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Animation before the war: nation, identity, and modernity in Japan from 1914-1945

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Animation before the war: nation, identity, and modernity in Japan from 1914-1945

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ANIMATION BEFORE THE WAR:
NATION, IDENTITY, AND MODERNITY
IN JAPAN FROM 1914-1945
By
Annie Manion

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA-TELEVISION (CRITICAL STUDIES)

August 2014

Copyright 2013 Annie Manion

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project was many years in the making and I would like to express my gratitude for
everyone who lent me their support, patience, expertise, and generosity during the process of
researching and writing. First and foremost, I must thank my dissertation committee, Priya
Jaikumar, Clinton Godart, and especially my chair, Akira Lippit. Without their patience this
dissertation could not have come together and I am grateful for all their help and suggestions. In
addition, I would also like to thank Anne McKnight, Kristine Panushka, and Laura Serna, all of
whom offered me valuable advice and opportunities that helped me find direction along the way.
Thank you as well to Yuka Kumagai for her many years of Japanese language instruction while I
was at USC.
University staff also gave me their integral support. At the School of Cinematic Arts
Critical Studies Department, I would like to thank Linda Overholt, Kim Green, Jade Agua,
Christine Acham, William Whittington, and Alicia White for keeping me on track with my
paperwork and degree progress, and for the friendly smiles and conversation every time I came
into the office. Also, thanks to Grace Ryu at the East Asian Studies Center for shepherding me
through more than one fellowship application process.
Much of the research for this project was necessarily done in Japan, none of which would
have been possible without generous support for overseas research. I am especially thankful for
support from the Fulbright-Hays fellowship for the 2009-2010, and the combined support from
the ACE/Nikaido Summer Research Grant and the Visual Studies Certificate Summer Grant
from the University of Southern California Graduate School that allowed me to extend my
research into the summer. Successful navigation of the archives depended on the following
people. In particular, I give special thanks to Masato Hase at Waseda University for sponsoring

iii

during my year in Tokyo and to Araki Takuro for helping me get set up for research at the
Waseda libraries. Thank you to the faculty and staff at the Inter-University Center for hosting
me not once but twice for Japanese language instruction, especially for the personal guidance
from Sano Kaori the summer before entering the archives. And special thanks to Itakura
Fumiaki at the National Film Center for arranging an unprecedented four days of animation
screenings for me.
Last but not least, I’d like to thank my peers, the many people who were together with
me in the trenches, grinding through the their own doctoral courses and research while still
finding the time to look over my work and offer suggestions and advice. To Tom O’Leary, Chera
Kee, Casey Riffel, Alexander Chase, Ken Provencher, Michael Dillon, Brian Jacobsen, Josh
Moss, Noelia Saenz, Jennifer Black, Arunima Paul, Catherine Clark, Anjali Nath, Benjamin
Uchiyama, Tim Jones, Nick Kapur, Jennifer Miller, Michio Arimitsu, Craig Colbeck, May-yi
Shaw, Sean Callaghan, thank you for sharing classes and discussions, for opening up their homes
and schedules for dissertation writing groups, and for joining in with occasional but all-important
downtime.
And finally, to my husband and my family, thanks for being there through it all.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ii

List of Figures v

Abstract viii

Introduction. 1
Introduction Notes 36

Chapter One. Animation in Historical Context: Discourse and Industry 46
Chapter One Notes 74

Chapter Two. Plastic Modernity: The Animated Body and National Identity 80
Chapter Two Notes 142

Chapter Three. Animated Empire: The Spectacular Power of
Science and Technology 149
Chapter Three Notes 190

Conclusion. 193
Conclusion Notes 201

Bibliography 202

Films Referenced 215

v

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Jirô and Honjô look at a German bomber being retrofit in Japan 1

Figure 2 Advertisement from the Asahi newspaper for a festival of first run animated
sound films (January 1933) 5

Figure 3 Title page of the July 1934 issue of Film Criticism 5

Figure 4 New Year’s greeting from Mickey to Japan from January 1, 1936 6

Figure 5 Doraemon’s inauguration ceremony from March 19, 2008 11

Figure 6 Scenes from “The Scrolls of Frolicking Animals” 21

Figure 7 1917 comic of audience at an animated film from Terasaki article 66

Figure 8 Diagram of an animation table from Kitayama’s 1934 article 71

Figure 9 Screenshot from Fantasmagorie 89

Figure 10 Screenshot from Humorous Phases of Funny Faces 90

Figure 11 Momotarô stretches the demon’s horn in
Momotarô the Undefeated 107

Figure 12 Momotarô operates the periscope in Momotarô’s Sea Adventure 108

Figure 13 Momotarô pilots a fighter plane in Momotarô’s Sky Adventure 108

Figure 14 Ma-bô speaks to a native king in
Ma-bô Fights Hard in the South Seas 110

Figure 15 The butterfly begs the mouse to return her wings in
The Hapless Butterfly 114

Figure 16 The spider’s shadow looms over the ladybug in
The Spider and the Tulip 115

Figure 17 Chame brushes the lion logo on her toothpaste 117

Figure 18 Chame thanks her mother for the delicious breakfast 118

Figure 19 Her nose grows when she lies to her mother 119

Figure 20 Chame and her mother watch Kinue compete on screen 120

vi

Figure 21 Dankichi, wearing a crown, enjoys watching the
Olympic Games with island natives 123

Figure 22 Chinkoroheibei fights a cloud shaped like Popeye
with the Union Jack on its belly 130

Figure 23 A giant shark attacks Momotarô’s submarine 130

Figure 24 An eagle attacks from above in Momotarô’s Sky Adventure 130

Figure 25 “Mickey” and his army attack from above 133

Figure 26 A tanuki prepares bat in Our Baseball Game 139

Figure 27 The bullfrog contemplates the mysterious ball 140

Figure 28 Tarô plays a train game with his friends in the front yard 156

Figure 29 The train gets up and rolls out of the box 156

Figure 30 Animated Conductor Tarô speaks to a pair of hippos 156

Figure 31 The plane cabby flies around to look for a fare 160

Figure 32 In the city below him, animals obey traffic rules 160

Figure 33 A demon listens to the radio to relax 161

Figure 34 The monkeys prepare to drop bombs using their tails
as helicopter blades 164

Figure 35 A frightened enemy bomb balks in fear from the monkey troops 164

Figure 36 Screenshot from The Black Cat (Ôfuji, 1929) 173

Figure 37 Full-page ad for The Thief of Baguda Castle from
June 1 1926 issue of Film Report (Kinema Junpo) 175

Figure 38 Ôfuji’s film Cutout Urashima (Kirinuji Urashima, 1928)
Featured in a collage from August 18, 1928 issue of Film Report 179

Figure 39 Demons from Momotarô’s Sea Eagles run from the attack 181

Figure 40 Rotoscoped image of Momotarô’s aircraft carrier at daybreak 182

vii

Figure 41 Rabbit mechanics prepare Zero fighters for take-off 182

Figure 42 Rabbit signals from the tower using his ears as semaphore 183

Figure 43 Long shot of the aircraft carrier 183

Figure 44 Destroyed ships in the Demon Island bay 184

Figure 45 Sunken vessel 184

Figure 46 Dandelions float away. 185

Figure 47 Sailor with his younger brother enjoy a view of Mr. Fuji 186

Figure 48 Exotic “native” animals enjoy a Japanese alphabet lesson 187

Figure 49 Troops provide machine gun cover 188

Figure 50 A bombed out enemy tank 188

Figure 51 Japanese soldier prepares to deliver a killing blow 188

Figure 52 Dying demon, his horn obscured by his helmet 189

viii

ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a history of the early Japanese animation industry during the first half
of the twentieth century. Over the last thirty years, animation has come to be one of the primary
cultural exports coming out of Japan and the most visible example of Japanese soft power.
However, the discourse of Japanese animation, or anime, focuses primarily on anime as a
postwar object with roots in television and the American Occupation or as a pre-modern object
with aesthetic connections to traditional Japanese art forms such as scrolls and painting. I argue
that in addition to these pre-modern and postmodern influences, the current Japanese animation
industry has deep roots in modern imperialism that are still visible today, though they are often
overlooked.
This project is an effort to (re)introduce the modern period into the current discourse of
anime. Chapter one summarizes the structure and development of the early industry through the
critical discourse of animation. The early Japanese animation industry was heavily
marginalized. It developed under the shadow of Western animation as well as foreign and
domestic live action cinema. The industry did not develop beyond a small, boutique context
until after 1945. But in the eyes of animators and critics, animation was seen as a medium that
had unique value for reflecting the changing nature of modern life. The second chapter looks at
the films in more detail, analyzing the relationship of the animated body to Japanese national
identity under modernization and imperialism. The flexible, plastic bodies accommodated a
wide range of ethnic and cultural identities that were sometimes contradictory as they relate to
the nation. In chapter three, the focus is on the technology of animation, both on screen and
behind the scenes. Animated film was part of a larger trend in popular culture that worked to
normalize the more extreme elements of violence and death that are inherent to imperialism.

ix

Technological spectacle through animated film played a role in transforming imperialism into
consumer culture for much of the prewar period. The conclusion considers the consistencies and
differences of the contemporary animation industry with the early pre-war industry in order to
track the deeper ideological issues that might still be at work.

1

INTRODUCTION.

This last year, Miyazaki Hayao, head of Studio Ghibli and the director of Academy-
Award winning Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, 2003), released what is
purported to be his final film before retirement. The film is called The Wind Rises (Kaze
Tachinu, 2013) and depicts the life of Horikoshi Jirô, the chief engineer of the team that designed
the infamous Japanese Zero fighter plane. (Fig. 1) At one point in the film, Jirô and his best
friend Honjô have been sent to Germany to study the latest in Nazi aeronautics. An aggressive
German soldier blocks their efforts, refusing to give them access to the airplanes and machinery
they have come all the way to see. After a frustrating meeting, Jirô and Honjô walk the snowy
streets and have a brief conversation about what little they were able to glean from the visit.
Honjô laments that Japanese technology is so backward. Complaining that they are already
decades behind the innovations they glimpsed in the German hanger, he wonders whether Japan
will ever be able to “catch up,” concerned that if it does not Japan does not stand a chance for the
future.

Figure 1 Jirô and Honjô look at a German bomber being retrofit in Japan

2

The subject matter of Miyazaki’s final film was met with some surprise. Though almost
all of Miyazaki’s films feature some form of flight, to date the majority if his work features
adolescent female protagonists in a coming of age narrative. His films are often set in dreamlike
fantasy spaces or anachronistic historical time periods. The Wind Rises represents one of the few
instances in which Miyazaki chose to base his film not only on a male lead, but also in historical
events that do not easily lend themselves to artistic interpretation. The Wind Rises is not the first
time that Japanese animators have approached the memory of the Second World War. That
ground has been tread before by films such as Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen, Mori, 1983),
based on a manga that depicted the events surrounding the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and
Takahata Isao’s 1988 film Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka). But these films focus on the
final years of the war and showcase to varying degrees the prevailing narrative of victim’s
history and violence enacted on the Japanese.
1
In contrast, Wind depicts the years leading up to
the war, openly navigating the decades of Japanese imperialism and fascism that culminated in
total war only at the end of the 1930s. It occupies a more ambivalent space, one that is not
willing to assign blame for the war, but which struggles to condemn fighting and violence from
an abstracted space once removed from the reality of the battlefront. In Miyazaki’s eyes,
Horikoshi “only wanted to make something beautiful” and that it was not the engineer’s fault
that his airplanes were used as weapons of war.
2
Though Miyazaki’s decision to make a film
about fighter planes may seem out of place in the current environment, a strange addition out of
place both with his own oeuvre as well as with other animated films that remember the Japanese
experience of the War, it harkens back to much older, deeply ingrained tendencies in animated
film that relate back to the earliest years of the industry. The roots of the animation industry are
intertwined with Japan’s history of modernization and imperialism. This history has been

3

obscured for much of the postwar period, but films like The Wind Rises remind us that it is still
there, just beneath the surface.
There is still much that is not known about the early animation industry and its
development through the Taishô period (1912-1926) and into the early Showa period (1926-
1945) of Japanese history. This absence can be explained in some part by the relative dearth of
archival material. Many of the films produced during this period were lost over the years to
everything from disaster and warfare to sheer neglect. The same might be said for domestically
produced live-action films from the end of the nineteenth century into the 1930s, but in the case
of mainstream cinema, the industry left behind a trail of peripheral traces, for example
screenplays, movie programs and film reviews, that allow researchers to build a more thorough
picture of the films themselves as well as the infrastructures that supported them. Animation at
this time, however, did not leave comparable traces, not only because there was even less of an
effort to preserve its ephemera, but also because even in its own national context, domestic
animation was highly marginalized.
The sheer lack of historical evidence, however, can only go so far towards explaining the
limited number of histories about early Japanese animation. It would seem that a thorough film
history of animation would be a welcome addition to the literature, particularly given the close
relationship that film histories have with national histories.
3
However, the marginalized position
of domestic animation in pre-war popular culture does not translate easily into a narrative of
power and positive international reception. The filmic and aesthetic techniques developed by
local animators were innovative and often quite beautiful, but some, like silhouette films (kage-e
eiga), were adapted from techniques developed in the US or Europe, while others, such as
chiyogami animation, were never adopted outside of Japan.
4
Japanese animated films did not

4

receive widespread global distribution outside of the empire in the pre-war period.
5
The majority
of domestic animated films were not reviewed in newspapers or film publications; this was an
honor reserved only for the highest profile animators or feature films. Likewise, film magazines
and general newspapers rarely carried advertising for domestic animated films. Because the
films themselves were often short and educational in nature, they did not always play in first-run
theaters, but rather in small theaters devoted to running newsreels or small-gauge film.
Comparatively, the American animation industry from the 1920s to the 1940 was
experiencing what has been described as a “golden age” in which commercial techniques
developed by Americans were gradually becoming the mainstream global standard and
American content was exported to movie-going audiences all over the world.
6
Even within
Japan, one of the few nations to have a functioning animation industry before the 1960s, Western
films and characters were high profile. Animation from many different nations was imported to
and released in Japan, but American animation was by far the most common and available.
Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailorman, and Mickey Mouse films were particularly popular, and these
characters appear regularly in reviews and critical articles about animation as a medium as a
reference point for the readers.
7
Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney were popular celebrities whose
appearance in print media was common, and sometimes even exemplary of the medium.
8
(Fig.
2-4) Animation as a medium was simultaneously ubiquitous and marginalized in pre-war Japan,
a visual form of expression that would have been familiar to most of the movie-going public, but
which occupied a much smaller portion of the media landscape than competitors such as film,
radio, and print.

5

Figure 2 Advertisement from the Asahi newspaper for a festival of
first run animated sound films (January 1933)

Figure 3 Title page of the July 1934 issue of Film Criticism

6

Figure 4 New Year’s greeting from Mickey to Japan from January 1, 1936
The contemporary discourse of anime studies reveals patterns that increasingly associate
anime with postmodern culture on the one hand and ancient tradition on the other.
9
For some,
anime is popular because it is at the cutting edge of media development.
10
Producers, studios
and fan communities are taking advantage of the latest in information or digital technologies to
make and consume anime, while the content also often represents futuristic spaces that question
the role of media and technology in society. In other words, anime appeals to contemporary
audiences for its ability to express a shared postmodern experience.
For others, anime also represents the genealogical descendent of classical Japanese
aesthetics and style, and is appealing for the ways that this lineage differentiates it from the
dominant entertainment paradigms coming out of Hollywood.
11
In this respect, anime is made to
resist cultural and geopolitical hierarchies of culture that continue to privilege the West through a
strong emphasis with its aboriginal roots in Japanese tradition. Connecting anime in an unbroken
line to ancient art forms such as emaki and ukiyo-e does more than define anime as a branch of
Japanese national cinema. Soft power discourse heightens the importance of anime’s cultural

7

origins, because in order for Japan to claim ownership over the cultural appeal of anime, it must
first be established that anime is unequivocally Japanese. By linking anime’s visual style to
Japanese art and history, it is possible to strengthen the association of anime with Japanese
culture and prevent it from becoming diluted by associations with other countries in Asia, thus
allowing Japan to maintain the geopolitical soft power that is gained through anime’s popularity.
The prominence of soft power discourse in the growing field of anime studies
inadvertently distances anime from the context of mechanical motion picture technology at the
beginning of the twentieth century as well as from the political context of the prewar empire. It
begins to seem as though anime is a product of post-war reconstruction and economic recovery, a
more recent medium than it actually is, or else it is a very old medium with unbroken ties to an
unchanging aesthetic past. While anime can and should be associated with new technologies and
it does represent a negotiation with long-standing Japanese aesthetic traditions into contemporary
tastes, it is also a form of motion picture. As such it is as much beholden to the history of
cinema as it is to the histories of television or Japanese-style painting. The complex negotiation
and re-negotiation between producers, consumer and objects cannot be made fully apparent
while our understanding of anime is linked to a construct of animation which does not take into
account the powerful influence of modern cinema.
At the time of its inception, cinema represented a new mode of looking at the world. It
provided the viewer a mode with the pÔtential to alter, or even enhance, an individual’s
perception of reality. Motion picture was simultaneously scientific and magical, a manipulation
of light and shadow that allowed visual reproduction to more closely resemble real life than any
technology had offered before.
12
As different as it may seem from cinema shot with indexical
photography in real time, animation was a part of that new mode of viewing. In the earliest days

8

of motion picture, there were no clear-cut boundaries between the two media. Much may be said
today, with the reliance of mainstream cinema on computer graphics and animated effects, but in
the contemporary media environment, there are assumptions in place about what animation is
and what it can or should do. The emerging field of animation studies is actively engaged in the
process of distinguishing cinema from animation, struggling to create borders around an object
that has hitherto defied classification.
There is a great deal of slippage between the terms “cinema” and “animation.”
13
There
are no hard and fast rules that distinguish one from the other. Some, like Rudolph Arnheim,
consider animation to be a type of cinema, applying a particularly broad definition of cinema that
is not tied up in photographic recording.
14
Later animation scholars such as Alan Cholodenko
contend that all cinema is in fact animation, considering that animation can be applied to pre-
cinematic machines and types of motion picture that are again not dependent on photography or
projection.
15
Oftentimes the differences between animation and cinema are less aesthetic as they
are practical, and related to how each medium is produced. In addition, the concept of indexical
recording and the relationship of the image to reality or realism are important points that differ
between the two.
16
For the purposes of this research and the sake of clarity, “cinema” is used as
shorthand to refer to live-action motion picture shot in real time using indexical photography.
“Animation” refers to motion picture that is shot frame by frame and which may or may not have
an intermediary object, for example clay sculpture or drawings
This project is an attempt to shift the perspective in order to highlight aspects of anime
and its historical development that have not yet received much attention. Although soft power
discourse is not the sole focus of anime studies to date, it has nonetheless influenced the
direction of the conversation to the extent that certain elements, such as culture, consumption,

9

fandom and post-war technologies, have been emphasized over others. I do not wish to reject
soft power discourse and its influence on anime studies as much as add complexity through
historical contextualization and media specificity.

Anime and Soft Power: from Pre-modern to Postmodern

The global fad for Japanese consumer goods that began in the 1990s sparked a wave of
interest in exploring and understanding Japanese popular culture. Anime, or Japanese animation,
has been at the heart of the popularity for so-called “J-pop” culture, as one of the first objects to
be widely distributed on both domestic and international markets that would also come to be
recognizably Japanese in origin. Although Japan boasts the second largest animation industry in
the world after the United States, for much of the twentieth century, the export of Japanese
content was largely invisible. Industry practices such as labor outsourcing and localization
effectively disguised the national and cultural origins of the majority of the animated films and
television series exported from Japan.
17
In fact, through much of the post-war period of
economic growth and recovery, Japan was considered a nation that wielded very little “soft
power”, due to the pervasive stereotype of Japanese uniqueness and cultural inaccessibility.
18

But that image changed quickly and drastically over the turn of the twenty-first century, as multi-
media franchises such as Pokemon, Yu-gi-oh and Naruto became lucrative, popular and familiar
to audiences the world over. By the early 2000s, Japanese animated cartoons dominated the US
airwaves, and were broadcast in over 68 countries.
19
In 2003, director Miyazaki Hayao’s film
Spirited Away became the first Japanese film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated
Feature, suggesting that in the eyes of both critics and everyday consumers that Japanese
animation had finally arrived, and could be recognized as an object with aesthetic, cultural and
financial value.

10

As a result of anime’s newfound value, Japanese institutions began to formally recognize
anime as an example of national culture. For example, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA)
implemented a loosely-defined policy of “pop–culture diplomacy” in order to take advantage of
a variety of J-pop media for the sake of “promoting a positive image of Japan abroad.”
20
In
2008, the beloved character Doraemon, a robot cat first introduced through a popular manga
series in the late 1960s before becoming the center of an anime franchise that would endure to
the present day, was inaugurated as the first “anime ambassador.”
21
(Fig. 5) The Japan National
Tourism Organization includes an “invitation to an ‘otaku’ tour” as one of several “exotic
experiences” open to foreign travelers. Additionally, the Ministry of Industry and Trade (METI)
is promoting a “Cool Japan” policy as one of their recovery efforts since the Tsunami Disaster in
2011.
22
The gradual inclusion of anime into cultural policy has not been focused or organized;
in fact the ongoing controversy over the use of government funding for the sake of a nationally
supported anime and manga archive demonstrates that there are those who do not feel that pop
culture can or should represent national identity.
23
But the growing sense of comfort in and
around using anime to demonstrate Japanese soft power, cultural appeal and economic
development suggests that the attitude towards anime as an object and animation as a medium
has begun to change. In the few short decades since the 1990s, anime has gone from being an
obscure object familiar only to a subcultural audience to a formal representation of Japan
national identity on the global cultural stage.

