleidoscope. The complexity of the animation increases throughout the film with the pièce de résistance being the lovely final sequence where a girl in kimono dances. The sophistication of movement as the girl mimics the whirling of the cherry blossoms is as expertly done as a Lotte Reiniger silhouette animation from the same time period.

The version of Song of Spring on the Zakka Films DVD is truly remarkable as a rare example of tinting in a pre-war Japanese film. Early cinema was not only black and white but quite often tinted either by soaking the film in dye in order to stain the film emulsion or hand tinted. Notable examples include Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, 1926) and the recently restored A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902) by Georges Méliès, which premiered at Cannes in May and is screening at the BFI London Film Festival this month.

Certain colours in tinting were associated with different locations or times of day. An amber tint would be used for daylight interiors, for example, while a blue tint would suggest a moonlit night. . . or water as in the below image from The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Ofuji has gone with a pink tint in keeping with the cherry blossom theme of the song.

The opening title cards suggest that Ofuji shot the film on a Pathé Baby (パテ・ベイビー). The Pathé Baby film system used a unique 9.5mm film format introduced by Pathé Frères in 1922 and became quite popular in Europe in the 20s and 30s. The Pathé Baby did not record sound, so Song of Spring was designed to be played simultaneously with a Columbia Records phonograph record of the song. Not only does Columbia Records appear in the opening credits of the film, but the film ends on a shot of a Columbia Records phonograph record spinning amongst the cherry blossoms.

Song of Spring appears on the Zakka Films DVD The Roots of Japanese Anime with optional English subtitles. The DVD comes with an informative booklet that includes historical background by Jasper Sharp (Midnight Eye) and film notes by Aaron Gerow (Yale U). Individuals can purchase this DVD for a reasonable price from independent film distributor Film Baby. Institutions should contact Zakka Films directly for purchasing information.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

The Village Festival (村祭, 1930)

Chiyogami cutout animation

Mura Matsuri (The Village Festival aka Harvest Festival (1930) by animation pioneer Noburo Ōfuji (大藤信郎, 1900-61) is a deceptively simple film depicting a typical Japanese festival. It is an early example of Japanese manga-eiga (literally ‘cartoon movies’ as animation was known in Japan pre-1960s). As Japanese artists only began to create animation for public consumption beginning in 1917, it was still a relatively novel screening experience. 

Japanese animators learned their craft through careful study of animated films imported from countries like France, England, and the United States. Some clues about Noburo Ōfuji’s screening habits can be gleaned from this short little film that runs at under 3 minutes. To begin with, I suspect that he has been watching Max Fleischer (1883-1972) films because he uses a “Follow the Bouncing Ball” technique with the kana that spells out the lyrics for the audience to read along. This gimmick is commonplace today, but it was an innovation at the time that began in September 1925 with My Bonnie (Max & Dave Fleischer) and was used extensively in the Fleisch brothers’ Ko-Ko Song Car Tunes of the 1920s and 1930s. Ōfuji puts his own creative touch onto the “Follow the Bouncing Ball” technique by having the ball interact with other objects related to the matsuri (festival) and at times substituting the head of characters in the matsuri for the ball

Innovative 'Follow the Bouncing Ball'... or Dragon head?

 

This type of read along song animation became a staple of Japanese television in the 1960s with programmes like the NHK’s popular Minna no Uta (Everybody’s Song) series which pairs animators with new songs. In many ways, Mura Matsuri is, along with other musical shorts from the period, a grandfather to the modern Minna no Uta classics.

It is clear that Ōfuji is primarily targeting this film primarily at an audience of children. The expectation of a child audience is indicated through the young voice of the singer Eiko Hirai, and through the use of kana in the song lyrics. Interestingly, the kana are used in a similar fashion to contemporary usage for young children: hiragana for common Japanese words and katakana for sound words like don don (ドンドン). I find this interesting because Nishikata, where I lived when I started this blog, is quite close to the Yayoi Museum & Takehisa Yumeji Museum (behind Tōdai, near Nezu Station). I saw a wonderful exhibition at the Yayoi Museum of children’s books and magazines from the 1920s and 1930s. Most of the material written for children at this time appeared to be written exclusively in katakana. 

Chiyogami + Follow-the-Bouncing-Ball

At the time that this film was made, sound film was already all the rage in North America and Europe. The technology cam much later to Japan much mainly due to the benshi wanting to hold onto their jobs. Mura Matsuri is a film that straddles the silent and sound eras. The 16mm film itself is silent because it has no optic track. Instead, it is an example of a ‘Record Talkie.’ The song was recorded onto an SP record and played simultaneously with the film. For the digital restoration of this film they took the 16mm print and added the soundtrack from the SP record. The match between character movement and the tempo of the music is quite good.

Ōfuji is generally credited with being a pioneer of chiyogami (traditional Japanese coloured paper) cutout animation. While aesthetically, this gives films like Mura Matsuri a very Japanese look, the choice of chiyogami may have been more practical than artistic. When Ōfuji began making chiyogami cutout animation in the 1920s celluloid was prohibitively expensive in Japan. The average animator really didn’t have access to celluloid until the mid-1930s. Cutout animation is also a less labour intensive method of animation that drawing on celluloid.

Even when celluloid became more widely available, Ōfuji continued to make chiyogami films. In an interview with Armen Boujikanian at Frames per second, Akira Tochiga points out that in his post-war career, Ōfuji used coloured cellophane instead of celludiod: “. . . because of the materiality of the [cellophane] paper, [he had] to find ways to economize the motion of the characters. And this seems very associative with TV animation. As you may know, when Osamu Tezuka started the program Astro Boy, thirty minutes of animation were aired on TV weekly. It was pretty hard to make original pictures for thirty minutes amount of work per week.” The economy of character movement later became a staple of TV anime in Japan, with animators like Tezuka animating only 8 pictures per second instead of 24 in order to save on time and money.

With films from the 1930s, one always looks for evidence of war propaganda. Although Mura Matsuri actively promotes Japanese culture, it is not classed as propaganda. It was produced a year before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and predates the widely acknowledged first official propaganda animation Momotaro’s Sky Adventure (空の桃太郎, Yasushi Murata, October 1931). According to the brochure for screenings at the Cinémathèque québécoise, the song was already popularly known through national school curriculum. When I watch old films I like to try to imagine the context in which they were originally screened. A light-hearted film, I imagine audiences singing and clapping along to Ōufuji’s delightful celebration of the harvest festival.

This film is available on DVDs offered by Digital Meme and Zakka Films.

Style of Kon Ichikawa - Art + CM + Animation

Japanese Movie

France Art Anime Kessakusen DVD Box [Limited Pressing]

Animation

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010