11

Figure 5 Doraemon’s inauguration ceremony on March 19, 2008
Anime studies to date has been primarily engaged in defining its two primary
components, namely what is Japanese about Japanese animation, and what is anime itself.
24
The
late 1990s marked a moment when the popularity of anime coincided with the revitalization of
the mainstream animation market and the introduction of 3D animation technology, which
allowed for a greater range of animated special effects. It also came on the heels of a particularly
tense moment in US-Japan relations, as the two nations wrestled with trade embargoes and the
renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty. The Japanese economy was also at the beginning of its
long-term economic downturn, which resulted in the steady decline in industries key to the
economic development of post-war Japan. Combined with the long-standing postwar image of
Japan as a nation with little to no soft power or cultural influence abroad, these factors
contributed to the importance that anime has had in contemporary discourses of international
relations, business and Japanese national identity.
The scholarly discourse around anime takes place in the context of long-standing cultural
hierarchies that are based in postcolonial power structures. The global cultural distribution still
favors the West. In the realm of animation, Hollywood is an unavoidably dominant presence.
As a result the popularity of anime all over the world, including Western countries, made people

12

wonder if those hierarchies had begun to change. As Brown notes in the introduction to his
edited collection Cinema Anime:
One of the most important questions for anime scholars is whether the dissemination of Japanese
media worldwide marks the emergence of a new form of cultural imperialism (or form of
‘invisible colonization’
25
that is simply a variation on the American cultural export industry, or
whether anime’s status as a transnational “edge culture,” which frequently questions the status quo
while at the same time lacking clearly identifiable Japanese national, racial, or ethnic markers
(referred to by Japanese commentators as anime’s quality of being mukokuseki or “without
nationality”) undercuts (or at least complicates) the reconstruction of Japanese national/cultural
identity through its very participation in the decentralized networks of media globalization and
global capitalism.
26

The cultural hegemony of the West over the East is well documented.
27
But examples of Eastern
culture that were able to gain a foothold in a Western consumer market are more rare.
28
This
leads to the hope that the popularity of Japanese pop culture, of which anime is the “undoubted
captain of the…team,”
29
could indicate a shift towards a different center of power. That anime
could be popular and garner a high level of critical acclaim on such a wide-spread level went
against preconceived ideas both about Japanese content, as too unique to appeal across national
borders, and animated content, as a lesser quality medium best suited for children.
In the same way that there is a hierarchical dynamic assigned to culture based on its
national or regional origins, there is also a cultural hierarchy inherent to the type of media as they
relate to class and institutionalized high art. As a medium, animation conventionally carries less
cultural capital than cinema.
30
Animation as a whole has been measured against cinema, which
forms the roots of a film studies canon that emphasize the indexical photographic image. It is
only recently that animation has begun to gain value as an art form, due in no small part to its
high visibility in the mainstream, blockbuster film industry. The importance of animated special
effects and visual quality of three-dimensional computer rendering have distanced animation
from the negative connotation of inexpensive television cartoons meant primarily for children.

13

This has led to the uneasy position of animation studies within the film studies canon. As
Maureen Furniss puts it:
The denigrated status of Animation Studies in the university is largely due to the belief held in
many that animation is not a ‘real’ art form because it is too popular, too commercialized, or too
closely associated with ‘fandom’ or youth audiences to be taken seriously by scholars. This
impression is faulty because there is a wide range of animation that is not commercially – or child-
oriented and, in any case, these areas also merit study.
31

This stereotype comes out the complex interaction between the physical and technical realities of
producing animated film, its inevitable comparison with hegemonic live-action cinema and the
ongoing institutional standards set by vague, class-based, taste-culture hierarchies. Thompson
describes the rise of the two-dimensional cell-animation process that dominated the animation
industry for decades until the advent of computer technology. The American commercial
industry set the standard of production because it was the most streamlined and most prolific in
the years before television. These films were exported everywhere around the world, and had a
huge influence on international production as well, as foreign produces, including Japanese,
worked to reproduce the same visual effect. After the release of Snow White (Disney, 1937), a
self-consciously photorealistic film that used the full range of Technicolor and the multiplanar
camera to mimic the indexical qualities of cinema, photorealism became the standard of quality
for animation. By this measure, animation is at its best the more it resembles live-action cinema,
creating a cultural hierarchy that places cinema and its proximity to reality and accurate
reproduction at the top.
32
The fact that animation rather than live-action cinema was earning an
unprecedented level of positive criticism also seemed to indicate a paradigm shift in which
entertainment might no longer be dominated by live-action media. It went against preconceived
notions of animated media, an environment dominated by the US and by low-quality television
content for children, and as such it needed to be explained.

14

More often than not, anime’s global appeal is located in its perceived relationship with
postmodern culture.
33
In his now infamous article, McGray quips “Japan was postmodern before
postmodern was cool,” building from a quoted comment by media studies professor Ueno
Toshiya that Japan entered the postmodern age following the First World War.
34
Japan becomes
a futuristic space, particularly as it relates to technological developments, representations of
technology and the integration of that technology into the rhythms and structures of everyday
life. But it is also identified with a shared postmodern, postindustrial, and post-traumatic
experience. According to some, this is the source of its appeal for non-Japanese audiences as
well as the particularly future oriented pÔtential of animation. In this respect, animation
becomes transparent; a window through which to see postmodern culture rather than an object
with mass and form that exerts influences of its own.
For example, Napier wonders if “it may be that animation in general—and perhaps anime
in particular—is the ideal artistic vehicle for expressing the hopes and nightmares of our uneasy
contemporary world.”
35
She does not go on to unpack the role that animation plays in expressing
this uneasy world, instead focusing on anime as an object that arises out of Japanese cultural
conditions. She organizes anime into thematic modes, such as apocalyptic, elegiac and matsuri
or festive. Each can be traced to origins in postwar Japanese culture, such as the post-traumatic
experience of the atomic bombs or the need to resist the master narrative of hard work and study
for the sake of economic recovery. She also argues that
the world of anime itself occupies its own space that is not necessarily coincident with that of
Japan…animated space has the pÔtential to be context free, drawn wholly out of the animator’s or
artist’s mind. It is thus a particularly apt candidate for participation in a transnational, stateless
culture.
36

The medium of animation is a window that allows for Japanese culture to represent something
“transnational” and “stateless” and it is that element of anime that is being consumed by non-

15

Japanese. Anne Allison also locates the appeal of anime in shared postmodern infrastructures.
Discussing the success of Spirited Away (2001) over Miyazaki’s earlier film Princess Mononoke,
Allison states “both (the American and Japanese audiences) brought to (the film) shared
experiences…of living in a world conditioned by post-industrialism, global capitalism, and-as
their contingent effects-dislocation, anxiety, and flux.”
37
It is not only these dystopic themes that
appeal to audiences on both sides of the Pacific, according to Allison, but also the aesthetic of
cuteness inherent in much of the anime geared towards children, that can act as a balm for that
sense of dislocation and anxiety.
38

Anime is also linked to the postmodern through its modes of consumption. This
discourse has focused largely on so-called “otaku”, or “anime geeks”, who participate heavily in
fan culture in addition to watching a great deal of animated content. Children and youth culture
have also been the focus of anime-based ethnographic studies of anime. Azuma Hiroki’s book,
Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, uses otaku culture to analyze two characteristics of
postmodernism: the breakdown of master narratives and Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra. His
work has been very influential, even though it is less ethnography of fan behavior as it is an
application of postmodern theory in a contemporary “real-life” setting. It nonetheless
demonstrates the usefulness of anime culture for again exploring postmodern flows of culture
and practice.
39
Fans are recognized for being new media explorers, among the first to use digital
media and the Internet to teach, share information, and express increasingly complex,
fragmented identities.
40
Less technology-based practices such as cosplay are understood as
expressions of personal identity that resist (or reinforce) group identities based in gender or
nationhood. Fandom is also recognized as an example of time-space compression, due to their
prowess at making foreign culture available worldwide in a fraction of the time that it takes

16

formal distribution channels to disseminate content.
41
The focus on fan culture comes out of the
desire to explain anime’s popularity from the point of view of non-Japanese who actively
consume it. They create the sense of a global community interested in Japanese culture,
supplying the proof in the eyes of some critics that anime can and does indeed translate into a
form of soft power.
42

Technology is another important theme in contemporary anime studies, one that not only
emphasizes anime’s relationship with the postmodern, but that also inadvertently reinforces a
techno-oriental image of Japan as an exotic futuristic space.
43
More often than not, technology
in anime is approached through representation, that is, how technology appears on the screen.
This is in some part related to the association of anime with science fiction. While anime offers
a wide variety of genres, science fiction and children’s media were among the first to be
discovered by the West, and discussions of these two genres tend to dominate the literature.
Steven Brown discusses the film Ghost in the Shell 2 (Oshii, 2004) and the TV series Serial
Experiments Lain, for example, comparing cyborgs with dolls as he seeks a post-humanist
approach to understanding technology.
The focus on technological representation is beginning to change, however, a handful of
more recent literature has begun to see animation as more than the transparent window into
Japanese culture or postmodern experience, instead incorporating the medium itself as a
technology and an industrial infrastructure more directly into the discussion.
44
Thomas
Lamarre’s book, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, seeks to integrate on-
screen technological representation with behind-the-screen creation of the image as well as the
meta-machine that produces and supports the production and consumption of anime.
45
Marc
Steinberg has a similarly integrated argument centered more specifically on the technique of

17

limited animation rather than the medium as a whole.
46
In addition to addressing the media
specificity of anime in an effort to track its influence on convergence culture, Steinberg
historicizes his argument, tracking the origins of the current structure of media mixing to the
early 1960s and Tezuka Osamu’s Mushi Productions.
While these studies are a step towards understanding anime as animated motion picture
technology, they still display bent towards postwar development and understanding anime in the
context of continual newness.
47
Lamarre begins his book with a reference to early cinema and its
relationship with train travel, but works his way back to digital and computer technology for the
majority of the book, and Steinberg roots his argument in the television industry. There is still
much to be learned about how anime relates to earlier forms of motion picture, and its roots in
cinematic technologies. The emphasis on soft power and the J-pop boom distract from studies of
anime from the point of view of its medium because of the importance of establishing that anime
is an object that is inextricably linked with Japanese culture. Should anime as a term come to
refer to a particular type of visual style, for example, or a specific type of serialized storytelling,
then it becomes more difficult to explain how or why it reflects positively for Japan in ways that
can actively benefit Japanese diplomacy or business interests. In fact, anime studies is as much
characterized by unease and criticism as it is by the hopeful charge that Japanese pop culture
represents a shift in the dominant paradigms of global cultural exchange.
At the same time that anime can be described as appealing, lucrative and dominant, at
least in the Asian region, there are also those who have misgivings about the nature of soft power
and whether or not a popular cultural product actually translates into political power. Leheny
demonstrates that the Japanese enthusiasm over pop cultural success is understandable, it is not
clear that Japanese pop culture will actually become hegemonic, nor is it clear how this can help

18

to resolve some of Japan’s ongoing social and political problems, such as the economic
recession, shrinking birthrate etc.
48
Yano demonstrates that Japanese pop culture was met with
negative as well as positive evaluation, linking negative press reports and media panics to
lingering Western stereotypes of orientalism and the Yellow Peril.
49
Her point is that even
though popularity can create a more positive image of Japan and work against stereotypes,
Japanese media can also be perceived as a threat to the cultural integrity of other nations. In the
eyes of the popular press, cosplay, the practice of wearing costumes to look like one’s favorite
fictional characters, and other fan behaviors can as easily be interpreted as perverse as they can
liberating and refreshingly queer.
50
Perhaps the most influential of these voices is Iwabuchi
Koichi, who has for a long time disagreed with the notion that anime has the ability to
disseminate Japanese culture.
51
He cannot deny that anime is popular, but he believes that
animation is too easily adapted to local culture, and does not carry the cultural impact of a live-
action film. Rather than a challenge to Hollywood and Western cultural hegemony, Iwabuchi
sees the popularity of anime as a step backwards, in which Japanese culture is actually made
more invisible by the culturally odorless aspects of cuteness and animation.
Iwabuchi’s criticism that anime as inherently mukokuseki (nationality-less) can be read as
a criticism of animation (and its siblings manga comics and video games) as a medium. His
discomfort with anime stems from its lack of a one to one indexical relationship with culture. He
acknowledges that Pokémon is popular and influential, but questions whether or not that appeal
can really be traced to Japanese culture, if it is a “de-ethnicized and cultureless, virtual version of
Japan” that Western audiences have come to appreciate.
52
For Iwabuchi, culture is bound up
with “bodily, racial, and ethnic characteristic,”
53
elements that are lacking in the majority of
cultural products that are popularly exported from Japan. This is a criticism of what he sees to

19

be a “chauvinistic, self-praising discourse in Japan” that is “flush with national pride.”
54
But his
criticism reveals more than his disdain for social critics who were willing to praise a product that
had previously held little appeal. It is also a discomfort with animation’s lack of an indexical
interface with Japanese culture.
Anime is therefore an inefficient representative of Japanese culture abroad. His argument
is not necessarily unfounded. The lack of racial or bodily referents to Japanese culture can and
does make it more palatable to foreign audiences, in addition to the fact that animation is more
easily dubbed, edited, or airbrushed to accommodate local tastes than its live-action counterparts.
Likewise, Japanese studios are dependent on Western (and in particular American) distributors
for the legal distribution of their content, which undermines the pÔtential of these media to grant
any real shift in power.
55
But this does not necessarily mean that animation is devoid of cultural
markers. Rather, it is necessary to further unpack the nature of animation and determine where
the cultural elements might emerge outside of the one-to-one ratio of indexical recording.
In the context of anime and its negative evaluation, both based in stereotypes of
animation and its failures as a cultural object it becomes necessary to clean up anime’s image in
order for it to operate effectively as soft power. Even if anime were unimportant to diplomacy
and cultural policy, some effort would be required in order to elevate anime about the common
stereotype of animation and the negative qualities specifically associated with anime. One of the
rhetorical tactics that has been used is to emphasize the allegiance that anime has with pre-
modern art and aesthetics. This is a way to distance animation from the more troubling
associations associated with technology or fandom, and ally it instead with the qualities of
institutional high art. It is also a way to secure the cultural origins of anime by demonstrating
clear examples of cultural odor through tradition, elements that are not modern and faceless

20

enough to be shared with other countries in Asia or in the West. It also serves to further distance
anime from conventional, mainstream image of Western “cartoons,” create a brand of quality
that is specifically tied to Japanese culture.
One of the most common rhetorical tactics that has been used is to emphasize the
allegiance that anime has with pre-modern art and aesthetics.
56
This is a way to distance
animation from the pÔtentially negative evaluation via the association with technology or
fandom, and ally it instead with the qualities of institutional high art. It is also a way to secure
the cultural origins of anime by demonstrating clear examples of cultural odor through tradition,
elements that are not modern and faceless enough to be shared with other countries in Asia or in
the West. It also serves to further distance anime from conventional, mainstream image of
Western “cartoons” and create a brand of quality that is more than animation has received in the
past. For example, animator Takahata Isao, one half of the famous Studio Ghibli team, interprets
the Scroll of Frolicking Animals (Chôjû-jinbutsu-giga) from the Heian period (794 CE-1185 CE)
as “twelfth century animation.”
57
(Fig. 6) The scrolls would be unrolled one “frame” at a time by
the reader, in an early form of cinematic motion picture in which the apparatus of motion is the
human body itself. Aside from an interesting means of expanding what is meant by “animation,”
his argument also allies the medium with an object that is recognized as a national treasure. It
also sidesteps any concerns of the cultural legitimacy or cultural origins of animation, by giving
Japanese animation a lineage that can be traced from within the cultural and national boundaries
of Japan. Papp offers a similar argument tracing a genealogy of monster imagery from the
prehistoric Jômon period (14,000 BCE – 300 BCE) to postwar manga artist Mizuki Shigeru.
58

Murakami Takahashi defined superflatness as a unique aspect inherent to Japanese art, using a
comparison between seventeenth century screen paintings with the animated film in order to

21

demonstrate the timelessness of the superflat aesthetic.
59
In all three of these examples, anime is
not only put into a direct comparison with highly regarded works of high art, it is also framed as
an inherited visual genealogy. This emphasizes anime’s roots in pre-modern Japanese culture,
not only promoting anime as a quality medium, but also establishing more clear-cut cultural
origins.

Figure 6 Scene from “The Scrolls of Frolicking Animals”
This is not to say that there is no value in locating the cultural roots of Japanese animated
film in earlier forms of visual expression. In some respect, it acts as an entry into exploring the
nature of animation and how it may differ from cinema. Takahata’s work in particular stands as
an interesting exploration into the nature of animation outside of the context of the cinematic
apparatus, providing non-technological links with cinematic modes of viewing. Nonetheless, it
is possible to draw that connection too far, in the process obscuring the technological roots of
contemporary animation, which cannot and does not exist outside of the apparatus of cinema.
The aesthetic roots of anime in traditional artworks are true and unavoidable, but constructing
the aesthetic traditions as unbroken genealogies or lineages suggests a teleological progression
that fails to imagine a broader understanding of anime.

By comparing visual or narrative
elements that appear to have changed very little over time, it conveys an image of Japanese

22

culture that is timeless and resistant to the fits and starts of modern identity building and change.
Studies such as this, however, distract from the fact that animation in this context is a form of
technology, equally as dependent on cameras and machines as live-action cinema. It may be true
that is possible to animate images without the intervention of a mechanical device, as is the case
not only with scrolls but also with pre-cinematic devices such as the zoetrope, but contemporary
anime is as much a product of cinema as it is pre-modern experiments in creating motion picture,
and it is important that this not be overlooked.
In addition to obscuring animation’s roots in modern cinema, the current discourse also
downplays the legacy of Japanese imperialism. It is also important to consider the legacy of
empire as it relates to the contemporary popularity of anime in Asia and the West. The lack of
attention devoted to the history of anime in the modern period also distracts from pÔtentially
troubling parallels between imperial expansion in the twentieth century and the growth of soft
power in the twenty-first. The consumption of anime in places like Korea, China, Manchuria and
Taiwan, former colonies of Japan, is treated as a positive thing, a means for these nations to
improve their diplomatic relationships with Japan and for Japan to change its image from
negative to positive through popular culture.
60

The consumption of Japanese goods and media in Asia is explained through a shared
postwar experience of recovery that eschews the more recent tension of Japanese empire and the
Pacific War (1941-1945). Iwabuchi approached his research with the legacy of wartime
aggression specifically in mind, seeking a reason for the popularity of Japanese television dramas
and pop music stars in the formerly occupied regions of Taiwan and Hong Kong. He found that
Asian consumers felt an affiliation for the familiar form of modern living they found in Japanese
media that was not available to them in Western media. Similarly, Shiraishi links the appeal of

23

Doraemon, the same anime series promoted by MOFA through pop culture diplomacy in China,
Korea, and Taiwan in the 1970s, to a desire in those nations to consume a recognizable form of
modern consumer affluence. According to her, Doraemon was attractive because he represented
a non-threatening, consumer-based, technological future that came out of a familiar Asian
tradition rather than a Western one. He represented the level of automation and affluence to
which the rest of Asia aspired and Japan had already achieved.
61
The emphasis of the shared
Asian experience is that of postwar growth and economic development.
62

One of the reasons anime has been an important medium in Japan in the postwar period is
the role it has played in recording and processing public memory and the shared trauma of World
War II. But much of the literature thus far has focused primarily on how anime represents the
Japanese experience of the war and the lingering cultural impact of the atomic bomb on visual
culture.
63
There has been less focus on aspects of the wartime and postwar experience that
cannot be shared, and the dynamics of power that underlie the current patterns of outsourcing
and distribution. The acceptance of Japanese pop culture in its former colonies is a positive
suggestion that the scars are beginning to heal, but there does need to be a greater accounting for
the negative histories that have not been entirely forgotten. In the current climate of
globalization and transnationalism, the imperial legacy is an uncomfortable topic that still has the
capacity to derail diplomatic talks and create international conflict.
64
Pre-war animation cannot
be extricated from Japan’s imperial history, and as such it does not fit neatly into the type of
national narrative that emphasize pacifism, victimization, and post-war growth that so readily
apparent in contemporary anime and anime studies.
There is a growing body of literature that is slowly piecing together the early modern
history of the Japanese animation industry, but it is still in the very early stages. This is in no

24

small part due to the fragmented state of the archive. Because so many of the films have been
lost and animation lacks the same kind of print record that has supported studies of early cinema,
histories of Japanese animation have made do with that is available and subsequently are widely
scattered and methodologically diverse. During the pre-war period, there were rare anecdotal
histories written by the animators themselves, particularly in the 1930s.
65
But after that it was
not until the 1960s that an interest in recounting animation history began to re-emerge. Film
Criticism (Eiga Hyôron) ran a comprehensive eight-part history of animation by Mori Takuya in
1962 that focused primarily on American animation, but included brief mention of the pre-war
industry and wartime production.
66
The emphasis of Mori’s history in this case was more to
introduce a reader who may have been unfamiliar with animation to the medium’s greater
international history rather than to showcase Japanese achievement within a global context.
Even the last three sections, which focus on the postwar period, heavily feature the different
styles and technical advances being made in the United States and Europe at the time. In 1978,
Watanabe and Yamaguchi published the invaluable Japanese Animation Film History (Nihon
Animêshon Eiga-shi).
67
This is still one of the most comprehensive histories of Japanese
animation. Because Yamaguchi was himself an animator, however, much of the book is written
from memory and it bears an anecdotal tone and very little citation. More recently, Tsuguta
Nobuyuki has been working on publishing histories of early animation. He takes an auteur-
based approach oriented around the most prolific and influential pre-war animators whose work
has been better preserved over time.
68

Brief accounts of animation appear in histories about specific themes in early film
studies. For example, High briefly mentions animated propaganda films in his history of
Japanese film during the Fifteen Years’ War.
69
High’s account of the role of animation in

25

wartime cinema is very brief, and largely consists of comparing Japanese propaganda animation
with American propaganda animation, leading him to the conclusion that Japanese animation at
the time was subtler and less violent than its American counterpart. Tanaka’s history of
educational films includes enough information about animation to expand on this idea by
providing some more background and detail to idea of propaganda films. Even before the
beginning of the war, animated film in Japan fit into an educational context, which lent itself
easily to promoting the war effort.
70
Neither of these histories illustrate the lack of archival
evidence, however, which is something that Clements struggles to address in a recent article
about educational films used for the purpose of training military servicemen.
71
His article
approaches the gaps in the archive, acknowledging the fact that none of the films he is discussing
have survived, only a vague record of their production. Ultimately, his argument is simply to
state that these gaps exist, but they do not mean that writing animation history need necessarily
be inaccessible to the contemporary scholar.
More recent work seeks to integrate an understanding of pre-war animation as a medium
with the complexities of its time period. Constructed binaries between East and West, modern
and tradition, exert an unavoidable influence in this context. These approaches are oriented
primarily around one or two surviving films, but they work outwardly to encompass more of the
integrated context of animation history. For example, Akita Takahiro has published two articles
about early animation that deal primarily with the relationship of animated film to the modern
Japanese experience in the 1920s and 1930s.
72
His conclusion, however, that pre-war animated
films are collective dreams about Japan’s ancient past rather than an expression of a modern
future is perhaps too much rooted in an understanding of animation which highlights content and
the act of drawing over the mechanics of photographing and projecting a moving image. In spite

26

of the fact that the films Akita discusses are based in a jazzy modern rhythm, depicting animals
teaching each other modern games and sports, he sees animated films as nostalgic dreams of the
lost past. His conclusions are based in the fact that the visual design of the animal characters
mimics the style of the same scrolls that Takahata cites as early animation, “The Scroll of
Frolicking Animals”, indicating to Akita an inability of modern Japanese to shake their desire for
traditional culture. Miyao Daisuke frames binary tensions as an ongoing negotiation. His work
provides crucial international context for pre-war animated film, acknowledging the pÔtential for
transnational cultural exchange as early as the late 1920s. Both his article about the animated
remake of Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of Baghdad, as well as his article parsing animation
through the criteria laid out by the Pure Film Movement, a loosely unified coalition of critics and
filmmakers who were interested in changing the nature of Japanese film to better suit an
international market, are useful rhetorical exercises which seek to critique the importance of soft
power discourse in anime studies.
73

As useful as this work is for understanding early Japanese animation, there is still much
to be done in terms of writing a more integrated history. The challenge is not only to
accommodate the gaps in the archive, but also to incorporate the varied nature of the early
Japanese animation histories that have been written to date, navigating the murky discourse of
media, identity and politics. To that effect, it is necessary to find a framework that can
accommodate the many gaps in the archive.

A Fragmented Archive: History, Animation, and Modern Japan

Because of the scattered nature of the remaining evidence and in order to accommodate
the many gaps in the archive, this study takes the form of a bricolage, supported both by primary
sources, and when those are scarce or unavailable, secondary research. Similarly to Bruno’s

27

work piecing together the lost history of Italian filmmaker Elvira Notari, early Japanese
animation history must rely not only on what was created in the time period, but also what has
followed after. She writes:
The state of textual remanence demanded such a method, in which the analyst’s gaze would be
able to move, as does that of an anatomist, from visible traces on a surface to invisible ones inside
the body of texts. Indexical and inferential, this approach goes into depth and also traverses
intertextu(r)al sites of absent presence, riding n the crest of a visible invisibility.
74

Rather than resist the archival lacunae, her approach is instead to incorporate it into her
understanding of the material, working as much with what is invisible as well as what is visible.
While Bruno goes on to take up the metaphor of traveling to describe the manner in which she
has assembled her texts, in this case, her approach offers some interesting opportunities for
approaching animation history. First is the idea that archives are both indexical and inferential,
which in this case refers less to a filmed or photographed object as much as the relationship with
a past time and space. In this sense, animation necessarily has an indexical relationship with
culture, regardless of the list of cultural markers that by Iwabuchi’s definition it might lack. At
the same time, however, it is impossible to be completely reliant on the indexical relationship of
primary sources, because there are so few that are available. It then becomes necessary to
assemble different types of evidence—print, visual and filmic—as well as evidence from
different time periods in a meaningful manner, one that stays true, in this case, to the medium
that is being portrayed as well as the time period that produced it. To that end, rather than a
metaphorical reliance on travel and mapping, animation itself provides a useful framework.
At its most basic, the term “animation” refers to bringing motion or life to an object that
does not have those on its own. According to many contemporary animation scholars, the idea
of animation as “the illusion of life” is all but spent, and has little to offer ongoing investigations
into the medium.
75
But in this case, it offers a starting point for understanding animation as a

28

process that can be applied even outside of the strict context of motion picture media and
technology. According to avant-garde Canadian animator Norman McLaren:
Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn. What happens
between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame. Animation is therefore the art
of manipulating the invisible interstices that lie between frames.
76

McLaren’s definition is useful because it is a first step towards conceptualizing animation “less
in terms of production contexts, technologies, specific films and individual animators and more
as a culturally formed idea.”
77
Freeing the medium from a definition that is rooted in techniques
or practices, McLaren allows for it to become more of a philosophical framework able to fuel the
desire to animate thoughts and ideas, or perhaps in this case to re-animate a history that is
characterized by gaps. Animation becomes more similar to montage, a means to create meaning
through the process of assembling individual frames, although the ultimate purpose is not to
create meaning through juxtaposition, but rather to create unified visual motion. In this case, the
image we are trying to construct is an integrated image of the animation industry before 1945
that incorporates the point of view of animation producers, everyday consumers and the socio-
ideological environment they lived in.
With the nature of the surviving archive, it is impossible to construct a complete picture
of what the animation industry was like before 1945. But it is possible to re-conceptualize and
reconstitute what is known about early animation in order to contain the obvious but easily over-
looked fact that media and their contexts change overtime. More than the metaphor of a
palimpsest, in which the original is clouded over by what has come after, animation, individual
frames held together by the manipulation of the gaps between them, represents its own archive in
the context of Japan. It is, however, important to keep in mind the invisible interstices, the
places where the evidence has been lost entirely or where secondary sources must fill in for

29

where primary sources are scarce or unavailable. This act of reconstructive animation is a
manipulation of the historical evidence, self-reflexively assembling the pieces around the gaps
that become the invisible interstices, in order to rebuild a lost image of itself.
At the same time that animation exists as a medium that openly incorporates its reliance
on interstices and in-betweens spaces, it is also characterized by visual plasticity. In the twenty-
first century, the concept of the plastic image, sometimes also referred to in handbooks and how-
to manuals as the property of “bend and stretch” exhibited by animated characters, no longer
holds as much meaning for practitioners, critics and consumers alike. But in the mid-twentieth
century, during the Golden Age of US production, when Disney and Warner Brothers short films
were circulated worldwide, plasticity was one of the key attributes of an animated image, and
one of the earliest distinctions between animation and cinema, even at a time when these were
not clearly delineated objects. Soviet filmmaker and critic Sergei Eisenstein believed that
animated plasticity was very powerful, and carried with it the pÔtential to shock the sleeping
masses out of their complicity, or else to continually lull them into a sense of comfort with their
situation depending on the skill and desire of the animator.
78
French critics in the 1930s believed
in “a multifaceted sense of animation as pure cinema, as an extension of other arts and as a new
form of art”.
79
In Japan, the apparent malleability and resulting invulnerability of the animated
body was also a point of fascination, a source of the ineffable mass appeal that many critics
believed animation to have.
80

For pre-war Japanese animation, plasticity is a particularly useful idea, not only to
accommodate the marginal nature of the industry, which necessarily shifted to fit whatever mold
was necessary in order to survive, but also the manner in which the images on screen bent and
stretched to accommodate the modern Japanese experience. Post-war Marxist film and art critic

30

Hanada Kiyotera described plasticity as being akin to sand, which is formless enough to take on
the shape of vessels it is poured into, but study and solid enough to walk on or build with.
81

Plasticity is a dialectic of agency and helplessness that dovetails with the consumer-subject
experience of modern Japanese in the Taishô and early Showa. Everyday Japanese citizens had a
wide range of freedom of expression, and the trends towards industrialization and urbanization
opened up greater opportunities for consumption, personal expression and even consumption as
personal expression. At the same time that people were learning and encountering new modes of
experience, they were also part of an ideological system that valued rigidity and control.

Conclusion

Animation in Japan is an interesting case study precisely because it was not a dominant
media entertainment context. It never had the chance to codify into a static institution with its
own set of rules and assumptions. Instead it remained in a state of perpetual pÔtential and as
such it reflected many of the hopes that emerged in Japan along with the promise of modernity.
It likewise reflected much of the anxiety that accompanied modernization, reflecting a complex
national identity that is inseparable from a powerful ideology of expansion and empire.
Animated films and their uneasy production context reflect the ambiguities, complexities,
discomforts and contradictions of everyday life in modern Japan. Animation in the pre-war
reflects an “uneven” and “jagged” modern Japanese experience.
82
It is a reminder that
modernization occurs as a series of fits and starts and that societies exist as interlocking moving
pieces rather than a unified whole.
Japan in the late Taishô and early Showa was a volatile place. Politically, the Taishô
period was characterized by a great deal of fragmentation, and it was a high-water mark for
political diversity. The period in between the end of World War I and the beginning of the

31

second war with China was also a time of colonial expansion into the mainland, as Japan was
able to strengthen its growing but tenuous position against Western imperial powers.
Demographically, the rapid rise and fall of the nascent industrial economy contributed to a time
of extreme and nearly constant social change. Gender roles and class structures were in constant
flux as opportunities arose that allowed people like women and the lower classes greater
financial power. It was also a time marked by a strong consumer culture, both in terms of sheer
consumption as well as popular expression. Harootunian describes the everyday experience in
the interwar period as the “production of experience that tried to catch hold of the moving
present (‘fleeting and fragmentary,’ as Baudelaire described the modern present) and thus give it
meaning and direction.”
83
And indeed, the decades after the turn of the century up and into the
Fifteen Years War with China and the Pacific War against the Allies were also characterized by a
deep sense of anxiety, as it seemed to those living at the time that their traditional culture and
unique sense of identity was being lost to the ravages of modernization. This sense of loss was
aggravated by the fact that modernization was closely associated with the foreignness of Western
culture. Animation, itself characterized by plasticity and instability, can provide us a unique
insight into this period of turmoil and unease. In the process, it allows us to expand our
understanding of animation, re-animating some of its lost history, and challenging the sense of
“newness” that is so closely associated with the postmodern and contemporary visual culture.
Each of the following chapters seeks to further elaborate on the connection between
animation as motion picture and visual expression and the changing nature of Japanese identity
and society in the pre-war period. By the time the first animated films from Europe premiered in
Japan, the media environment was rife with a wide variety of modern entertainments. Some, like
cinema and radio, represented a new way of interacting with the senses (in this case sight and

32

sound) based in the technological intervention of machines into human perception. Others, such
as print media, manga and the many varieties of live stage shows from kabuki to comedy shows,
that maintained familiarity with pre-modern media, but adapted to evolving tastes. The first
chapter explains how animation fits into the context of popular consumer culture in general and
cinematic culture specifically. Due in no small part to financial constraints, animation came to
be associated with educational films. In some early cases, animated films were simple
explanations of modern processes such as Kitayama Seitaro’s films An Explanation of Postal
Saving (Chôkin no Susume 1917), about the new postal savings system, and Atmospheric
Pressure and the Hydraulic Pump (Kiatsu to Mizuage Panpu, 1921).
84

Later, animation would become associated with moral education, used to teach values,
cultural identity, and proper behavior. Films and filmmakers were deeply caught up with the
changing nature of nationalism and national identity. Similar to the shift towards greater control
and surveillance in the realm of live-action cinema, animation also became more closely related
with education and control.
85
At the same time, however, its differences from mainstream
cinema allowed animation to be an alternative space for cultural negotiation as nation building
turned to nationalism turned to total war. In the mid-1930s, there was a brief period of interest in
animation on the part of Japanese film critics sparked by the popularity of the Silly Symphonies.
The majority of their discourse discusses foreign films, but they describe the pÔtential animation
had as a tool to reinforce against the eroding effects of modern and Western culture. At a time
when cinema and consumerism appeared to be social problems that encouraged dangerous
behaviors like youth violence, animation offered an alternative, a possible means to rework a
threatening new technology in order to buttress Japanese culture against a continuous onslaught
of media panics and social scares. At the same time that animation was being explored as a tool

33

by different institutions in the pre-war bureaucracy, it was also a site of unruliness and fun,
associated with the Taishô era tenet of nonsense (nansensu) that encompassed a consumeristic
but sometimes cynical revelry in modern life. Early Japanese animators were obligated to meet
the narrative and thematic needs of Ministry of Education, but they were also working to make
their films as interesting and appealing to popular audiences as their foreign competition. As a
result, animated film carries a strong generic connotation as educational film, but it is also
expressive of more popular and less strictly institutional interests as well.
The second chapter expands on the concept of animated plasticity as it relates to Japanese
modern identity, questioning the extent to which the content of some of the surviving animated
films met with the pÔtential of the form as imagined by critics at the time. By linking the
visualization of animated bodies to the plasticity of everyday modern life, chapter two
emphasizes inconsistency and change. Although animation was connected with moral education,
the production of animated films was haphazard and lacked a centralized focus. Individual
animators pursued their own political and artistic interests while at the same time beholden to the
bureaucracies and institutions that were willing to provide the capital that kept the industry up
and running. The result is an example of the modern unevenness introduced by capitalism,
played out in the often uneven, protean bodies of animated figures. Even in terms of their
relative plasticity, animated bodies show a wide range of ideological representations. The
resulting films exemplify the diversity and contradictions inherent to pre-war popular culture and
help to expand our contemporary understanding of the animated form.
Where chapter two focuses on internal domestic pressures related to Japanese
modernization and identity, chapter three opens up to include the external pressures from foreign
nations and cultures with a particular focus on the role of technology in this dynamic. In this

34

case, the question is again whether or not animation lived up to its perceived pÔtential, but
instead of focusing exclusively on animated content, chapter three investigates the actual
filmmaking and production of animation as a technological object, and how this is in turn
reflexively portrayed within the films. Japanese animators were acutely aware of the huge
disparity in the production value of their films between their films and those coming out of
Disney and Warner Brothers’ Studios in America. At least on the level of technical know-how,
the animation industry reflected a familiar three part colonial hierarchy that placed the West, in
this case largely embodied by American animated films but also included films from Europe, at
the top, Japan in the middle and the rest of Asia at the bottom, which aside from China was not
producing animation. At first, Japanese animators set about de-engineering Western techniques
to try and create films that resembled imported ones. There was a dual effort on the one hand to
master the techniques used so vividly by Disney and on the other hand to develop a visual and
technical style that was uniquely and distinctly Japanese. This chapter will look at Japanese
animators interactions with different types of animation, as well as considering the role of the
machine and military conquest in shaping pre-war identity.
The conclusion will extend briefly into the post-war period, in order to highlight the
structural and ideological similarities and differences that exist between the pre-war animation
industry and the industry that emerged in the 1960s as the foundation for the one that exists
today. Animation production continued up until the very last days of the war. In the years
immediately following the surrender, animators continued to work, although the numbers of
films produced dropped considerably. The industry that formed gradually in the wake of the war
bore very little resemblance structurally to the one that had come before. There was a conscious
effort to build an industry that had greater international connections both with mainland Asia as

35

well as Europe and the United States. Animation at first became more centralized as formerly
disparate filmmakers came together to form first the New Japan Animation Company in 1948,
which later became Toei Dôga. Ôfuji Noburo, one of the first Japanese animators, worked hard
to get Japanese animation recognized through newly formed international film institutions, such
as ASIFA and the Cannes Film Festival. In some ways, however, many of the cultural
hierarchies that were in place before the war went essentially unchallenged as US and Japanese
animators set the precedent for outsourcing animation labor to other countries while continuing
to develop the content, characters and narratives at home. The patterns of outsourcing followed
the same patterns as colonization had, with the West first outsourcing to Japan and Japan in turn
outsourcing to its former colonies in Korea and Taiwan. In addition, the advent of television
technology drastically changed the form and production of Japanese animation, which went from
being diverse and multi-faceted to being dominated by two-dimensional, limited cell animation.
This study will conclude with an in-depth look at the events that led to the standardization of the
current system in order to unpack the differences and similarities between the pre- and post-war
animation industries. This will act as a reminder of the current discourse that overlooks the pre-
war period by bringing it into a more direct dialogue with the more familiar contexts of anime
that dominate the literature today.
The history of modern Japanese animation acts as a starting point to consider the role of
media in global culture and geopolitics. It speaks to the lingering effects of colonialism and
imperialism and the relationship of media to power on both a national and a global scale. The
effects of twentieth century socio-political structures are not easily undone with the influence of
popular consumption. It is important to remember that a medium is a complex collection of
interacting contexts, none of which can be separated out from the other. As significant as

36

consumption is towards defining a medium and determining the extent of the cultural power that
it can or cannot wield, there is still much to be said for the contexts of labor and production or of
copyrights and distribution and access. The early period of Japanese animation acts as a clean
slate from which to consider how the industry today developed, to question the causes and
effects of soft power, and to explore what impact anime has had in the past or will have for the
future.
Introduction Notes

1

Susan J Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 165; Wendy Goldberg, “Transcending Victim’s History: Takahata Isao’s
Grave of the Fireflies,” Mechademia 4 (2009): 39–54.

2
Justin McCurry, “Japanese Animator under Fire for Film Tribute to Warplane Designer,” The Guardian, August
22, 2013, sec. Film, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/hayao-miyazaki-film-wind-rises.

3
Eric Cadzyn points out that film and the concept of the nation historically emerged in the same time period, the
end of the nineteenth century. More than other media, he argues, film developed in tandem with the nation,
something that indelibly marks all cinema as national cinema. Animation as a cinematic technology developed along
a very similar timeline to cinema, and it would not be a stretch to attribute similar nationalistic qualities to animated
film as can be attributed to mainstream live-action cinema. Eric M Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and
Geopolitics in Japan (Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2002), 52.

4
Chiyogami animation was a style unique to the filmmaker Ôfuji Noburo. Instead of drawing characters and shapes
on a blank sheet of paper, he use traditionally patterned chiyogami paper layered together to create the animation
effect.

5
Even the extent of their distribution within the empire is not clear. The career history of stop-motion animator
Mochinaga Tadahito, who worked in the Manchurian film industry during the War and remained in China after 1945
helping to establish a post-war Chinese animation industry, suggests that animation was a part of colonial
filmmaking culture. There is no known record of animation being made in Seoul or other locations of film
production, nor is there any concrete record of animation produced in Japan being exported to areas of Japanese
influence in Taiwan, Korea or Manchuria. It stands to reason that animation would have been a part of Japanese
colonial film culture, and it is also likely that the same Western films that were available in Japan were also
available in colonial theaters, but at the moment there is no concrete historical evidence to support that.

6
For more on the American industry during the silent and early sound eras see: Charles Solomon, Enchanted
Drawings: The History of Animation, New ed. (New York: Wings Books, 1994); Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and
Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons (New York: New American Library, 1987); Donald Crafton,
Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982); Norman M. Klein, Seven
Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (London ; New York: Verso, 1993).

7
“Warafu Hôgakuza: Fükiri Has’ei Manga Tanpen Taikai [Laughter at the Hôgakuza: A First Run Animated Sound
Film Festival]” January 1, 1933 Asahi Shinbun p. 3.

37

8
The July 1934 issue of Eiga Hyôron, which was devoted to animated films and short films, featured a small picture
of Mickey Mouse on the title page. Mickey Mouse films were often the basis for early animation theory in Japan, as
was less commercial more avant-garde work of Oskar Fischinger. Earlier that year, Walt Disney sent New Year’s
Greetings to readers of the Asahi Shinbun and Kinema Junpo. “Nikuhitsu Mikki Mausu Men no Nihongo de Go-
aisatsu Desu [An Autograph and Japanese Greeting from Mickey Mouse]” January 1, 1934 Asahi Shinbun pp.5.

9
There is some debate as to what “anime” means, both in English and Japanese. Although the most conventional
use today, in the early 2010s, is “animation produced in Japan by Japanese studios,” there was a brief period when
anime did refer to any animation that used a similar aesthetic and limited animation. In fact, the Canadian produced
television series The Last Avatar is still mistaken for a Japanese production because of the way they borrowed the
aesthetic. In Japanese, anime referred to animation in general, including foreign animation, up until the 2000s.
There is still a lot of ambiguity about the term, but for the sake of this research anime is used to refer specifically to
any content developed in Japan by Japanese studios. For more see: “Sheuo Hui Gan – To Be or Not to Be – Anime:
The Controversy in Japan over the ‘Anime’ Label | Animation Studies Online Journal,” accessed July 10, 2013,
http://journal.animationstudies.org/sheuo-hui-gan-to-be-or-not-to-be-anime-the-controversy-in-japan-over-the-
anime-label/.

10
For more examples of work that discusses anime as it relates to postmodernity: Napier, Anime from Akira to
Howl’s Moving Castle; Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, (Asia--
Local Studies/global Themes ; 13) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Takayuki Tatsumi, Full Metal
Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2006); Steven T Brown, Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010).

11
The following are more examples of work that draws connections or sees similarities between anime and pre-
modern art: Antonia Levi, Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation (Chicago: Open Court,
1996); Isao Takahata, Juniseiki no animêshon: kokuho emakimono ni miru eigateki, anime-tekinaru mono [Twelfth
Century Animation: Looking at National Treasure Scrolls Cinematically as an Animated Object] (Tokyo: Tokuma
ShÔten, Sutajio Jiburi Kanpani, 1999); Takashi Murakami, ed., Super Flat, 2005; Tze-yue G Hu, Frames of Anime
Culture and Image-building (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010); Zilia Papp, Traditional Monster
Imagery in Manga, Anime and Japanese Cinema (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2011).

12
Maxim Gorky described the uncanny, silent effect of his first experience with cinema as making ”you feel as
though Merlin’s vicious trick is being enacted before you. As though he had bewitched the entire street…” He also
goes on to remark on the scientific implications of the Lumière brothers’ new technology. Gorky is likely more
eloquent than the average movie-goer in the 1890s, but his reaction stands in as a summary for the newness and
strangeness of cinema at that time. Maxim Gorky. “A Review of the Lumière programme at the Nizhni-Novgorod
Fair.” Originally published July 4, 1896. Trans Leda Swan. In Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film by Jay
Leda. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1960) p 407-409.

13
Andrew Darley, “Bones of Contention: Thoughts on the Study of Animation,” Animation 2, no. 1 (March 1,
2007): 63–76.

14
Arnheim has admitted that he did not realize that his essay would have the impact that it did defending animation
as the purest form of cinematic expression. Nonetheless, his work has been very influential in this regard. Rudolf
Arnheim, Film as Art, 2nd ed. (University of California Press, 2006).

15
Alan Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications, 1991)
p 9-36.

38

16
For more on definition of animation and its differences from cinema see: Suzanne Buchan et al., Animated
“Worlds” (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey, 2006); Alan Cholodenko, The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation
(Sydney: Power Publications, 1991); Alan Cholodenko and Life of Illusion, “The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on
Animation” (Power Publications, 2007); Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998); Jayne
Pilling, ed., A Reader in Animation Studies (London: J. Libbey, 1997); Joanna Bouldin, “The Animated and the
Actual: Toward a Theory of Animation, Live-Action, and Everyday Life” (University of California, Irvine, 2004).

17
Localization is the practice of adapting a property for release in different national or cultural contexts through
edited, airbrushing, and/or dubbing.

18
Jospeh Nye introduced the term “soft power” in the 1980s as a means of distinguishing direct influence or
coercion, such as military occupation or economic investments, from indirect influence, such as the desirability for a
nation’s media or culture. By this model, the United States wields a great deal of both hard and soft power, because
of the far reach of their military and economic interests all over the world as well as the reach of cultural institutions
like Hollywood, rock music, blue jeans and fast food. Europe also controls a measure of soft power because of the
desirability of European high culture, such as art, fashion and food, as well as their control over the institutions that
disseminate and evaluate these types of culture. Until the late nineties, Japan was seen as a nation that controlled
hard power via their powerful economy, but had very little soft power because their culture was unique and insular
to the point of alienating foreign interest. Joseph S Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New
York: Public Affairs, 2004), 3–11.
The post-war genre of “nihonjinron” or “the discourse of Japanese identity” emphasizes a problematic
understanding of the uniqueness of Japanese culture through comparisons with other nations like the United States.
The discourse itself has a long history that goes back to through the Edo period, but in terms of contemporary
geopolitics it is the postwar discourse through the 1970s that has the most relevance as it contributes to the
stereotype of Japan as a culturally inaccessible nation. Since the seventies nihonjinron has become less popular,
although it has left an indelible mark on Japan studies. For more see: Harumi Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity: An
Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron (Trans Pacific Pr, 2001). Peter N Dale, Myth of Japanese Uniqueness
(London: Routledge, 2012).

19
This only reflects the legal distribution of anime content. If accounting for gray or illegal distribution through
practices such as sharing, fan-subbing, and download, anime’s reach is much farther. Napier, Anime from Akira to
Howl’s Moving Castle, 12–14.

20
“Pop Culture Diplomacy” http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/culture/exchange/pop/, (last visited July 2, 2013).

21
“Inauguration Ceremony of Anime Ambassador” http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/announce/2008/3/0319-
3.html, (last visited July 2, 2013).

22
Douglas McGray, “Japan’s Gross National Cool,” Foreign Policy, no. 130 (June 2002): 44–54. Cool Japan
Creative Industries Policy (English)”
http://www.meti.go.jp/english/policy/mono_info_service/creative_industries/creative_industries.html, (last visited
July 2, 2013).

23
In late 2009, the former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio allegedly referred to the National Center for Media
Arts, a project initiated by the previous Prime Minster, Aso Taro, and intended to be an archive for manga, anime,
and video games,, as a “state-run manga café”. The comment expresses both Hatoyama’s opposition to the project,
and also his low opinion of this pop culture policy. Manga cafes are 24-hour locations where patrons can go to read
manga and use the internet. They are very rarely glamorous or upscale, representing the lowest common
denominator of manga culture. Edan Corkill, “Is a national ‘Manga Museum’ at last set to get off the ground?”
Japan Times June 14, 2009. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2009/06/14/general/is-a-national-manga-museum-at-
last-set-to-get-off-the-ground/#.UgjzJxac1YI last visited August 12, 2013.

39

24
In English, anime literature is complicated by the appeal to popular audiences, leading to a great deal of hybrid
material written by fans and journalists as well as trained academics. For examples of popular literature: Patrick
Drazen, Anime Explosion! : The What? Why? & Wow! Of Japanese Animation (Berkeley Calif.: Stone Bridge Press,
n.d.); Gilles Poitras, Anime Essentials: Every Thing a Fan Needs to Know (Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press,
2001); Roland Kelts, Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S., 1st ed. (Palgrave Macmillan,
2007); Fred Patten, Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews (Berkeley, Calif.: Stone
Bridge Press, 2004). Examples of academics writing popularly: Helen McCarthy, Hayao Miyazaki: Master of
Japanese Animation: Films, Themes, Artistry (Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 1999); Jonathan Clements, The
Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917 (Berkeley, Calif: Stone Bridge Press, 2001);
Patrick W Galbraith, Otaku Encyclopedia = Gaikokujin No Tame No Otaku Ensaikuropedia: Insider’s Guide to the
Subculture of Cool Japan : Eibunban ([S.l.]: [s.n.], 2009).
The anime literature in Japanese is likewise mixed up with the many books and art books that have been printed
for fans by studios about individual animators and series, as well as a healthy proliferation of how-to-draw manuals
and behind-the-scenes materials. Film studies is not as firmly established a discipline in Japan as it is in the United
States, which has marginalized anime studies even further. There is some inclusion of animation in larger studies
about film history, notably in Tanaka’s history of educational film and Iwamoto Kenji’s collection of essays about
film and modernize from 1920 to 1930, but these are not enough to make up a formal canon of anime studies. Since
the 1990s there has been more publishing about anime, but it has been oriented towards a business or production
crowd and had little critical influence in academic circles. There are exceptions as follows: Azuma Hiroki’s work
on otaku, Ueno Toshiya’s research about cyborgs and transnational cultural exchange between the US and Japan,
and Tsugata Nobuyuki’s almost single-handed contributions to pre-war animation history. In spite of the obstacles,
a small handful of Japanese film professors are carving out an academic space for anime and manga in Japan. Much
of that work has centered around the debate over the use of government funding for a centralized manga and anime
library. Hamano Yasuki has been an advocate for preserving pop culture like anime because he sees it as this
century’s version of ukiyo-e painting. Morikawa Kaichiro has not published extensively, but he has been a key
influence in establishing Meiji University’s new manga library, the Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library of
Manga and Subculture, which will be completed in 2014. Tsugata indirectly notes the lack of formal writing about
anime in his Introduction to Animation Research encouraging students to scour magazines, newspapers, and
pamphlets for anything they can find about a series or animator they may be interested in. For more see: Toshiya
Ueno, “'Kurenai No Metalsuits.’Anime to Wa nanika/What Is Animation?;,” trans. Michael Arnold, Mechademia 1
(n.d.); Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009);
Nobuyuki Tsugata, Animeshongaku nyumon [An Introduction to Animation Studies] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2005);
Nobuyuki Tsugata, Nihon animeshon no chikara: 85-nen no rekishi o tsuranuku futatsu no jiku [The Power of
Japanese Animation: Piercing the 85 year history from 2 axes] (Tokyo: NTT Shuppan, 2004); Nobuyuki Tsugata,
Nihon hatsu no animeshon sakka Kitayama Seitaro [Japan's First Animation Creator Kitayama Seitaro] (Kyoto-shi:
Rinsen ShÔten, 2007).

25
From original text: Marc Bosche, “Nihon ni yoru hisokana shokuminchika [Secret colonization according to
Japan], ” Sekai (February 1997): 231-35.

26
Steven T Brown, Cinema Anime (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 28.

27
Early postcolonial scholarship outlines how the ideology of imperialism extends into the realm of culture and
representation long after the formal institutions of control ended. In this context, Western culture would maintain
hegemony over Eastern culture, even in the former colonies. Likewise, the consumption of Western pop culture
such as Hollywood or MacDonald’s in Asia would fit with the post-imperial pattern, but the consumption of
Japanese pop culture in the West would not. For more see: Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge
Classics (London: Routledge, 2004); Edward W Said, Orientalism, 25th anniversary ed (New York: Vintage Books,
2003); Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995); James L Watson, Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 2006).

40

28
Rare but not absent, as it is important to note. Examples of Eastern media that have been successful among
Western consumers are Korean television dramas, Bollywood films and kung-fu films produced in China. This is
not to say that there is not still a power dynamic at work in this type of consumption. bell hooks may have a
tendency to overstate her points, but her work demonstrates that white consumption of ethnic others is not always an
indication that the power hierarchy has shifted. There are certainly examples of Japanese culture that did become a
part of the global media landscape before the anime boom in the 1990s. One popular example are kaiju films like
Godzilla, while in the high culture realms of haute couture and haute cuisine Japanese design and tastes were
filtering down into the mainstream by the 1980s. (About Face, the Godzilla book, anything you can find about sushi)
Japanese film has been highly evaluated abroad since the days when Kurosawa Akira won the Golden Lion for
Rashomon at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, but by the eighties the Japanese film industry was experiencing a
decline both in volume of films made as well as quality. Personal electronics like the Sony Walkman were making a
huge impact, but Japanese music was not. Paul Du Gay, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman
(London; Thousand Oaks [Calif.]: Sage, in association with The Open University, 1997)., Dorinne Kondo, About
Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater, First edition. edition (Routledge, 1997); William M Tsutsui and
Michiko Ito, In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006); Donald Richie, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to
DVDs and Videos (New York, NY: Kodansha USA, 2012).

29
David Leheny, “A Narrow Place to Cross Swords: ‘Soft Power’ and the Politics of Japanese Popular Culture in
East Asian.,” in Beyond Japan: The Dynamics of East Asian Regionalism, ed. Peter J Katzenstein and Takashi
Shiraishi (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 214.

30
In spite of the fact that critical analysis of animation as a medium has been a part of film studies almost since its
inception, it has not played a large role in the film studies canon, and is often excluded from mainstream histories
and theories of cinema. As such, the field itself continually reacts to animation’s subordinate position relative to
cinema by constantly pointing out that marginality. The official beginnings of animation studies have not been
agreed upon. Papp places the beginnings in 1991, with Alan Cholodenko’s first Illusion of Life conference, citing it
as the moment that animation studies shifted from a popular discourse to a more academic one. Jayne Pillings
places the beginnings of animation studies as a field in 1988, with the establishment of the Society for Animation
Studies, while more recent articles and collections describe animation studies as “nascent” as late as 2007 and
“almost a terra incognita for serious critical and theoretical writing” in 2005 (Gehman and Reinke “The Sharpest
Point”). The fact is that there has been a discourse of animation since the beginnings of motion picture history,
dating as far back as Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art in which he claims that animation is the purest form of cinema.
Arnheim’s work is perhaps the closest that animation studies gets to being included in the standard film studies
canon. In the 1970s there was a wave of writing that explored the relationship of visibly motion to the idea of
imbuing an object with life, fueled largely by practicing artists and a burgeoning generation of art animators. At the
same time there has been a regular and robust literature of “how-to” books and popular histories written by
journalists such as Charles Solomon and Leonard Maltin. Edwin George Lutz, Animated Cartoons; How They Are
Made, Their Origin and Development, by E. G. Lutz (New York, C. Scribner, 1920: C. Scribner, 1920); John Halas,
Roger Manvell, and Roger Manvell, Art in Movement: New Directions in Animation, by John Halas, in
Collaboration with Roger Manvell (New York, Hastings House [1970: Hastings House, 1970); Raul Da Silva and
Eastman Kodak Company, The World of Animation, 1st ed (Rochester, N.Y.]: Kodak, 1979); Maltin, Of Mice and
Magic; Cholodenko, The Illusion of Life; Solomon, Enchanted Drawings; Pilling, A Reader in Animation Studies;
Chris Gehman, The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (Toronto, ON: YYZ Books/Ottawa
International Animation Festival/Images Festival, 2005); Darley, “Bones of Contention.”

31
Maureen Furniss, Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics, Rev. ed (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey, 2007), 3.

32
Thompson describes the historical context of the dominance of photorealism and the ways that two-dimensional
cell animation create ideological conditions that lead to cinema’s dominance over animation both in the realm of
criticism as well as practical production. The article is dated in the sense that it was written before CGI effects and

41

three-dimensional animation were common, but the ideology that she describes and the dominance of photorealism
as an animation aesthetic arguably still apply today. Kristin Thompson, “Implications of the Cell Animation
Technique,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa De Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1980), 106–120.

33
Anime and its relationship with postmodernism is also often brought up in the context of US-Japan relations,
emphasizing the postwar context of Occupation, the Cold War and the US-Japan security treaty and their role in
creating a unique international relationship that in turn supports a rich environment of cultural exchange. See:
Tatsumi, Full Metal Apache. Lee Makela, “From Metropolis to Metoroporisu: The Changing Role of the Robot in
Japanese and Western Cinema,” in Japanese Visual Culture. Ed. Mark W. MacWilliams. (M.E. Sharpe: 2008) p. 91-
113.

34
McGray, “Japan’s Gross National Cool,” 48.

35
Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, 11.

36
Ibid., 12–13.

37
Allison, Millennial Monsters, 9.

38
Allison’s understanding of the cute aesthetic does not borrow heavily from an earlier understanding of the cute
that was based in the subversive aesthetic that developed in the 1970s as youth and feminine resistance to the male-
dominated master narrative of economic recovery as described by Kinsella. Otaku culture and youth culture
according to Allison are not as resistant, because the conditions around them have shifted to accommodate
fragmentation and niche markets. In other words, there is no longer a master narrative for youth or otaku to resist,
only an increasingly diverse mainstream. Sharon Kinsella. “Cuties in Japan.” In Women, Media and Consumption in
Japan eds. Lise Skov (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996) p 220-254.

39
This work was originally published in Japanese in the 1990s. Since then Azuma has continually expressed his
surprise at how it has been taken up by fan and academic communities, because in his eyes the book was meant
primarily as theoretical work rather than an ethnography. Azuma, Otaku.

40
For more about fans and their practices see: Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Izumi Tsuji, Fandom Unbound:
Otaku Culture in a Connected World (New Haven [etc.]: Yale University Press, 2012).; Sharon Kinsella, “Japanese
Subculture in the 1990s: Otaku and the Amateur Manga Movement,” Journal of Japanese Studies , Vol. 24, No. 2
(Summer, 1998), pp. 289-316; Luis Pérez González, “Fansubbing Anime: Insights into the ‘butterfly Effect’ of
Globalisation on Audiovisual Translation,” Perspectives 14, no. 4 (2007): 260–77.; Saitô Tamaki, “Otaku Sexuality”
in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, ed. Christopher Bolton,
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayui Tatsumi. (University of Minnesota, 2007) p 222-249; Kathryn Dunlap and
Carissa Wolf, “Fans Behaving Badly: Anime Metafandom, Brutal Criticism, and the Intellectual Fan,” in
Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) p267-284.

41
Anime has long relied on piracy as a means of distribution. It is only since the anime boom that Japanese studios
have showed a keener interest in intellectual property laws and begun working harder to protect their interests. Saya
Shiraishi, “Japan’s Soft Power: Doraemon Goes Overseas,” in Network Power: Japan and Asia, ed. Peter J
Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Also: Patten, Watching Anime, Reading
Manga., Frederik L. Schodt, Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (Stone Bridge Press, 1996).

42
For more about fandom and resistance see: Patrick W. Galbraith, “Fujoshi: Fantasy Play and Transgressive
Intimacy among “Rotten Girls” in Contemporary Japan,” Signs , Vol. 37, No. 1 (Autumn 2011), pp. 211-232;

42

Marilyn Ivy, “The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo’s Parapolitics” in Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies
(University of Minnesota Press, 2010) p 3-30;

43
The study of technology and anime is often oriented around cyborgs, giant robots or the cyberpunk genre. For
some representative examples see: Brown, Tokyo Cyberpunk.; Sharalyn Orbaugh, “Emotional Infectivity: Cyborg
Affect and the Limits of the Human,” Mechademia 3: The Limits of the Human (University of Minnesota Press,
2008) p 150-172.

44
Lamarre’s work discusses the breakdown of cinema and animation in the digital age, framing the popular
discourse around the death of cinema and the breakdown of film quality within the increased visibility of animated
effects and the proximity of those effects to live-action recording-even in this sense it is focused on contemporary
animation and less on early animation. Likewise his article about animation and anime highlights the economy of
motion in contemporary films. For more examples of media studies and anime see: Thomas Looser, “From Edogawa
to Miyazaki: Cinematic and Anime-ic Architectures of Early and Late Twentieth-century Japan,” Japan Forum 14,
no. 2 (2002): 297; Mark Driscoll, “From Kino-eye to Anime -eye/ Ai : the Filmed and the Animated in Imamura
Taihei’s Media Theory,” Japan Forum 14, no. 2 (September 2002): 269–296; Thomas Lamarre, “Between Cinema
and Anime,” Japan Forum 14, no. 2 (2002): 183.

45
Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2009).

46
Limited animation uses fewer frames than full animation, making it a more cost and time effective method than
the traditional full animation standardized by American studios around the 1920s. It became the standard for
Japanese television animation in the early 1960s.

47
Driscoll, “From Kino-Eye to Anime -Eye/ Ai : The Filmed and the Animated in Imamura Taihei’s Media
Theory”; Lamarre, “Between Cinema and Anime.”

48
Leheny, “A Narrow Place to Cross Swords: ‘Soft Power’ and the Politics of Japanese Popular Culture in East
Asia.”

49
Pokemon was explicitly linked to a somewhat exaggerated scandal because several children in Tokyo experienced
seizures during an episode that featured a special effect involving flashing lights. The event filtered into a
widespread media panic even outside of Japan, and the safety of anime for children fell under question. Christine
Yano, “Panic Attacks: Anti-Pokemon Voices in Global Markets” in Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall
of Pokemon ed. Joseph Tobin. (Duke University Press, 2004) p 108-139.

50
Otaku are often associated with deviant behavior, such as sexual perversion, shut-ins (hikkikomori), and even
murder. In the West, some of the first underground anime to become popular featured heavily violent or sexual
content, contributing to a negative image of this type of fan outside of Japan as well. In the wake of the J-pop boom
and the mainstreaming of anime culture, these stereotypes have begun to change, but it is still not clear the extent to
which anime fandom can be considered a positive representation of Japanese culture. Annalee Newitz, “Magical
Girls and Atomic Bomb Sperm: Japanese Animation in America,” Film Quarterly 49, no. 1 (Autumn 1995): 2–15.

51
Koichi Iwabuchi, “How ‘Japanese’ is Pokemon?” in Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon
ed. Joseph Tobin. (Duke University Press, 2004) p 53-79.

52
Ibid., 61.

53
Ibid., 58.

43

54
Ibid., 59

55
Ibid,. 66-75. Much of the legal distribution of anime worldwide goes through US-based companies such as
Funimation, which holds the distribution rights for everywhere except Japan itself and Australia. In addition,
companies like 4Kids Entertainment, which distributed Pokemon and Tokyopop! have recently been sold or closed
their door due to lack of sales further indicating the waning of anime culture as a consumer boom.

56
Levi, Samurai from Outer Space; Hu, Frames of Anime Culture and Image-Building.

57
Takahata, Juniseiki no animeshon.

58
Papp’s work is interesting because she uses the genealogy of monsters (yôkai) in order to build up the reputation
of Mizuki’s work. She notes how the English language scholarship tends to be focused around the same handful of
filmmakers, namely Oshii Mamoru, Miyazaki Hayao, Kon Satoshi and Otomo Katsuhiro. She ends her genealogy
of imagery and expression with Mizuki brings his works into a direct lineage with a clear-cut art historical tradition,
both highlighting his work and elevating animation to the level of high art. Papp, Traditional Monster Imagery in
Manga, Anime and Japanese Cinema.

59
Murakami, Super Flat.

60
Yoshiko Nakano, “Shared Memories: Japanese Pop Culture in China.” In Soft Power Superpowers: Cultural and
National Assets of Japan and the United States ed. Yasushi Watanabe. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2008) p111-127.

61
Shiraishi, “Network Power.”

62
Development is understood as economic development and commodity culture. There is an implicit recognition of
the sort of outflow of economic influence outlined by Bruce Cummings in his article about postcolonial economic
structures in Northeast Asian. He traces the successive waves of economic development in Korea and China first
through infrastructures such as factories left behind when the Japanese lost their colonies after World War II, as well
as the post-war development of Japan as the nation that continued to set the bar for the rest of Asia. He shows that
industrial development in Korea followed the same patterns as it did in Japan as Korea “inherited” so to speak
infrastructures from the Japanese. Specifically he notes the progression from textiles to heavy manufacturing to
information technologies. The article was published just over a decade before the J-pop boom, but the patterns he
points out for previous industrial waves hold true for animation, particularly based on the structure of outsourcing.
Bruce Cummings. "The Origins and Development of the Northeast Asian Political Economy: Industrial Sectors,
Product Cycles, and Political Consequences," International Organization (winter 1984), pp. 1-40.

63
For more see: Susan Napier. “Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla to Akira.” In
Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture. Ed by John Whittier Treat. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1996) p 235-262; Gene Walker. “The Filmic Time of Coloniality: On Shinkai Makoto’s The Place Promised in Our
Early Days.” In Mechademia 4: War/Time. (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2009) p 3-19; Wendy
Goldberg. “Transcending the Victim’s History: Takahata Isao’s Grave of the Fireflies.” In Mechademia 4:
War/Time. (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2009) p 39-54; Christine Hong. “Flashforward Democracy:
American Exceptionalism and the Atomic Bomb in Barefoot Gen.” in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 46, No.
1, Human Rights and Literary Forms (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009) p 125-155.

64
Most recently, Osaka mayor, Hashimoto Toru, publicly suggested that there was no evidence that the Japanese
government forced women to become comfort women during World War II. Rupert Wingfield-Hayes. “Osaka

44

Mayor Hashimoto enflames ‘comfort women’ row” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22684826 (last visited
September 14, 2013).

65
Ôfuji Noburo, Kitayama Seitaro, Ôten Shimokawa and Kôuchi Jun’ichi all at one time recount their experiences
of the beginning of the animation industry.

66
Mori Takuya. “Dôga Eiga no Keifu [The Genealogy of Animated Film]” pt. 1-8, Eiga Hyôron 9-4, (Fall 1962 –
Spring 1963).

67
Yamaguchi Katsunori and Watanabe Yasushi, Nihon animēshon eiga shi [The History of Japanese Animation
Films] (Yūbunsha, 1978).

68
Yasuo Yamaguchi, Nihon no anime zenshi: sekai o seishita Nihon anime no kiseki [A Complete History of
Japanese Anime: The wonder that commands the world] (Tokyo: Ten Bukkusu, 2004); Tsugata, Nihon animeshon
no chikara.Tsugata, Nihon hatsu no animeshon sakka Kitayama Seitaro.

69
Peter B. High, The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931-1945, (Wisconsin
Studies in Film) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).

70
Jun’ichiro Tanaka, Nihon kyôiku eiga hat'atsushi [The Historical Beginnings of Japanese Educational Films]
(Tokyo: Kagyusha, 1979).

71
Jonathan Clements and Barry Ip, “The Shadow Staff: Japanese Animators in the Tōhō Aviation Education
Materials Production Office 1939–1945,” Animation 7, no. 2 (July 1, 2012): 189–204,
doi:10.1177/1746847712438137.

72
Akita Takahiro. “Manga Eiga no Dôbutsu Kyarakuta [The Animal Characters in Animated Films” in Nihon Eiga
to Modanizumu: 1920-1930 ed. Iwamoto Kenji. (Tokyo: Ribûro Poto, Shohan edition, 1991) p 158-163.5/19/14
12:14 PM

73
Daisuke Miyao, “Thieves of Baghdad: Transnational Network of Cinema and Anime in the 1920’s,” Mechademia
2 (2007): 82–103.

74
Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 4.

75
Suzanne Buchan. “Introduction.” Animated Worlds. (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2004) p 3-21.

76
Norman McLaren. “Definition of Animation, A Letter from Norman McLaren with an introduction by Georges
Sifianos” in Animation Journal (Spring 1995) p 62.

77
Kristian Moen, “‘This New Mode of Expression’: The Idea of Animation in 1930s France,” Animation 8, no. 1
(March 1, 2013): p 8, doi:10.1177/1746847712473805.

78
Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda and Alan Upchurch (London: Meuthen, 1986).

45

79
Moen’s article specifically referred to mainstream critics and film reviewers, among them Vuillermoz and Jeanne.
Moen, “‘This New Mode of Expression.’”p 8

80
Katô Genpei discuss plasticity in the July 1934 issue of Eiga Hyôron, and it is one of many topics Imamura
Taihei brings up in relation to animation in Manga Eigaron. Katô Genpei. “Has'ei Mangaron Kangae.” Eiga Hyôron
7 (July 1934); Imamura Taihei. “A Theory of the Animated Sound Film.” Trans. By Michael Baskett. Review of
Japanese Culture and Society. Issue 22, December 2010 p 44-51.

81
Hanada Kiyoteru. Sabaku ni tsuite. In Hanada Kiyoteru chosakushû [The Collected Works of Hanada Kiyoteru].
Tokyo: Miraisha, 243–257.

82
Hartoonian talks about the uneven nature of modern Japanese experience, while Silverberg describes it as a
jagged montage. Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar
Japan (Princeton University Press, 2001); Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of
Japanese Modern Times, 1st ed. (University of California Press, 2007).

83
Harootunian p xv

84
Neither of these films is extant.

85
Both High and Gerow note the gradual exertion of state, and in particular bureaucratic, control over cinema from
the end of the 1910s through the mid-1940s. Gerow’s book focuses on the discourse of cinema that contribute to the
formation of the centralized censorship system while High details the tighter control over media and the changes in
the film industry that occurred over the course of the Fifteen Year’s War (1931-1945). For more see: Aaron Gerow,
Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925, First Trade
Paperback (University of California Press, 2010); High, The Imperial Screen.

46

CHAPTER ONE.

ANIMATION IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT: DISCOURSE AND INDUSTRY

Introduction

In order to begin expanding on the current understanding of anime and
Japanese animation to encompass the early animation industry, it is first necessary to take the
time to define the historical context of the early twentieth century and the national context of
Japan in the late imperial period. This is particularly important given the gaps in the historical
record; a strong framework is essential for linking together the evidence that does remain for the
sake of interpretation. The need to focus the discussion to a specific time and place may seem
somewhat contradictory for a project that is working to expand rather than contract the
discussion. How can we open up the study of anime to its modern history without becoming too
limited to that historical context? The answer is related to methodology. It is important to
remember that regardless of the significance that a text or a collection of texts might have after
their initial creation and introduction into the media environment, entertainment media are still a
product of their specific national and historical context. The discourse of media specificity has
grown to acknowledge that media are defined from many different angles. They exist at the
intersection of technology, production context and industry, consumption, and discourse.
1
But
entertainment media are also specific to the times in which they are created.
2
If we can
acknowledge that discourse and consumption are as important as technology and production for
the creation of a medium, then it is also necessary to acknowledge that these things change over
time and should not be treated as absolutes.
The purpose of this chapter is to situate early Japanese animation production in its
historical, cultural, and national context. Specifically, this chapter discusses the relationship that

47

the animation industry had with the ongoing process of industrialization and the ideological
conditions fostered by imperialism and colonialism. Motion picture was a particularly
contentious cultural space for much of the pre-war period. Even as film became more and more
integrated into Japanese daily life, it remained a source of anxiety for bureaucrats and intellectual
elites who worried how the new technology and content, particularly foreign content, might
influence the ideas and behavior of the Japanese public. As a peripheral production context,
animation form and content exhibited the negotiation with social anxieties related to technology,
consumer behavior and cultural integrity. However, at the same time that they represented a site
of unease related to modernization, animated films in Japan fit into a global discourse of
animation that saw it as a balm for modern social ailments. Many believed that it had a great
capacity to entertain, and this was considered valuable, rather than frivolous.
3
Despite some
recognition for having positive attributes, much of how Japanese animation was understood at
this time stems directly or indirectly from its marginal position relative to other forms of
entertainment and news media. The animation industry developed in dialogue with other, more
dominant media contexts, such as domestic and foreign cinema, foreign animation, and
children’s media and education. The ultimate form and style that would come to dominant
domestic production were a result of overlapping social anxieties and their haphazard remedies.
Though animation would not come to be seen as a medium independent from cinema in
Japan until well into the 1960s, there was still a sense that it represented a different mode of
motion picture from that of live-action cinema, although what those differences were was not
especially clear. Animation was treated sometimes as a medium with specific properties that
live-action cinema did not share, and sometimes as a genre that leaned towards particular types
of content. At times foreign animation was carefully dissected from domestic animation, and the

48

two were treated as separate entities, while at other times they were lumped together for the sake
of argument. Depending on where it was made, animation either served to preserve Japanese
culture and reinforce Japanese moral values, or, in the case of some foreign films, to hasten their
degradation. As critics and filmmakers discussed the role animation might play in alleviating or
exacerbating broader social problems, they also began to articulate a loosely defined set of
characteristics that set animation apart from mainstream cinema. On the whole, animation carried
similar associations as it does today, as particularly well-suited for teaching and for children or
uneducated audiences.
The primary focus on this chapter is the discourse of animated film that survives from the
early decades of Japanese animation production
.4
Film criticism and film-related publication
were an integral part of early Japanese film culture. Beginning roughly around the 1910s, a
variety of print media developed that buttressed the film-going experience, from specialty
magazines devoted exclusively to specific genres or filmmaking styles to souvenir-style
programs sold at theaters along with the screenings. Print played a significant role in
disseminating cinema into non-urban regions that did not have consistent access to screenings;
many magazines published the written screenplays, known as scenarios (shinario). Fan
magazines, such as Film’s Friends (Eiga no Tomo), helped to support a celebrity-based
consumer culture. More analytical publications, for example Film Criticism (Eiga Hyôron) and
the Marxist publication Prokino, provided a venue for a particular type of intellectual consumer
participation and cultural production. Criticism played an active, but indirect, role in defining
cinema in Japan, especially in relation to the development of censorship policies.
5
For the study
of animation history, the discourse is an important link between the films that survived to the
present day and the greater socio-cultural environment that produced them. It provides us with a

49

brief look into the filmmakers’ motivations, the audience’s reactions, and the issues and
controversies that were pertinent to animated film as it was becoming an integrated part of the
Japanese film industry. Pre-war animation discourse demonstrates the interconnectedness media
have with their social, cultural, and historical environment.
Animation-related print media makes up only a small portion of what was a vibrant
culture of film publication, but it reveals a sophisticated, if loosely defined, understanding of the
animated form. The reviews, surveys, interviews, and advertisements that remain provide a
valuable insight into how animation fit into the media environment of its day. The discourse of
animation went beyond surface analyses of the visual style, content and narratives to begin to
question the effects of film form on the audience and the impact of production methods and
technologies on the cultural content of a finished film. Even the earliest known articles,
published around 1917, do more than simply recounting the author’s emotional reaction to
animated films, indicating an engagement with animation as an artistic form of expression.
Later, animation would be critically linked with technology and its production process,
demonstrating a nuanced understanding for how culture is contained and expressed through
media. Generally, critics who wrote about animation were concerned that foreign films
dominated that market. Animation discourse came from a place of deep anxiety, reflecting some
of the broader concerns of critics involved in the so-called Pure Film Movement over the
perceived quality of Japanese films as a whole and their desire to have some influence abroad.
In a similar manner, writers sought strategies for “improving” Japanese animation so that it could
better compete with American studios both in Japan and overseas. They also had high hopes for
animated film, recognizing the appeal that foreign films had and wondering how that appeal
could be put to use to reinforce rather than erode Japanese culture.

50

There are three major themes that emerge from the discourse. One of these is the desire to
define the appeal of animated films as a whole. Animation was seen as a highly entertaining art
form that had universal charm for a wide demographic. Japanese critics generally tended to
locate that charm in the media specific form of animation, looking to define the elements of
animated film that distinguished it from live-action motion picture. In many cases, this was
attributed to the plastic properties of the animated line. Interestingly, these conclusions were
often drawn using foreign films, such as Disney and Warner Brothers’ films, as the examples. In
addition, the conclusions were also very similar to those of their European peers, and many
articles make vague references to Sergei Eisenstein’s writings.
6
It was also seen as an outlet that
could provide some kind of relief from the monotony and heaviness that accompany modern life.
Animation was a site of playfulness, and some critics believed that the inherent qualities of the
form offered relief from the drudgery and dreariness of an increasingly mechanized,
industrialized social and working environment.
7
This line of thought can be found in both
heavily intellectual, analytical forms of film criticism as well as the more casual style of movie
reviews meant for marketing and the general public. When animated films were reviewed in film
magazines, they were almost always praised for their entertainment value and artistry, but more
often than not the precise nature of that artistry was not fully articulated. The perceived value of
animated film as a source of relaxation and play linked it to a more general “culture of pleasure”
and playful modern consumption that can be encapsulated in the modern notion of nonsense
(nansensu).
8

Another theme is the production process itself and the technology of animated
filmmaking. For example, one of the earliest articles, published in 1917 in the magazine The
Moving World (Katsudô no Sekai), introduced audiences to the frame-by-frame process of

51

making drawn animation. Articles such as this one that included detailed descriptions of
technological artistry behind animated film appeared sporadically through the 1930s. In addition,
much of the animators’ own contribution to the discourse tended to be very technical. Animators
would also often write “how-to” articles that made their innovations and personal discoveries
available readers to use and borrow. Kitayama Seitaro published an article in Film Education
(Eiga Kyôiku) about his influential cut-paper technique in 1931 as a how-to for amateur
animators. Later writings about the animation process focused more on the future of animation
filmmaking and incorporating technical advances such as sound and color. Similarly to the more
abstract, philosophical discourse that worked to define animation’s differences from cinema,
foreign films were an important element in the technical discourse. Walt Disney was often
praised for his technical prowess with sound and visual effects, as were Oskar Fischinger for his
work animating music and Lotte Reinigar for her shadow films. Even after the Film Law of
1939 limited the release of foreign films, and in particular foreign animation, Film Report (Eiga
Junpo) featured multiple installations about the Disney feature-length film Fantasia (1940) that
came out beginning in October 1941, as well as a long article about the Wan brother’s feature-
length Chinese film Princess Iron Fan (Tiě shàn gōngzhǔ,1941) which ran in March 1940. In
spite of the ongoing interest in foreign films and advances in overseas filmmaking technology,
much of the technical discourse features discussions of the domestic Japanese animation
industry. Foreign films provided a template for what kinds of advances were out there in the
world, and animators would write deeply technical articles about the animation process in Japan
and projections for its future. In fact, the focus on the filmmaking process provided animators
and critics a platform to actively discuss and quantify the means of “catching up” with the West

52

in this specific field, making explicit the deep-seated anxiety that they felt over the quality and
popularity of their films.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, is that of pedagogy. Animation was closely
associated with educational filmmaking ranging from straightforward “how-to” films introducing
modern knowledge to folkloric allegories meant to foster children’s moral education. These
types of educational films made up most of the domestic animation, fostering a strong
association of animation with children’s media and educational films.
9
Although some of the
earliest animation films were educational, the relationship between animation and education was
not a foregone condition. It emerged over time as a result of animation’s marginal position in the
film industry and an ambiguously articulated desire on the part of the Japanese bureaucracy to
experiment with using film in an official capacity to teach moral values and keep up the public
morale. By the late 1920s, was very little domestic animation that was not somehow related to
education, and the association began to be taken for granted in the discourse. Animation
plasticity came to be seen as particularly well suited for teaching and learning, because it made
difficult or uninteresting material palatable for a general audiences and school children. This
was also tied to cultural anxiety, as the same characteristics that lent domestic animation its
teaching potential were also inherent in foreign animated films. American commercial
animation was so much more familiar, popular, and available than domestic animation, critics
worried that Japanese people might be learning American values or absorbing Western culture
by watching them. Animation was recognized as having educational value, but that value was a
double-edged sword.
Though the written records of the early animation industry are not complete, they can still
allow us to track, at least in some part, the influence that consumption had on the production

53

process.
10
Put into context with broader trends in film criticism, moral education, and popular
culture, we can begin to piece together the ways that consumer expectation and reception played
a part in shaping the type of films animators created, from the narrative content to the visual
style. The former developed a genre-based association with education, children’s media and
folklore, while the latter shows an active engagement with the dominant style of American
commercial animation, either seeking to reproduce it or rejecting it in favor of finding an
indigenous style. By incorporating the discourse of animation as a means of accessing the
consumer experience allows us to begin filling in the holes left in the archive, finding links
between the individual surviving films and evidence to build a more holistic picture of the pre-
war industry.

Historical Contexts of Marginalization

Animation came to be one of the most marginalized and heavily regulated media in pre-
war Japan due to an overlapping set of social, political, and economic circumstances that placed
the industry in a position with little cultural capital or practical power. The marginal experience
of the pre-war industry is different from that of the postwar industry in that animation did not yet
represent a marginalized subculture. Rather animation production and exhibition were
marginalized within the Japanese film industry and media culture more generally. The practical
realities of costs, market competition, and lack of stable, consistent profits or funding limited
production to a small-scale boutique context until the late 1930s. Even after the Film Law of
1939 established import quotas on foreign animation and provided state funding specifically for
animation through the bureaucracy, the animation industry could not grow much more because it
had limited access to time and labor saving materials such as celluloid sheets that had been
standard in the commercial American industry since the late 1910s. Animation existed at a

54

complex nexus of public and private interests, mainstream ideology, and modern consumer
culture and expression. It exhibits the contradictions and inconsistencies of modern Japanese
culture, filtered through the animation form. This section focuses on the institutions and policies
that that influenced the formation of the animation industry and shaped the nature of the films
that were produced.
The geopolitical power hierarchy that existed under the system of late imperialism and
colonialism had far reaching consequences for Japanese culture in the modern period. By the
mid 1880s, the Japanese government had successfully renegotiated the unequal treaties with
Western powers that had been the initial catalyst for modernization, but the West would continue
to be an unavoidable and frustrating presence. The tension between indigenous Japanese culture,
which was often allied with tradition, and imported Western culture, which coded as modern
waxed and waned depending on the state of Japanese politics, foreign relations and the economy,
but it was always there. Japanese culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
represents a constant effort to be perceived as a modern imperial power while maintaining a
Japanese identity that remained undiluted by Western influence and modern change. In practice,
this was not a difficult balance to achieve, but during this period Eastern and Western culture
were seen as inherently incompatible. This point of view fostered an environment where the
stakes of cultural production, both at the state and the personal level, were quite high.
Internationally, Japan was situated in a three-part hierarchy between the West and the rest
of Asia. In spite of their colonial gains, economic growth, and military victories, Japan had a
difficult time proving to the West that it deserved to be taken seriously on an equal level. The
ingrained cultural hierarchy that placed Western culture and ethnic whiteness at the top of an
imagined narrative of modern progress and civilization was not easily undone. Japan rose to

55

hegemony in their own regional context, but with the exception of Pearl Harbor and the military
victories over Allied colonies in the first years of the war, that power was not able to push further
than Asia, even at the height of Japanese imperialism during World War II. Furthermore, it was
all hard power in the form of aggressive military action and industry. There was a desire for
exotic artworks and Japanese design in the twenties and thirties, but this did not translate into
very much useable soft power for Japan to improve its image in the West. Soft power played a
more significant role in perpetuating Japanese influence in Asia. Baskett describes the
importance of cinema as soft power for promoting Japan as the attractive empire over the
aggressive brutality of the west. He writes
images of a modern Asian nation defeating a Western empire promised hope to many throughout Asia of
liberation from Western colonial rule. The Japanese model of empire was an attractive alternative to
Western modes of imperialism, at least initially, due to the fact that Japan had itself only narrowly escaped
Western colonization, and many believed its success could be replaced.
11

Japanese dominance of its Asian neighbors was itself a complex interaction. In spite of the hard
structures that put Japan in a growing position of power in mainland Asia and into the Southeast
Asian islands, the identity boundaries between Japan and Asia remained porous. This would
have a great impact on cinema and the logic of representation found in interwar and wartime
films.
Filmmaking in Japan was intricately connected to imperialism and warfare. Each major
military conflict beginning as early as Japanese involvement in the Boxer Rebellion fostered
domestic filmmaking. Audiences at home were eager for news from the front, and coverage of
the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and the Fifteen Year’s War with China provided movie
studios and news companies with ample material to work with. Military expansion, filmmaking,
and nation building were interconnected, each one supporting and feeding off the other. National

56

identity and imperial ideology are difficult if not impossible to separate from film production.
This would have deep repercussions for animated film.
By the time animated films first appeared in Japanese theaters, they entered into an
environment that was already saturated with a wide variety of modern media and
entertainments.
12
The number of registered news journals nearly quadrupled between 1918 and
1932, and both the readership and the content were showing greater sophistication as the first and
second generations of people who grew up under the compulsory education system inherited the
reigns.
13
Manga comics were a popular form of expression from the Edo period that continued to
be well-liked in the modern period, although they changed form somewhat from whimsical
sketches of everyday life into something that incorporated elements of Western cartooning, for
example political cartoons available in specialty magazines like Tokyo Puck or comedic serials
printed regularly in newspapers like The Lazy Old Man (Nonki-no Tôsan).
14
Live theater also
continued to be prevalent and accessible, with traditional styles such as kabuki, noh, and bunraku
co-existing with modern and hybrid styles like shinpa and rango.
15
In addition, there was a
vibrant carnival culture that centered on so-called misemono or “attractions”, which likewise
grew out of earlier, pre-modern practices of social gathering and exhibition.
16
Motion picture
integrated easily into the practice of carnival culture as one of many modern marvels such as X-
rays, magic lanterns and telegraphs were showcased for an emerging consumer audience.
17

Animated films were not available in Japan until around 1912, the year that marked the
death of the Meiji emperor and the official beginning of the Taisho period. For the first several
years, the only animation in Japan was foreign, imported from the United States and Europe.
18

The first exhibitions of domestically produced animation took place several years later in 1917.
The dominance of foreign animation was as much a product of a system that favored exhibition

57

over production as it was the audience’s preference for the slicker, more polished films from
Europe and the United States. The film industry in the teens and twenties developed under a
different production and distribution paradigm than that of Hollywood. Even though Japan had a
studio driven system, exhibitors had a greater degree of control overall, and often dictated the
type of content that would eventually appear in theaters.
19
It was often more economical for
exhibitors to show American animation such as Felix the Cat or Betty Boop which were included
anyway with the block bookings from Hollywood, than to show domestic animated films. This
meant that domestic animated films did not have a stable exhibition niche that would in turn
provide a consistent monetary foundation that could pay for ongoing film production.
20

Animation was forced to rely on the educational market for much of the early twentieth century,
which made animators beholden to the desires and requirements of the institutions providing
funding for their films. Combined with censorship, this discouraged artistic experimentation that
might disagree with the dominant state ideology of nationalism and imperial expansion.
Animated film was also limited by the sheer technical requirements of its creation. There
was little overlap with the established film industry as far as the labor and materials that are
necessary to create animated films versus live-action ones. Early animators were left to their
own devices building and procuring what they needed for animation tables, paper and celluloid
and the great deal of manual labor necessary to draw each individual frame. Compared with
studio-shot live-action films, the costs of producing animated films were high, and the
production time was far too long. Where a conventionally shot film could be completed and
edited in a few weeks, a ten-minute animated film took months to produce. In addition, there
was very limited communication between Japanese animators and their Western counterparts.
Early animation was a labor of love in which local filmmakers needed to reverse engineer the

58

technique and technology of animation production based on the films that were available in
Japan. While this led to some interesting innovations, it was also a cumbersome limitation that
slowed the development of a sustainable industry.
Animation was one of the most heavily regulated media in pre-war Japan. As a
centralized system of censorship began to form in the teens and early twenties, the animation
industry was at a disadvantage, as it lacked the economic, political, or cultural power to resist in
a meaningful way.
21
Initially, motion picture in Japan was treated as a form of live
entertainment, similar to theater shows and sideshow attractions, rather than an information
technology such as newspapers or magazines.
22
Classifying film as an “entertainment” had the
effect of “stripping film as a mass medium of all constitutional protection and leaving it at the
mercy of bureaucratic decrees. This seemed to make sense at first, as cinema was the latest
modern misemono wonder, but the inadequacy of the label was not lost to officials at the time.”
23

The situation never changed however. Kasza notes that there were a few attempts to change the
status of cinema to something that better met its actual function in society, but these were never
given much attention because it did not seem like a major priority.
24
At first the regulation of
cinematic exhibition was regulated in the same manner as live theater, enforced at the local level
by local police. There was a great deal of inconsistency regulating cinema in the early days, due
to the fact that there no standardized rules that determined the type of content that was or was not
appropriate. Regulation came down to the attitude of whichever local official was in charge at a
given time in a give place; filmmakers and distributors were required to adjust the content of
their exhibitions in order to accommodate the regional differences in censorship and regulation.
Though local authorities frequently used the “danger of epidemics” clause to shut down live

59

performances that they found inappropriate, they were comparatively relaxed about policing
cinema at first, taking a “wait and see” approach to this new and unfamiliar medium.
25

Before too long, however, cinema’s popularity sparked a general sense of unease among
bureaucrats and local authorities. Cinema came to be understood as a “social problem.”
26
In
1911, the unprecedented popularity of a French serial called Zigomar, named after the dashing
criminal protagonist sparked a media panic. Newspapers began to link exhibitions of the film to
outbreaks of youth violence, blaming the film for encouraging wanton behavior in young people
and disrespect towards their elders. Indicative more of the tension surrounding cinema’s
unprecedented popularity rather than any real threat of violence, the Zigomar incident would
leave an indelible mark on the film industry from then on, signifying the moment when the state
began to articulate a need for a system of consistent, organized censorship and consumer
regulation that was specific and appropriate to the motion picture medium.
27
Unregulated,
cinema ran the risk of being “a kind of ‘hypnotism’, since it was supposed that movies would
suggest to children fascination of criminal acts and incite them to try them.”
28
Hase suggests that
this anxiety was more a result of the state’s “unconscious desire” to “manipulate children
hypnotically…to be patriotic citizens from the standpoint of school and government”
29
than it
was a reaction to a real threat posed by cinematic media But it had the lasting effect that cinema
came to be conceptualized as an infectious disease. Cinema acted like a “germ” or a form of
hypnosis that had the power to infect people’s behavior and influence them negatively. The
understanding of cinema as infection extended both to the nature of the medium acting on the
audience as well as the activity of film-going itself creating conditions for spreading the disease.
This would be an important understanding of how cinema worked both as a threat to indigenous
Japanese culture as well as a means of promoting it. The infectiousness of cinema was not

60

carefully defined ontologically, rather it was a vague understanding based on the popularity that
motion picture seemed to generate, but it conceptually linked cinema to ideas of modern
medicine and the lingering “diverse strains of Meiji thought, which we usually categorize as
“political,” and which depicted our society as ailing and in need of a fundamental cure.”
30

In roughly the same period, around 1917, there began a loose movement in film criticism
known as the Pure Film Movement. Proponents of this movement advocated the improvement
of Japanese cinema by distancing it from literature and theater and taking fuller advantage of
cinema as a new form.
31
Specifically, they felt that Japanese film contained too many cultural
idiosyncrasies, such as the use of male actors to portray women (on'agata), maudlin acting that
was too heavily based in Japanese theatrical styles, and uninteresting camera angles that simply
mimicked the experience of theater. They also believed that Japanese film exhibition relied too
heavily on live benshi narrators for conveying the subtleties and plot and character, a system
which prevented the artistic development of the filmic form. Advocates of the Pure Film
Movement were invested both in developing Japanese cinema as an art form as well as turning it
into a product that would be marketable abroad as a form of resistance against Japanese
consumption of foreign films. The Pure Film Movement in many ways articulates ongoing
tension with the West, as it placed the ultimate measure of value in the ability for films to be
exported and consumed in a Western cultural context.
But Gerow also demonstrates how this discourse was at work in defining modern Japan
from within as well as in contrast with the West, as well as how it was instrumental in defining
cinema as a social problem that needed to be controlled by the state. According to Gerow, Pure
Cinema discourse divided the audience into two types of subjects. On the one hand, Pure Film
critics situated themselves as an idealized subject, well educated and prepared to interpret film

61

without the risk of being negatively influenced either by subversive or threatening content or the
power of the medium itself. Similarly, the state placed itself in a position of authority that had
not only the assumed right but also the informed ability to decide what was or was not harmful
content. At the other end of the scale, statesmen and critics imaged an uninformed, “at-risk”
subject made up of minority communities such as women, youth and the working classes, who
could not be trusted to properly interpret content and who stood to be overwhelmed by the
impact of cinema. In addition to feeding back into the idea of cinema as a disease that could
infect people’s minds, this discourse was aware of the fact that Japanese cinema had no influence
at all overseas. Though it would have little impact on improving Japanese international soft
power, the Pure Film Movement along with the Zigomar Incident went a long way towards
defining cinema and articulating the need for a federally run censorship system. The system was
itself put into place in 1925. Every film produced in Japan from 1925 to 1945 went through the
censorship board, which became increasingly strict as the years progressed.
The discomfort that state officials and film critics experienced due to cinema’s
unprecedented popularity is part of a broader social anxiety towards mass culture and popular
expression. After the First World War, mass culture in Japan blossomed. Sand divides Japanese
modernity from the 1870s to the early 1920s into two stages divided roughly by World War I, “a
stage of nation-building in which intellectuals constitute a modern bourgeois culture as part of
their struggle to find Japan’s place in the imperial order, and a stage of global mass-mediated
consumerism, in which intellectuals reconfigured that culture for a wider public as they sought to
define a cosmopolitan identity and lifestyle.” He describes the first as “bourgeois modern” and
the second as “mass-society modern.” It is the second state, that of mass-society modern, that
fostered a diverse cultural environment and rich popular culture. The proliferation of “mass-

62

society modern” over more austere “bourgeois modern” created a great deal of anxiety.
Harootunian writes,
it was the dread of mass culture and consumption in the 1920s (not to mention the specter of mass
politics) and its threat to unhinge older, fixed social relationships and subjectivities that led to the
formation of a secondary discourse on the social aimed at representing the essence of society and
performing a virtual poeticizing or aestheticizing of every-dayness in order to negate the divisions,
fragmentation, and conflict that had instituted society in Japan.
32

Though it is a little earlier than the period noted by Harootunian here, the Pure Film Movement
and the discourse of film censorship can be read as part of the anxious attempt to create a fixed
order in the midst of constant social change.
At the same time that Japan could be described as a nation with a single minded ideology
focused on “catching up” with the West, it was also a nation of people who were increasingly
open to the realm of popular culture and popular expression. Miriam Silverberg describes
Japanese citizens as
consumer-subjects in order to express the double-edged nature of Japanese mass culture during
[the 1920s and the 1930s]. The consumer was both a subject of the emperor and a subject with
agency, acting as autonomously as the imperial system would allow. Japanese women and men
were both privy to a network of pleasure offered within mass culture and subject to an
increasingly tight web of state controls on freedom of expression and consumption.
33

Her understanding of the Japanese experience as divided between the pleasures of modern life
and the encroaching influence of the imperial nation is a useful way to understand how the state
interacts with society. Silverberg also introduced the idea that Japanese modern culture acts as a
montage in order to reconcile the binary tension between East vs. West and modern vs. tradition.
Using the cinematic metaphor, she created a framework for understanding Japan that could be
both modern and Japanese at the same time rather than having to choose between one and the
other.

63

There is not one system constituting Japanese modern language or culture; there were many, including the
rules of the every-changing grammar of fashion, cooking, and other aspects of everyday life to which
commentators of the moment were acutely attuned.
34

Her intent in this case is to introduce a paradigm that could account for the diversity found in
Japanese pop culture and acknowledges differences and even contradictions that might arise.
Animation as a framework operates similarly to montage, only without the open
acknowledgement of juxtaposition. Silverberg defines modern life as a “jagged montage” in
which the disparate pieces of modern life did not fit evenly together. Animated film was a
fantasy space that often worked to smooth over those differences, regardless of how artificial the
end result may seem.
Animation is also inextricably linked to Japanese identity in the pre-war period through
its close relationship with institutionalized education and educational film. Forced by economic
constraints to rely on the educational market, many animated films were commissioned or
funded by the Ministry of Education. After the Film Law of 1939 provided more state funding
for animated films, the Ministry of the Navy became more involved in producing animation as
well. The compulsory education system designed and implemented in 1890 through the Imperial
Rescript on Education had long lasting repercussions not only in education itself, but also for the
dominant understanding of national identity that fueled first Japanese modernization and later
Japanese expansion and military aggression. This only had significance for animation insofar as
the debate over how to approach cultural values through moral education. The initial effort on
the part of Meiji period bureaucrats, aside from the overall purpose of teaching a disparate,
uneducated, agrarian population that it was now part of a growing, modern empire, was to focus
on increasing literacy and introducing Western science. The desire was to mitigate the seeming
backwardness of its people as quickly and efficiently as possible. As time progressed, concerns

64

grew over how to encourage that knowledge of Western science without losing an innately
Japanese moral compass. Moral education is again related to the idea of cinema as an infection
or the fantasy of cinema as a means of control. As a weaker production context, animation
presented itself as an opportunity for the state to experiment with using the powerful medium of
motion picture to push back against the unruly mass culture that worried them so.
Animation was not in a position to be a dominant media context in the early twentieth
century in Japan. The structures of film production, the limitations on animation production, the
systems and discourse of censorship all combined to limit everything from physical production,
distribution and exhibition, and artistic expression. But animation was far from single-minded
and even within these confines it fostered an intricate form of cultural expression.

Early Animation Discourse

Film culture in Japan came into its own in the 1920s, due in some part to the environment
of intellectualism and activism and the rise of mass culture that characterized the Taisho period.
Written criticism and print were important parts of that culture for several reasons. The print
culture allowed for people who lived outside of the urban centers to stay up to date with the latest
domestic and foreign films even if it would be some time before they had the opportunity to see
them in their more remote areas. It also created a forum for developing a culture of film
criticism that would have a strong influence on the nature of filmmaking and film going for
decades. The earliest examples of animation criticism highlighted two of the most glaring
differences between animation and live action cinema: the visual aesthetic of plasticity, that
aspect that allowed for shapes and characters to mold and shift before the audience’s eyes, and
the markedly different production process and slightly different technological apparatuses that
were used make animated films.

65

The earliest known articles devoted to animated film appeared in 1916. The first,
“Animation Films and Japanese Painters (Dekobô Shigachô to Nihon Gak'a)” by Terasaki
Hironari was published in the January issue of The Moving World (Katsudô no Sekai) and the
second, “Talking about Animation (Dekobô Shigachô no Hanashi)” by Matsukaze Hisamu,
published in the November issue of the same magazine.
35
More than a convenient chronological
entry into animation discourse, these two articles predicate the themes and issues that would
preoccupy critics and animators in the decades to come. The first is a brief but enthusiastic
endorsement of animated films as research for Japanese artists. At the time, there was no
domestic production, and the only animated films that were available were from the West. By
suggesting that Japanese painters study animated films for the overwhelming quality of their
impressionistic lines, Terasaki brings animation into an existing hierarchy of cultural value that
pitted high art, such as painting, against popular culture, in this case animation. This was further
inflected with the cultural hierarchies inherent to the institution of imperialism. Embedded into
the tone of the article there is an implicit suggestion that Japanese artists are as yet under-
developed, and studying animation has the potential to allow them to catch up to the latest in
Western artistic standards. In addition to revealing the underlying influence of late imperialism,
which would continue to have a great impact on animation production, the article also introduces
the idea of teaching and education. Over time this relationship would become more explicitly
linked with the bureaucratic institution of compulsory education, but even as early as 1916 it
seems that animation, as a novel new form of motion picture, brought with it the possibility of
learning something new.
The second article is a page long introduction a new, different style of motion picture
known as “dekobô shingachô”. The tone in this case is more technical, interested in

66

summarizing as digestibly as possible the state of affairs of a new type of cinema so that savvy
readers could be in the know. In the eyes of the author, the important points of introduction were
a history of animated films, a brief description of the technology behind how they are made, and
a summary of the major animation studios and filmmakers at the time. The summary of
animated films here is also heavily influenced by imperialist ideology, as the author struggles to
sort out the origins of animation, which he links to the origins of cinema. Both articles share the
opinion that there is something inherently pleasant and entertaining about animated films.
Matsukaze’s brief history of the form states that while all line films (senga) needn’t necessarily
be comedic, the best ones certainly are. Terasaki writes that he laughed with the delight of a
young child as he watched the antics of the characters on the screen. (Fig. 7) Entertainment value
would come to be one the most important qualities attributed to animation. The understanding of
why or how animation was entertaining evolved with time, but the belief that it was uniquely
suited to be entertaining would be a significant one for the medium in this period.

Figure 7 1917 comic of audience at an animated film from Terasaki article

67

In July 1934, the monthly film magazine Film Criticism featured a special issue devoted
to animation and short films. The magazine, which ran from 1925 until 1975, usually offered
some sort of thematic arrangement in every issue through the 1940s. The July 1934 issue marked
the first in-depth critical discussion of animated film by Japanese critics. Between this special
issue of Film Criticism and the two articles that appeared in The Moving World in 1916,
publications about animation appeared only very rarely. Film-related magazines carried the
occasional advertisement or movie review for a high profile film, but with the exception of a
1930 interview with Japanese animation founding father Kôuchi Jun’ichi in the Yomiuri Shinbun
and a 1933 interview with Ôfuji Noburo in the Asahi Shinbun discussions of animation films
were scarce.
36
Even with the 1934 issue, animation shared space with another marginalized
filmmaking context, the small gauge films.
37
Articles ranged from attempts to define the
characteristics of animated film to highly technical explanations of animated film technique to
extensive filmographies for the well-known foreign and Japanese animators. Retired animator
Ôten Shimokawa contributed a short nostalgic piece about what it was like working in the early
days and Ôfuji Noburo wrote an article musing about when and how the Japanese industry could
expect to introduce animated films in color. The July issue touches on many of the issues related
to animation that seemed, to them, to be the most salient at the time.
In “Thoughts on a Theory of Animated Sound Films (Has’ei Eigaron Kangae) ”, Katô
expands on the importance of the animated line. In his eyes it is again the line that sets
animation apart and which gives the films their primary source of amusement. Writing
specifically about “Mickey (immortal) Mouse”
38
he identifies three powers that Mickey has that
make him well suited to what Katô describes as the current age of uncertainty (fuan no jidai).
They are the power of the indestructible, dancing line, the power to prevent injury, and the power

68

of compression. These are all forms of resilience and invulnerability that are a pleasure for the
audience to consume, even as a fantasy. Along a similar vein, seeking to identify the pleasing
aspects of animation, Kurada likens the act of seeing an animated to the refreshing feeling of a
light salad after eating something heavy like a steak.
39
Both critics draw their conclusions
primarily based on Disney films, specifically citing Mickey Mouse films as their inspiration. But
the conclusions are not framed as specific only to Mickey Mouse films or American films;
Disney stands in as the example to support arguments meant to apply to all animated films. But
the privileged position that Disney occupies as representative of all animation is clear.
According to Katô and Kurada, animation was a site of resilience and relaxation
respective. The indestructible dancing line could act as a protective barrier that warded against
uncertain times, while enjoying an animated film was something of a tonic for the oppressive
weight of everyday modern life. Their conclusions predate Eisenstein’s writings on Disney, but
their ideas fit with the larger discourse of animation and plasticity that Eisenstein represents.
Eisenstein respected Disney animation, and understood it as
marvelous lullaby for the suffering and unfortunate, he oppressed and deprived. For those who are
shackled by hours of work and regulated moments of rest, by a mathematical precision of time,
whose lives are graphed by the cent and the dollar.
40

But although animation could provide relief for those trapped in the confines of capitalist
drudgery, it was also complicit in keeping them there for although
Disney’s films are a revolt against partitioning and legislating, against spiritual stagnation and
greyness…the revolt is lyrical. The revolt is a daydream. Fruitless and lacking consequences. These are
not the daydreams which, accumulating, give birth to action and raise a hand to realize the dream. They are
the ‘golden dreams’ you escape to, like other worlds where everything is different, where you are free from
all fetters, where you can clown around just as nature itself seemed to have done in the joyful ages of its
coming into being.
41

69

Eisenstein’s desire for animation is a revolutionary one, and though he recognizes the merits of
animation as a relief from monotony, he is frustrated that it also acts as the sedative that allows
the status quo to perpetuate without a return to the dynamism of the nature at its very beginnings.
The political desires of Katô’s indestructible, dancing line are likely more in keeping with
issues that were pertinent to Japan at the time. The fantasy of resilience and invulnerability is
appealing at a time when social anxieties over the loss of culture were running high. Katô was
also writing at a time when the imperial project was shifting into high gear. From the point of
view of imperialism, indestructibility, compression, and invulnerability take a more sinister
connotation. Seen through Cholodenko’s understanding of animation as a mode of living death,
animation becomes a site that obscures or makes friendly the violence inherent to imperial
modernism. The possibilities for representing colonial expansion through animation were
certainly realized, and the bodies of colonizers and the colonized alike display a resistance to the
perpetual onslaught of fantastic, spectacular violence. Animation carries with it the potential to
sanitize the culture of death and violence that accompany imperialism and combat and make it
palatable for the sake of building morale or indoctrinating the next generation of imperial
subjects.
The potential uses of animation for empire is at odds with animation’s association with
the pre-war cultural mode of nonsense. Silverberg considers nonsense to be more than “a
reflection of the appeal of slapstick comedy” associating it instead with “a political, ironic humor
that took on such themes as the transformations wrought by a modernity dominated by Euro-
American mores.”
42
The version of nonsense that appears in domestic Japanese animated films is
not quite the same as that of the nonsense film, which was seen as being devoid of any kind of
significant political or cultural meaning. The politics of nonsense films were in their rejection of

70

dominant ideology and the fact that they embraced a fleeting sense of fun.
43
Animated nonsense,
defined by plasticity, did not reject its relationship to American slapstick, a genre that “hit home
and flourished worldwide was not critical reason but the films' propulsion of their viewers'
bodies into laughter.”
44
Like slapstick, Kurada and Katô both saw animation as something that
could draw laughter or some form of visceral, bodily enjoyment from people.
Imamura Taihei, famous for publishing Manga Eigaron (1942), one of the first
theoretical works in any cultural or national context to be written exclusively about animation,
also linked animation production to industrialization. Imamura deviated from the idea that
animation’s prime characteristics lay in the plastic nature of the line, linking its form and its
impact to the technological, industrial process of production. He continued to acknowledge the
visceral pleasure one could have while watching animation, writing that “the fun of cartoons as it
were lies in the violation of reality.”
45
But he approached animation with the apparatus and the
physical nature of the films as objects in mind. For example, he highlights the significance of
photography, seeing the invention of photo technology as the turning point between optical toys
(and pre-modern visual culture) and modern animation films. Most significantly, he links
American animated films to the industrial culture of Fordism in which they were produced, but
without the negative connotation implied by Eisenstein. Rather than a golden, lyrical, but
ultimately sedative dream, animation to Imamura meant dynamism, motion, and speed.
The link between animation and technology in animation discourse was often far less
philosophical and much more explicitly technical than Imamura’s intervention implies, though
the intent and tone differed depending on the intended audience for a particular article. When
writing for each other and other filmmakers, animators descended into painstaking technical
details. For example, Kitayama Seitarô’s 1930 article for Film Education recounting his

71

methods for building an animation table and reproducing paper cutout animation is an exhaustive
explanation of the process that includes diagrams and figures.
46
(Fig. 8) Ôfuji’s article about the
future of color technology in animation is less myopic, but he still assumes a certain degree of
knowledge on the part of the reader that allows him to delve into specific detail. These two
articles also demonstrate a tendency for the technical articles to either nostalgically look back at
an earlier period of animation production or forward towards the future. Technology articles for
people in the know did not dwell on the present. Rather, like Kitayama’s article, they showcased
the scrappy innovation of earlier times while also musing over how far things have advanced
since then. Or else, as in Ôfuji’s article, the map out animation’s future, creating a sense of
assurance that animation would always be improving-by which they meant approaching the same
level of polish as Western, and in particular American, animated films.

Figure 8 Diagram of an animation table from Kitayama’s 1934 article

72

Technologically oriented articles for general audiences, such as the interviews with
Kôuchi and Ôfuji for Yomiuri and Asahi respectively, did not have the same investment in
remembering the past or imagining the future. In fact, given that these articles both explain the
same basic process behind two-dimensional cell animation within a few years of each other
suggests that the general public had little knowledge of how animation was made. But ignorance
did not preclude curiosity, and it appears there was a continual interest in knowing how
animation was made. What is interesting is that the earlier interview with Kôuchi does not seem
to be particularly oriented towards children, while the Ôfuji interview appeared in on the
children’s section (kodomo pêji). This is not to say that animation developed an association with
children’s media in that short time; the relationship animation has with children’s media runs
much deeper than the interview suggests. But the fact that the articles have different audiences
suggests that animation has still in the process of forming, that the associations had not hardened
yet.
That animation seemed to be universally enjoyable was something that appealed to
officials interested in using cinema for the sake of control as Hase suggests. From 1938-1939,
Film Education published as a series the ongoing results of an experiment using educational
films in schools. Every month a set of four films which each moralized about a different aspect
of Japanese society, were sent out to all the schools in a certain region to be shown to the
children. The teachers would them report back to the magazine with their general impressions of
how the films were received and whether or not they were helpful for teaching lessons. Each
region did not receive the same films, but the films were classified according to their type, for
example culture films (bunka eiga), which were a form of documentary or newsreels. Every
month also included at least one animated film, suggesting that the association of animation with

73

educational film was already in place by the mid-1930s. The study reveals that while animation
was associated with education, enough so that it was included in an extensive study of the
controlled effects of educational films on children, it was still considered less important than
live-action educational cinema. Oftentimes when the teachers would send back their reports of
how the films were received, the animated films were not mentioned at all, or else the comments
were very similar and ran along the lines of “naturally the manga films went over well with the
children.”
47
The almost flippant reaction on the part of the teachers indicates that animation was
popular, but perhaps not always regarded as highly as the formal discourse would suggest.

Conclusion

In the historical context of early twentieth century Japan, animation was a heavily
marginalized medium. The power structures at the time privileged foreign animation over
domestic and live action cinema over animation. In addition, animation had little power to resist
the system of censorship that emerged in the mid-twenties. As a result of its weaker position, the
animation industry cultivated ties with education. The discourse of animation began to lay out
some of the characteristics that, at the time, were considered to be unique to animation.
According to thinkers and critics at the time, animation had a powerful capacity for
entertainment that was linked to the plastic and indestructible nature of the animated line. It was
also linked to the structures of industrial capitalism, considered either a relief from the weight of
modern society or a soothing drug that prevented people from resisting the status quo. There
was a discourse of animation as technology that was framed in the context of progress, either
looking back at how far animation had come or looking forward towards new technological
possibilities. Pedagogically, it was almost so casually associated with education as to be taken

74

for granted. In the following chapter, we will begin to see how all of these different contexts
impacted the films themselves as we explore the significance of the animated body.
Chapter One Notes

1
For examples of writings about media specificity and the range of methodologies to approach that see: Noel
Carroll, “Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self-Consciously Invented Arts: Film, Video, and Photography,”
Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1996), pp. 3-24; Lev Manovich,
“Cinema as Cultural Interface,” accessed February 26, 2014, http:/www.manovich.net/TEXT/cinema-cultural.html.

2
In the last several years there have been studies that approach media from the point of view of old or obsolete
technologies. Studies of early cinema, optical toys and technologies that failed to catch on with the consumer, are a
reaction to teleology and technological determinism. But they have gone a long way towards opening up our
understanding of media such as cinema, television, Internet, and games by revealing the fits and starts that are
inherent to the development of any medium. For more see: Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New:
Thinking About Electric Communications in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press,
1988); Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999); Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B Pingree, New Media, 1740-1915 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2003); Nicolas Dulac and Andre Gaudreault, “Heads or Tails: The Emergence of a New Cultural Series, from
the Phenakisticope to the Cinematograph,” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 8 (n.d.); Lisa
Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT, 2008).

3
This was a common thread in articles about animation beginning as early as 1916 and sustained through the
discourse through the 1940s. Hironari Terasaki, “Dekobô Shingachô to Nihon Gak’a [Animated Films and Japanese
Painters],” Katsudô No Sekai, January 1916, 100–103; Hisamu Matsukaze, “Dekobô Shingachô No Hanashi
[Talking about Animated Films],” Katsudô No Sekai, November 1916, 28–30; Genpei Katô, “Has’ei Mangaron
Kangae [Thoughts on a Theory of Animated Sound Films],” Eiga Hyôron 7 (July 1934): 24–25; Kuniyoshi Kurada,
“Manga Eiga No Tokuisê [The Specificity of Animation],” Eiga Hyôron, no. 7 (July 1934): 26–32; Taihei Imamura,
Manga Eigaron [A Theory of Animated Film] (Tokuma Shoten, Sutajio Jiburi Kanpani, 2005).

4
Film discourse has been a valuable resource for studying early Japanese film because more direct historical
evidence, such as films, studio or theater records and the like, have not survived. Film magazines, theater programs,
advertising, etc. have been essential for preserving early film culture. While most film historian acknowledge the
relevance of discourse for film history, they tend to take different methodological approaches to the material,
cataloguing and analyzing it in different ways. Bernardi, for example, focused primarily on printed screenplays
(shinario) in her work on early Japanese film culture, while Gerow incorporates an eclectic variety of material. For
more see: Joanne Bernardi, Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2001); Eric M Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan
(Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2002); Aaron Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of
Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925, First Trade Paperback (University of California Press, 2010).

5
Gerow’s work uses discourse to demonstrate how the news media, intellectual film criticism, the system of benshi
narration and the bureaucracy all contributed overlapping ideas defining cinema as a social problem that ultimately
needed to be controlled through a central censorship system. For more detail see: Gerow, Visions of Japanese
Modernity, 94–131.

6
Early animation criticism suggests that Japanese film critics had access to foreign writings about animation, as
well as some kind of access to the films that were the basis for French, American, and British publications. For
example, Kurada and Katô both refer to Eisenstein in their 1934 articles about animation for Film Criticism, though

75

neither makes any specific citations or quotations. Imamura also references Eisenstein and Fischinger in Theory of
Manga Film.

7
This point of view developed in the 1930s, and is not limited to Japan. Eisenstein’s approach to animation also
comes from the idea that plastic animated films offer an escape or a release from the increasingly mechanized reality
of modern life. According to Moen, there was also a similar vein that ran through French animation criticism during
this period. In the context of late silent film and early sound production, animation in Europe enjoyed an artistic
heyday as it was seen as an example of pure cinema because of its freedom from the legacy of photography. The
importance of realism had already begun to take root in film criticism, and animation seemed to be an alternative to
Bazin’s claim that total cinema was engaged in a memory process of preservation. Animation was praised in France
as a site of pure abstraction. In addition, European animators, the most famous of whom are perhaps Oskar
Fischinger and Len Lye, experimented quite a bit with visualizing music. In Japanese criticism about the artistic
value of animation, Disney’s films were particularly important. In the United States, the relationship between
animation and the art scene and avant garde is present, but much more oblique. For more pre-war European
animation theory see: Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art, 2nd ed. (University of California Press, 2006); Sergei
Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda and Alan Upchurch (London: Meuthen, 1986); Kristian Moen,
“‘This New Mode of Expression’: The Idea of Animation in 1930s France,” Animation 8, no. 1 (March 1, 2013): 7–
21. For more about art and animation in the United States see: Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation,
Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde Her Leslie (New York: Verso, 2002).

8
Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton
University Press, 2001).

9
Of all of the film magazines to feature articles and reviews about animation, Film Education tended to include
reviews, articles, and information about animated film more frequently than the others. As a publication, Film
Education encompassed a wide range of discussions on film and education. It was a venue for considering
educational films as a genre, educating audiences and amateurs about the film industry, as well as for thinking about
how the medium of motion picture could be used as an educational tool.

10
It is important to keep in mind that the critics who wrote articles for film magazines did not always represent the
general public. Rather, they were intellectuals and/or individuals with a privileged relationship with the film
industry, either as practitioners themselves or people with a direct relationship with those practitioners. But their
opinions show us what the perceived nature and impact of animated film were, lending us an idea of how these films
might have been received more generally. At the very least they demonstrate an idealized version of the purpose of
the form. For more about film critics and their relationship to the film industry see: Gerow, Visions of Japanese
Modernity, 94–133.

11
Michael Baskett, The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 2008), 8.

12
There has been some contention recently about when the first animated films from Europe and/or the United
States were actually exhibited in Japan. Two recent article by researcher Frederick S. Litten call into question the
dates, sites and films that have been cited as the first animated films in Japan since Yamaguchi and Watanabe’s all-
encompassing 1978 animation history. Yamaguchi and Watanabe cite 1909 as the first year that animated films
could be seen in Japan. They are not clear about which films exactly where exhibited in what theaters, but describe
the films as resembling Emile Cohl’s chalkboard animation Fantasmagorie (Gaumont, 1909). The films were
called dekobô shingachô originally, a vague nomenclature that referred to all animated films through much of the
teens, and further obfuscates any concrete evidence of which animated films were first shown where. Even if there
is a record of a theater showing a collection of dekobô shingachô films, in other words, there is no way to know the
Western titles or filmmakers necessarily. Litten was unable to confirm Yamaguchi’s claim that the first animation
was imported in 1909, instead finding clearer evidence that the first true animation film was imported in 1912. He
does not define what he means by a “true animation film” in this case, which is one of the weaker elements of his

76

argument, discounting stop-motion trick films as “true animation” and mixed films that feature elements of live-
action filmmaking (for example the animator’s hand writing), suggesting his specific definition of animation refers
to variations on drawn, two-dimensional, frame-by-frame animation. This further suggests that if the definition of
animation were expanded to encompass stop-motion and early “trick” films the original introduction of animation to
Japan becomes even murkier. His meticulous research uncovered a 1933 history of film by Yamamoto, which he
posits as the original source of the 1909 date. Frederick S. Litten, “On the Earliest (Foreign) Animation Films
Shown in Japanese Cinemas,” The Japanese Journal of Animation Studies 15, no. 1A (2013): 27–32.

13
Gregory J. Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918-1945 (University of California Press, 1993), 28–
29.

14
Manga is a version of cartooning has a long tradition in Japan. Shimizu Isao tracks the origins of manga to the
same Heian scrolls that Takahata cites as an ancestor of modern animation, tracing the visual style of the animals in
the Scroll of Frolicking Animals with that of pre-modern and modern manga. In the Edo period, manga referred to
sketches of everyday life, an early style of Japanese cartooning that featured a spontaneous, irreverent drawing style
and took elements of daily life and folklore as subjects. The Edo period artist Hokusai is the most well-known
example of an Edo period manga artist. His work had much in common with Western cartooning, as these were
both drawing styles that took aspects of daily life as their subject and which were spontaneous and stylistic rather
than rendered carefully in detail. In the Meiji period, after Japanese sketch artists were exposed to Western
cartooning, they began to develop Western style political cartoon magazines that were similar to those published in
New York in London. Publications like Japan Punch and Tokyo Puck still incorporated a visual style akin to Edo
period manga, but with deliberate stylistic or linguistic homage to Western cartooning. Frederik L. Schodt, Manga!
Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics (Kodansha International, 1986); Isao Shimizu, Manga Tanjô Taisho
Demokrashî Kara Shup’atsu [The Birth of Manga: Emerging from the Taisho Democracy], Rekishi Bungaku
Raiburarî 75 (Tokyo: Kichigawa Kôbunkan, 1999).

15
Donald Richie, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and
Videos (New York, NY: Kodansha USA, 2012), 25–27, 29–32.

16
Traditional theater such as kabuki and noh often have oral accompaniment as narration or song. This is cited as
one of the factors that contributed to the practice of benshi narration that accompanied silent cinema in Japan.
Gerow and Dym also link benshi with modern misemono culture that showcased new technology and the desire to
mitigate the foreignness of the culture. J.L. Anderson, “Spoken Silents in the Japanese Cinema or Talking to
Pictures: Essaying the Katsuben, Contextualizing the Texts.,” in Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre,
History, ed. Arthur Nolletti and David Desser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Jeffrey A. Dym,
“Benshi and the Introduction of Motion Pictures to Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 55, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 509–36;
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity.

17
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 47.

18
Between 1912 and 1917 the only animation available in Japan was foreign animation. In addition, the only
animation style that was recognized as such during the period were line drawn animation. It was not until later that
shadow films, paper cut out films and other different styles were considered animation as well. There was a fifteen-
second segment of footage discovered in 2006 that was originally dated to 1909, but subsequent analysis have not
been able to substantiate that initial claim. For more information on the history of global animation see:
Giannalberto Bendazzi, Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University
Press, 1994); Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde Her Leslie.

19
Aaron Gerow, “One Print in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Film Industry and Culture in 1910s Japan,”
The International Electronic Journal of Visual Media and History, accessed January 20, 2009,
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1100/agfr11e.htm.

77

20
For much of the early twentieth century, Hollywood was the only national context that was able to support a full-
fledged commercial animation industry. The American industry was wealthy enough and had a much larger
guaranteed audience than any other film industry, and over time it became standard exhibition practice to include
animated short films in between the features at most movie theaters. European theaters had a similar set up, which
also provided an outlet for the exhibition of animation, but even in European countries that had strong film
industries such as France, Great Britain and Italy, competition with American animation kept the domestic output
relatively small. European animation is generally associated more with avant-garde film and new types of visual
experience rather than the standardized re-creation of a set formula that characterizes the American industry. The
Soviet state supported animators as much as they supported conventional filmmakers, and as a result the Soviet
Union had a comfortably established animation industry. State support in Japan took a different form, which
allowed for there to be consistent production, but the industry in Japan never grew to be larger more than a
collection of boutique studios. Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928 (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1982); Norman M. Klein, Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon
(London ; New York: Verso, 1993); Bendazzi, Cartoons.

21
Baskett, The Attractive Empire, 49; Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918-1945, 61–71.

22
In his discussion of public rights and freedoms within democratic government systems, Kasza makes the
distinction between entertainment media and information media while introducing the bureaucratic system that
regulated cinema before and after 1925. The distinction had major repercussions for how censorship laws were
create, as it was this separation that located the regulation of cinema within the Japanese bureaucracy rather than the
legislature and the constitution. However, the entertainment versus information media distinction was not
necessarily one that pre-war intellectuals were consciously aware that they were making or discussing. The
distinction, which he does not clarify, says more about Kasza’s understanding of media as rooted in conveying
information rather than form of sheer entertainment, a type of technology or a social system. It perhaps speaks more
to Kasza’s background as a political scientist rather than a media studies scholar. Kasza approached cinema as a
means of understanding government and the complicity of the democratic system in creating and allowing autocratic
authoritarian regimes. As such, he is not invested in the ways that media may genuinely act different from each
other or have a different perceived effect on the audience, something that in the eyes of the authorities at the time
would require different tactics for regulation. Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918-1945, 7–10, 54–
61.

23
Before there were dedicated city spaces devoted solely to motion picture, film exhibition shared the same streets
and locations as live theater and carnival culture. In Tokyo, for example, film culture developed around the district
of Asakusa, which was an entertainment district during the Edo period (years). For more on the connection between
cinema, misemono, technology, and geography see: Kenji Iwamoto, Gentô No Sêki: Eiga Mae Zenya No Shikaku
Bunkashi [Centuries of Magic Lanterns: The History of Visual Culture at the Dawn of Film] (Tokyo: Moribashisha,
2002).

24
Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918-1945, 57.

25
Peter B. High, “The Dawn of Cinema in Japan,” Journal of Contemporary History 19, no. 1 (January 1984): 23–
57.

26
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 40–65.

27
Ibid., 174–221.

28
Masato Hase, “Cinemaphobia in Taishô Japan: Zigomar, Delinquent Boys, and Somnambulism,” Iconics, no. 4
(1998): 95.

78

29
Ibid., 97.

30
Kōjin Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 111.

31
Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, 94–132.

32
Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 14.

33
Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, 1st ed. (University
of California Press, 2007), 4.

34
Ibid., 33.

35
There were no magazines devoted solely to film until the mid-1920s. The Moving World started as a general
publication about photography, modernity, and urban living, but soon became rather heavily film-oriented.

36
“Manga Firumu No Seisakuhô Wo Kaiso Kôuchi Jun’ichi-Shi Ga Hanashitekureru [How to Make Animated
Films: Talking to Founder Kôuchi Jun’ichi],” Yomiuri Shinbun, October 20, 1930, Evening edition, sec. Culture;
“Has’ei Eiga Seisaku to Taiyo [The Loan and Manufacture of Sound Films],” Asahi Shinbun, February 24, 1932,
Morning edition, sec. 11; Noburo Ôfuji, “Min’asan Ga Daisukina ‘Manga No Katsudô’ Dôshite Tsukurareru Ka?
[How Is the ‘Moving Manga’ That Everyone Loves Made?],” Asahi Shinbun, March 19, 1933, Morning edition, sec.
5.

37
The connection between animation and other alternative contexts such as small gauge film, short films,
educational or cultural films, and more was as concrete as it was discursive. It was not just a tendency on the part of
critics and journalists to lump all non-mainstream filmmaking together. It was often the case that the same group of
filmmakers produced films in these different contexts. For example, in the 1920s, a handful of filmmakers who
were best known for their shadow animation films also produced political films for the Communist group Prokino.
There was a lot of overlap in terms of film classification as well. Alternative films tended to be shot using small
gauge or be shorter in length due to the subject matter or exhibition context. Combining one of the first focused
criticism of animation with that of short film is interesting for the association that it creates as well as the glimpse
into non-studio filmmaking contexts. “Manga Firumu No Seisakuhô Wo Kaiso Kôuchi Jun’ichi-Shi Ga
Hanashitekureru [How to Make Animated Films: Talking to Founder Kôuchi Jun’ichi],” Yomiuri Shinbun, October
20, 1930, Evening edition, sec. Culture; “Has’ei Eiga Seisaku to Taiyo [The Loan and Manufacture of Sound
Films],” Asahi Shinbun, February 24, 1932, Morning edition, sec. 11; Noburo Ôfuji, “Min’asan Ga Daisukina
‘Manga No Katsudô’ Dôshite Tsukurareru Ka? [How Is the ‘Moving Manga’ That Everyone Loves Made?],” Asahi
Shinbun, March 19, 1933, Morning edition, sec. 5.

38
Katô, “Has’ei Mangaron Kangae [Thoughts on a Theory of Animated Sound Films],” 24.

39
Kurada, “Manga Eiga No Tokuisê [The Specificity of Animation],” 26.

40
Sergei Eisenstein et al., The Eisenstein Collection (London ; New York: Seagull Books, 2006), 88.

41
Ibid.

42
Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, 30.

79

43
Ibid., 230–231.

44
Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,”
Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 59–77.

45
"A Theory of the Animated Sound Film". Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22: 44–51. Imamura, Taihei
(December 2010). Translated by Michael Baskett.

46
Kitayama Seitaro. “How to Make Line Films [Senga no Tsukurikata]” Eiga Kyôiku (September 1930) 62-102.

47
“Zen Nihon Eiga Kyôiku Kenkyû Shô. [All Japan Film Education Research Collection],” Eiga Kyôiku (January
1939) 25–30.

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CHAPTER TWO.

PLASTIC MODERNITY: THE ANIMATED BODY AND NATIONAL IDENITY

Introduction

This chapter examines the way in which the interplay between narrative, visual style and
media specificity work to construct national identity in pre-war animated film. Much of the
cultural negotiation that is apparent in animated film takes place around the depiction of
animated bodies. Animated films bore a pre-occupation with visual and metaphorical bodies
that in turn reflected a fascination with representing the body in popular culture. In many ways
“the body” is one of the most contested sites in the process of modernization, particularly as it
relates to motion picture.
1
Cinema was “from the start…also a medium of the body, not just of
sight.”
2
It alters the nature of sight through mechanical intervention, enhancing the capabilities of
the human eye. As a recording technology it also acts as documentation of the body, something
which has been an important consideration in the understanding of cinema as science in addition
to cinema as entertainment or information.
3
The act of viewing cinema also engages the whole
body, as it exists in space relative to the images on the screen or to the camera. Film culture
even goes so far as to alter cityscapes as movie palaces and entertainment districts are built and
torn down. According to Wada-Marciano, “[cinema]’s power to reconfigure space and time into
a provisional reality made the cinema the perfect embodiment of Japanese modernity.”
4

Animation shares many of these traits with cinema, especially before it was discursively defined
as its own medium. However, because it lacks the indexical nature of cinema and the one to one
relationship with real life that cinema offered, the relationship of animation to the body is not
entirely the same as that of cinema.

81

In addition to traits that can be attributed to all types of motion picture, animation in the
early twentieth century was also associated with plasticity.
5
Silverberg described the modern
Japanese experience using
the idea of ‘montage in motion’ [that] expresses the choices and interpretation made by Japanese
consumers of film, fashion, food, and other consumer items that couple be coded as Western but were
decoded and re-encoded as modern. In other words, this culture of montage in motion entailed a
transcoding process that enabled the consumer to maintain a sense of indigenous identity while both
moving within and creating a montage of foreign gestures, objects, and words.
6

Montage operates as a metaphor for the kind of cultural mixing that occurred in modern Japanese
culture, one that acknowledges modernity as a state of “historical rupture [and] radical
realignments of power.”
7
She distances herself from the idea of collision montage, in which the
components of comparison are inherently oppositional, instead highlighting the idea that
Japanese modern culture is a whole made up of many different, mismatching parts. Animation
works in a similar fashion; rendered plastic by the animated form, bodies on in these films were
capable of encapsulating the diverse range of identity politics in pre-war Japan. Rather than
emphasizing the breaks and discomforts, however, animation emphasizes the efforts to smooth
them over through the fantasy of the indestructible plastic line. No less violent a metaphor, for
the animated line is imagined to be under constant attacks that it can and must continually repel,
animation nonetheless operates in as much an obfuscating as much as revealing way.
Oftentimes, the moral tone of animated films, many of which tended to be educational, promoted
a unified, if vaguely defined, national body poised to become the sophisticated cultural leader of
an international modern world. These underlying moral values were linked, directly and
indirectly, to different modes of behavior, political orientation, gender, and ethnicity. Animated
films reveal a culture that was very much in flux. Identity as it appeared in these films oriented

82

around the animated body is not fixed. It was a living thing that was animated in the interlocking
mix of ethnic representation, politics, culture, and play.
Early twentieth century Japanese state policy was deeply invested in controlling and
policing bodies. The political environment in the Taisho period into the early Showa was
charged with controversy and upheaval, the product of taking abstract rhetoric centered on the
kokutai and struggling to apply its tenets in a practical way that cut across all aspects of society.
Japanese industry was beginning to gain an international foothold, but with that growth and the
increased education of the workers came labor movements and philosophical discussions that
sought to determine the line between man and machine.
8
The ongoing push to colonize and
establish a sphere of influence around the Pacific Rim fueled a need for soldiers to defend the
expanding borders and colonists to occupy those spaces.
9
Urbanization brought a variety of
issues to the fore, creating anxieties related to the changing nature of gender roles as women
entered the workforce as well as class conflict as an urban working class began to develop and
become more visible.
10
Advances in medical technology made health and hygiene into public
issues on a scale that had never been seen before. The human body was the most elemental
component of the imperial machine, and in order to keep it running properly it was necessary for
it to be controlled.
On top of the real life practical need for bodies to keep the engines of modernization
running, the metaphor of the body held particular significance in pre-war modern Japan. In the
Meiji period, the Japanese nation came to be oriented around the idea of the kokutai, which
roughly translates to “national polity” or “body politic.” Within this ideology, the nation was
imagined as a body with the emperor positioned at its head, and the branches of the government
and the common people making up the rest. The kokutai was intended as a framework to define

83

the parameters of the emergent Japanese state. This was a useful in the early days of the Japanese
modernization process for conveying a sense of nationhood, as well as for defining a set of moral
values that should would also serve to define Japanese identity and differentiate it from its
national others. Originally, kokutai was seen as something every nation possessed, only with a
different structure or set of values. However, by the end of the Meiji period, it had taken on a
great deal of significance as a symbol of Japanese identity, and it was understood that Japan was
the only nation to have a kokutai.
11
This made it a central rallying point for Japanese uniqueness
and a defensible position against cultural degradation.
Kokutai ideology became an integral aspect of pre-war Japanese culture and society
through the modern institution of compulsory education and the promulgation of the Imperial
Rescript on Education in 1890. For the most part, animated films reflected dominant state
ideology and national identity because of the way that it was regulated through censorship and
education. Japanese identity in animated films was roughly oriented around the set of values set
form in the Imperial Rescript for Education in 1890. Similarly to the Pledge of Allegiance in
postwar America, Children were required to recite the Imperial Rescript of Education every
morning in class. In an effort to ground Japanese education in an indigenous belief system, the
Rescript was constructed to teach and reinforce a set of moral values that were “indigenous and
universal at the same time.”
12
Animated films, many of which were educational films
constructed to teach an appropriately Japanese moral compass to schoolchildren, reinforced
group identity over individualism and hard work over consumerism. Though rooted in Meiji
period anxieties and debates over moral education versus scientific knowledge, the Rescript and
its version of kokutai would continued to carry a great deal of weight and significance until the
end of the Pacific War.

84

In spite of its importance both abstractly as a rhetorical structure for defining Japan at a
time of great change and practically as a concept that was actively promoted through institutions
such as the military and education, kokutai was not a clearly defined concept, even for Japanese
at the time. It was an essential, but vague, ideological link between the institutions that
determined the course of the empire through the end of World War II. However, although it was
intended as a way to unify a disparate population of uneducated people into a homogeneous
nation of modern citizens, the kokutai was a flexible framework that allowed for a great deal of
diversity and disagreement. Gluck states:
Kokutai, the concept of a mystical national polity, was turned to many uses; the call for effective
local self-government at times rebounded against the interest of the central ministries that
originated it. Moreover, much else was happening in the social, economic, and political spheres
that caused mutations and divagations unimagined by those who toiled tirelessly in ideological
activity.
13

Thus, kokutai provided a nationalistic foundation that supported a multiplicity of public
and private interests. Though it was constructed by the state as a means of creating a
loyal citizenry, it was available as a rallying cry to everything from political minorities to
popular culture.
At the same time that the kokutai metaphor was institutionalized into Japanese modern
life, the body was an important mode of popular expression, and served to help people work out
issues the emerged over ethnicity, gender, and class. According to Wada-Marciano “the body in
cinema compensated for Japanese anxiety toward modernization.”
14
Writing specifically about
sports films, she states that the athletic body “presents an image of an ideal integrated self, both
Japanese and Western, traditional and modern, bourgeois and working class, even masculine and
feminine—an image that served to buffer people’s fears over the loss of self that accompanied
the rapid changes of Japan’s modernization.”
15
The same, however, can be said about animated

85

bodies. In the same way that photographing attractive, athletic and ethnically Japanese bodies
allowed cinema to become a fantasy space in which idealized cultural representation could resist
geopolitical hierarchies, animated bodies with their ability to bend and stretch that gave the body
in animation access to the idealized state of plastic invulnerability.
While animation was, more often that not, used as a tool to reinforce Ministry of
Education policies in the private, consumer sphere, it was also a venue for consuming and
expressing the growing “culture of pleasure” of the interwar period. The Ministry’s moral
messages often uneasily relied on animated characters that were allowed to revel in nonsense,
entertainment, and modern pleasures such as music, sports, and games. As time progressed,
however, and the regulations regarding motion picture tightened, the pleasure of animated gags
and nonsense drifted away from the consumption based entertainments of misemono, jazz music
and fashion and came to more overtly engage with the culture of death through animated
violence, battles and conflict. Animated bodies reveal the inseparable nature of children’s media
and moral education, the consumer-based culture of pleasure and the culture of warfare and
death that underlie modernization at a time of empire, and the focused push to build and preserve
national identity in the face of uncertain times. Animated bodies exhibited a great deal of
ideological (and visual) flexibility while remaining within the general boundaries of constructing
a Japanese identity that could inspire pride, demonstrate progress, and support the values of hard
work, community, and healthy living that reductively represented Japanese values over Western
ones. The struggle to define and maintain a modern Japanese identity was negotiated and made
visible through the plastic nature of the animated body.

86

The Body Politic: Kokutai Ideology in the film Theorizing Government

The kokutai provided a flexible rhetorical framework that was just as accessible to
individual citizens and private institutions as it was to the central bureaucracy that originated it.
Though it began in the hands of the Meiji oligarchy, “the call for a sense of nation gradually
moved out from its nationalist, pre-parliamentary context into the public domain, where it was
available for an expanded range of uses.”
16
With the meaning of the kokutai embedded into
national identity itself, it could be referenced in a wide variety of political contexts while still
reinforcing the idea of a powerful, modern Japan. With animated film it becomes possible to
visualize the kokutai using the plastic potential of the indestructible, animated line. For a brief
period in the mid- to late-1920s, in the midst of the flurry of political activity that marked the
Taisho Democracy, there were a few instances when minority political parties or individual
politicians collaborated with animators to produced so-called PR (public relations) films.
Generally, these were small-scale independent films produced outside of the context of the
growing Japanese studio system and very little of political animation survived to the present
day.
17
In one of the surviving examples, Kôuchi Jun'ichi’s 1927 film Theory of Government
(Seiji no Ronrika), it is possible to see a complex visual engagement with metaphorical
understanding of the nation as a body that is critical of the early Showa government while still
exhibiting a staunch belief in the national narrative of power and modern progress.
One of the few PR films from the 1920s to survive to the present day comes out of an eight-year
collaboration between Kôuchi and Mutô Sanji, the outspoken president of the Kanegafuchi
Spinning Company (present-day Kanebo) and leader of the Jitsugyo Doshikai political party.
18

Between 1925 and 1933, Kôuchi produced nine films as promotional material for Mutô’s
ultimately unsuccessful campaign to be elected to the House of Representatives.
19
A colorful

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figure in Taisho society, Mutô initially made a name for himself as a leading industrialist in the
silk industry. His approach to business was more than a sheer moneymaking venture; he was
invested in promoting Japan as a nation and reinforcing Japanese identity though the structure of
his factories and relationship with labor. Early industrialists were interested in increasing
productivity while at the same time preventing labor movements and worker uprisings. Tsutsui
argues that in order to meet these needs Japanese businessmen integrated Taylorism with
paternalism. The structure of practice within the factories emulated American Scientific
Management, an attitude that sought to standardize human labor and criticized for mechanizing
the human body, but couched in a familial rhetoric that saw them as children in a harmonious
family
20
. Mutô’s silk factories were seen as a particularly successful execution of modern
Japanese business practice.
The hierarchy within his textile factories mimicked that of the kokutai, with the president
of the company acting not only as the business leader but the moral example for all of the
workers. Governed by the proper authority, in this case himself and other business leaders with
knowledge of industrial science and technology, the Japanese spirit was capable of great things
so long Japanese citizens could use Western knowledge without being corrupted by it. As
Harootunian states: “In the discourses of the 1930s, there was a widespread effort to imagine
some sort of corporate structure capable of eliminating excess and unevenness to establish a
stable social organism whose parts formed a communal body.”
21
Mutô’s entry into politics was
an extension of that effort, as he felt that the government was failing to uphold its moral
authority, inserting instability into the communal body of the nation.
22

Mutô’s interest in animation began when he attended a 1924 screening for governor of
Tokyo, Gotô Shinpei that featured an animated film about the governor directed by Kôuchi. He

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enjoyed it so much that he would be the primary benefactor for Kôuchi’s studio until retiring
from politics in 1933 to pursue journalism. Their relationship was such that once Mutô left
politics Kôuchi also left filmmaking to return to manga comics. Given the realities of producing
animation in the 1920s, which cost more and took longer to make than live action film at the
time, Mutô’s long term investment in producing animated films suggests that he saw value in
animation that was somehow distinct from what conventional cinema had to offer.
Unfortunately, Theory of Government is the only film they worked on together that is extant, but
it is a rich, sophisticated example of the potential for animation to express abstract ideas.
Building off a political cartooning aesthetic, Government makes affective use plasticity, motion,
and the animated line. The film is less invested in teaching the intricacies of the Jitsugyo
Doshikai’s platform than it is an emotional appeal to viewer’s sense of nationalism. This is
oriented around the concept of Japan as a body, one that is currently carrying the illness of
corruption. The film creates a sense of shared experience, cultural unity and national pride in
order to erode faith in the current government and promote Mutô’s appropriateness for
leadership. Through the use of spectacle and animation special effects, the film is appealing to
an audience of eligible voters to stop the cycle of destruction and put Japan on a path towards
economic and geopolitical success.
At the most surface level, Government is a dazzling, almost abstract visual spectacle that
is characterized by constant motion. The visual style is reminiscent of early chalkboard
animation such as Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1909) and J.S. Blackton’s Humorous Phases of
Funny Faces (1906). (Fig. 9-10)
23
Narratively the film does not follow a straightforward
narrative plot, instead showing the audience a litany of political ills for which electing Mutô is
presented as the cure. Movement is at the heart of the film’s visual power, used to draw attention

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to specific points in the visual oratory or emphasize a particular idea. There are almost no static
moments. Even still images and text are integrated into the scenes and accompanied or
highlighted by some form of movement. For example, rather than interrupt the image with inter
titles, written text is integrated directly into the drawings on the screen. The words are always
animated, scrolling across the screen in ticker-tape lines or following by a bouncing white ball or
quivering arrow that jumps from character to character. Rather than distracting away from the
text, the constant motion highlights it, drawing attention without the jarring interruption
introduced by title cards. The effect is amplified by the fact that the content, while educational
in the sense that it is intended to win voters over to Mutô’s cause, is not intended to dovetail with
classroom moral education. The visual logic of Theorizing Government relies heavily on the
ideological lessons that were taught in elementary school, but it puts them to work against the
current government. In many ways, this film takes full advantage of animation form using visual
effects that were not possible with other motion picture technologies at that time.

Figure 9 Screenshot from Fantasmagorie (Cohl, 1909)

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Figure 10 Screenshot from Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (Blackton, 1906)
One of the clearest examples of animated special effects is the use of the plastic,
animated line, particularly relative to the characters and figures that appear in the film. The
communicative logic of the film itself depends on the protean transformation of the film’s line-
drawn figures. As a critique of the government, the film works to establish the differences
between those who are privileged and those who are being exploited. The enemies of the state in
this case are career politicians who have little understanding of the suffering of the common man
or little interest in the intricacies of running a successful economy. They are shown to conflict
with the innately Japanese values of community, and as such need to be removed in order to
maintain a healthy body politic.
24
People who appear in the film are visual representations of
familiar stereotypes. The visual shorthand used would have been familiar even without the
literary labels, as they mimic the codes used in political cartoons as they appeared in newspapers
and satirical magazines such as Tokyo Puck.
25
For example, after a short, written introduction of
animated words that briefly introduce the issues at hand, the words melt together and twist into
an unnamed politician, drawn as an over-dressed, stereotypical fat cat wearing a top hat and a
morning coat and labeled with the kanji for politician (seijika). A farmer wearing traditional

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wooden sandals and a bamboo hat and labeled as “nômin” appears with a broom and begins to
beat the politician over the head. The politician’s figure bends and stretches under the attack
before being beaten into a different shape, this time the form of another wealthy politician
wearing glasses and a long frock coat. The new figure, which still bends with every blow,
ignores the ongoing attack by the farmer, steps into a fancy car and drives away.
This brief sequence summarizes the Rice Riots of 1918, in which dissatisfaction among
farmers and laborers along with economic hardship in the wake of the First World War lead to a
series of violent riots over the costs of rice.
26
The prime minister at the time resigned, but by the
logic of Mutô’s argument, his successor simply carried on the problems of the earlier
administrations. Visual plasticity provides a means to show the audiences, using spectacular
shorthand that even in spite of the turmoil of the Rice Riots the nature of politics and politicians
has not changed. They continue to be self-serving and simply bend into another form to suit their
needs and escape criticism. The solution, then to this destructive cycle is to elect Mutô, whose
image appears immediately following the departure of the second political figure. A series of
sketched dots converge to become the contours of Muto’s face, which then carefully dissolves
into a photographed image of Mutô wearing a Western-style suit. The introduction of the
photograph is striking after the iconic cartoon style used so far in the film, and it emphasizes
Mutô’s conviction and his devotion to resolving the issues. Compared with the malleable,
untrustworthy stretch and squash plasticity of the earlier politicians, he appears as stalwart and
intractable, the human embodiment of what is best for Japanese interests at home and abroad.
The film goes one step further in order to cement Mutô’s authority, building from the
hand drawn portrait of Mutô in order to bring him more directly into the plastic logic of the
animated line. The static realism of Mutô’s photograph is at odds with the cartoon aesthetic of

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the film as a whole. While this is used to accentuate his importance through a visual contrast,
there is also an effort to prevent the lack of motion inherent to a photographed image from
disrupting the dynamic flow that drives the politically emotional message. Mutô’s photo lingers
on the screen, but the camera gradually zooms from a complete shot of him seated at a desk to a
close-up that neatly frames only his face. Choosing to introduce Mutô using a photograph rather
than recording real-time moving footage is itself an interesting choice. It contradictorily
preserves the animation aesthetic by turning the photograph into another frame that links ideas
together. In the midst of the abstract cartoon style, the photograph is striking and memorable.
But it is also carefully integrated into the fluid hand-drawn aesthetic. The image is introduced
through a soft dissolve from a hand-drawn portrait into the photographed image. After a long
slow zoom into a tight close-up of Mutô’s face, the image again dissolves into black and white
hand drawn lines. The constant camera movement prevents the stillness of the photograph and
its lack of plasticity from jarring the flow of the film. Government revels in the visual pleasure
of motion, and there is a constant effort to avoid moments of pause or stillness that might break
the hypnotic spell.
Taking advantage of the visual plasticity, Mutô is directly equated with the spirit of the
nation, the one politician who has the nation’s best interests at heart. Through special effects, his
face takes on the outline of the Japanese islands, visually suggesting the connection between the
nation, national spirit, unity, and political leaders. Once the photograph has dissolved into a
drawn portrait, the image continues to zoom until the man’s face resembles only a series of
wiggling lines. It then appears to zoom out again to reveal that the lines have transformed into
the outline of the Japanese archipelago. He himself has become the nation, a means of visually
reinforcing his appropriateness for office. Contrary to the ghostly impact of superimposition, the

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slow transition from the photograph to the geographical outline is made almost solid by
consistency of the animated lines. In this case, plasticity allows the image and the metaphorical
association to take on a physicality that is visually heavier than that of conventional editing. The
lines create a link that builds from the indexical quality of the photograph, creating a simulated
form of indexicality in the transition from photograph to drawn portrait to national boundaries.
The overlaid images form their own type of imprint. This scene not only emphasizes the
importance of metaphorical bodies to Japanese identity, which we see in the transformation of
Mutô into the nation, but also reveals the visual impact that was possible through the animated
form. Although it is a short moment, it is a point where metaphor, motion picture, and meaning
all come together to create maximum impact for the audience.
There is a strong reliance on the metaphor of the body politic in order to reinforce a sense
of solidarity and encourage nationalism among potential viewers. For example, the problem of
overpopulation is one of the many introduced in the film. A population boom and subsequent
over-crowding were often cited as justifications for colonial expansion, the logic being that the
burgeoning Japanese population needed to have someplace to go when there was no longer a
place for them on the original archipelago.
27
Government focuses on this problem in particular,
using a visual iconography of bodies and disease. Japan appears as a ship labeled as “Nippon-
maru” navigating rolling seas peppered with rocks. The captain, labeled as “government” (seifu)
is asleep at the wheel and one of the water rocks is labeled “the population problem “ (jinko
mondai). As the ship is tossed and turned on the sea, a group of top-hat wearing seijika play
instruments, drink, and laugh as the ship’s boiler room burns behind them. The ship begins to fill
with people, and is soon stuffed with bodies, arms, legs and heads dangling from the rims. The
frame them pans back, showing a map of the Pacific, with the little, over-laden ship sailing from

94

Japan to China to Indonesia, being rejected from every shore before returning to Japan. The
bodies inside the ship are then reduced to small white dots that quickly multiply and over-run the
map. For the sake of simplicity, the problem of over-population is portrayed as an illness.
Human bodies are reduced to the level of germs that infect and overrun the national “body” that
is Japan.
The trope of infection and disease were as ingrained into Japanese cinema as an extension
of the relationship it had with the body. As the Zigomar Incident demonstrates, cinema itself
was considered an infectious agent, capable of corrupting the minds of youthful viewers. The
concern was based in as much in the technology of cinema, its newness and its relationship with
science, as it was in the content of specific, individual films. To take the metaphor one step
further, cinema was the mode of transmission while the content determined the symptoms of the
disease. From this angle, cinema as infection is not necessarily negative, nor does it act counter
to the master narrative of Japanese modernization and progress. Illness made a convenient
rallying point. In his essay about tuberculosis as a trope in modern literature, Karatani points out
that “the discovery of the ‘pathogen’ created a mirage which made it seem as though all
contagious diseases could now be cured through medical science.”
28
He traces a connection
between the idea of communicable pathogens and germ theory with the modern ideology of the
“mirage of health.” Combined with the institutionalization of modern medicine, illness, at least
as it was conceived both as and in cinema, was a defanged threat. It was something dangerous
enough to invoke a sense of anxiety, but it was safe enough to be controlled. By using infection
as a visual trope to represent overpopulation, Seiji no Ronrika adds even more dimension to the
metaphorical body, encouraging viewers to do their civic duty by using their votes to prevent the
negative effects of “disease” from taking hold.

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It is important to note that while the members of the Jitsugyo Doshikai were dissatisfied
with the direction of the ruling party, the Seiyûkai, was taking with economic and foreign policy,
favoring a laissez-faire approach, they were not as extreme as the socialist or communist parties,
who were interested in much deeper and father reaching reforms.
29
Their politics represent the
resistance of one set of elites, urban industrialists, against the still dominant agrarian landowning
class. In fact, Seiji no Ronrika’s unfocused catch-all criticism offers little in the way of practical
solutions aside from electing Mutô to office. Though the film may not deviate drastically from
mainstream politics of the day, it represents the point of view of a specific group whose interests
were not necessarily in line with the dominant elites. It is an example of how the kokutai could
operate to support a vague, but powerful, morally based nationalism and a specific interest at the
same time. It is also an interesting example of how animation and plasticity are used to evoke
the national body. Animation provided the Jitsugyo Doshikai with a spectacular means of
summarizing their particular brand of nationalism, demonstrating some of its differences from
cinema and its potential as a medium.

The Spread of Infection: The Intersection of Modern Science and Everyday Life

In the interwar period, the practical and philosophical pre-occupation with everyday life
began to support the gradual normalization of middle class bourgeois culture as the media
standard for the nation as a whole. The actual socio-economic structure of Japanese society was
diverse, complex and in a state of flux due to the cascading effects of rapid industrialization and
urbanization, but magazines, newspapers, and cinema increasingly presented it as homogeneous,
urban, and middle-class.
30
Much of this representation was focused around the domestic sphere,
which was an important site of modern cultural negotiation. According to Sand, the home was a
major site of cultural expression, one which was not directly influenced by the state, but which

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reflected a great deal of the influence of modernization policies.
31
Cinema, including animation,
was an influential force for disseminating the ideal of middle class living. Not only did cinema
favor white-collar, middle class families as film subjects, the moral sensibility of the urban
bourgeoisie was often encoded into the character and narrative arcs.
32

The institution of moral education linked the moral code of right and wrong to modern
behavior. Politeness and ethics were caught up in the desire to demonstrate a proper modern
image of Japan. It was not enough to behave by the tenets of the Rescript, sacrificing pleasure
for hard work and providing for the sake of the group rather than the individual and the future
rather than the present. It was also a moral imperative, as a Japanese consumer-subject, to be
well-informed and familiar with the latest advances in technology. This was not always
necessarily something that needed to take place on the battlefield or in the office. Scientific
behavior was becoming encoded into the patterns of everyday life. For example, in his study
about the presence of the Red Cross in Japan, DePies described the effort on the part of the local
Japanese chapter to promote personal hygiene in the late 1910s. The campaign, which was
designed and run by Japanese nationals rather than foreign visitors, used poster advertisements of
children going through their daily routines in a hygienic way. The children in these posters were
consistently healthy and rosy-cheeked as they happily went about washing their hands and
vegetables, brushing their teeth and making sure to use separate towels to prevent cross
contamination.
33

The moral structure of hygiene or home economics campaigns such as this, hinged both
on the symbolic understanding of the nation as a body and the logic of disease. The Spread of
Infection, a 1929 hygiene film directed by Yamamoto Sanae and commissioned by the Ministry
of Education, is an interesting film to consider in the context cinema as an infectious disease as

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well as the moral imperative to be modern for the nation. If cinema was an infection, it was one
that could not only be cured it could also be used as a vaccine. On the surface, Infection carries
two clear-cut purposes: first to introduce a rudimentary understanding of germ theory and the
second to teach and encourage people to maintain proper hygiene. It also links middle class
living with the moral imperative to be scientifically aware and behave accordingly. The
metaphor and moral responsibility are carried even further in The Spread of Infection, as the need
to care for one’s own body became a moral obligation to uphold the Japanese social values not
only to one’s family but also on a national scale. Citizens had a dual responsibility to themselves
and to the state to be healthy. In order to create that sense of responsibility, the film again uses
the plastic logic of animated film to invoke the body politic, enhanced by the addition of
technological authority as a finishing touch.
The first part of the film establishes the basics of germ theory, showing people the
mechanics of infection and the effects of disease upon the body. In the first scene a middle class,
suburban family is assembling for dinner around an improperly prepared fish. While the maid
was preparing food, a little demon crawls from under the table and scatters black stars on the
under-cooked fish. In spite of its focus on scientific knowledge, Infection relies on a folkloric
rendition of a monster in order to convey the source of the disease.
34
Represented as quivering
black stars, the infectious agent in the film is spread by a small gremlin that sneaks his way into
the kitchen of a large, suburban home. He begins scattering black stars all over the uncooked
food before disappearing into a crevice. The careless maid does not notice and continues
cooking. She however does not heat the fish to the proper temperature, and it is still covered
with quivering stars when it is brought to the family to eat. Though the entry into the idea of
germ theory borrows from the imagery of folklore, the idea that illness is caused by something

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physical rather than mystical is an important scientific intervention. Disseminating this modern
theory, linked itself to changes in modern subjectivity, effectively distances the pathogen from
the patient, abstracting it into vectors of infection that can and should be controlled through
proper modern behaviors.
35

The unfortunate maid’s family represents a middle-class ideal. A three-generation family
consisting of two parents, two grandparents and three small children relax in an airy shared
living space, the perfect cell of a stable, healthy body politic. More than an accurate cross-
section of society, this family represents an ideal, stable family in which all the generations live
together in harmony. They live a comfortably affluent suburban lifestyle. Their home is large
with tatami mats and shoji doors, but lacking in any kind of opulent ostentation. It sits right next
to the river a short boat ride from downtown. The idyllic suburban neighborhood extends to the
immediate surrounding area. Outside in the river fishermen and merchants bring produce down
the river on wooden boats rowing with poles, and the streets are crowded but unpaved.
As the family sits down to eat, the audience is treated to close-ups of each member consuming
pieces of infected fish, finally zooming in on a piece of the fish being consumed by the youngest
daughter. The imagery becomes abstract as the audience follows the diseased food down her
throat and watches in a simplified silhouetted X-ray as the black stars settle inside her and begin
to multiply. The film zooms in even further, introducing a microscopic view of the germ-stars
reproducing themselves. Invoking X-ray and microscopic imagery introduces The Spread of
Infection into a larger “confrontation and competition” between what Figal calls “folk
knowledge” and “state knowledge.”
36
According to Figal, one goal of the Meiji administration
was to control superstition in order to foster scientific knowledge in its place. On one level,
Infection ameliorates the conflict, while still favoring science over superstition, by introducing

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the X-rays as the means of indentifying the pathogen. Animation as a special effect allows things
like microscopic pathogens and imaginary creatures to be visualized, condensing science and
folklore into a single understanding of how infections spread. By referencing scientifically coded
technology, Infection transitions from the traditional understanding of illness resulting from
spiritual disorders into the quantifiable (but no less invisible) modern realm of pathogens and
modern medicine. The power hierarchy of science over folklore is maintained, however, because
folkloric gremlin is vilified as the source of disease while science and technology provide the
starting point for preventing and overcoming disease. The two cannot be easily separated, and in
fact, the film does not try to do so. In order to render the invisible visible the film straddles
different strategies, in the process blending them together seamlessly. In combining X-rays,
microscopic views, and folklore, Infection attempts to smooth over the tension between scientific
and non-scientific understandings of medicine and disease.
The introduction of X-rays also reinforces the idea of the national body. X-rays imply
the ability to move below the surface and see the interior. While technology at the time made
this possible and early cinema shared space with X-rays as a misemono attraction, X-rays did not
make frequent appearances in pre-war films, animated or otherwise. Including not only X-rays,
but also a zoom into extreme close-up of the microscopic activity of germs multiplying was
deliberate, unusual, and more easily accessible to animation than to indexical photography in
1928. By penetrating the boundary of the visible body, X-rays collapse it into a state of extreme
superficiality. As Lippit states,
In the X-ray image, the body and the world that surrounds it are lost. No longer inside nor out,
within nor without, body and world form a heterogeneous one…the x-ray can be seen as an image
of you and the world, an image forged in the collapse of the surface that separates the two.
37

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Collapsing the interiority of the subject who consumed the diseased food visually conflates the
body of the individual victim with the external body of the state. The use of X-rays is not meant
to bring the viewer into the sick individual’s point of view-something that is also supported by
the lack of attention towards symptoms and suffering. The ultimate effect is to dismantle the
individual, reinforcing the sense that a single citizen is ultimately only a cell in the larger body of
the nation.
Within moments, the reproducing black stars overcome the girl’s body, and she is filled
in from the inside until she is nothing but a black silhouette. Infection avoids moralizing from
the point of view of individual suffering. At no point in the film does it dwell on the
consequences of infection. It does little to inform people about fevers, rashes, nausea or any of
the other unpleasant, unsightly symptoms of disease. DePies noticed a similar attempt to
“sanitize” infection in the Red Cross campaign, which focused on the healthy figures of children
exhibiting the proper behavior, rather than the suffering of sick people. Instead of building on a
logic of punishment, moral obligation was indirectly encouraged by creating the desire for the
attractive, upper middle class spaces and people depicted in the advertisements.
38
The film uses
a similar logic of encouragement, rather than punishment, in order to promote its message of
moral hygiene. The maid who failed to cook the fish properly is not indicted for her actions, and
the film moves on before dwelling on any symptoms the youngest daughter might come to
display. Her blackened silhouette suggests a dire outcome, but without a showy display of
suffering. In this way, the moral compass remains oriented around group dynamics rather than
the individual. The infected child is not meant as the audience’s entry into the experience of the
film. She stands as a representative of the group, an innocent who needs to be protected in order
to preserve the idyllic environment she inhabits.

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From the microscopic vision of the germs, the film expands to show how disease can be
spread in urban populations. The fish came from diseased water, shown again using the round
dancing germs, which are transferred to vegetables being transported down the river. Once the
vegetables are delivered into the city, the film does not continue to track those particular viruses,
instead shifting to scenes of modern thoroughfare. On paved streets lined with brick buildings
carriages and people dressed in Western clothes walk back and forth. A woman and a child
navigate the crowd on their way to a bank, and are passed by a man in a fedora and coat with a
fur collar who spits on the ground. The spittle is covered again with the little germs, and the
child puts his hand in it as he crawls along the ground. His mother then buys him an ice cream,
and the boy eats the germs along with the treat. From the focused family unit, the film shifts to
an awareness of the city, and one’s responsibility to a larger body of people outside of oneself.
Similar to the average family at the beginning of the film, the city is an idealized modern
space. The pace of life is rhythmic and the crowds go about their business like clockwork.
People are well dressed and in the visual shorthand used to portray the city filth and poverty are
easily omitted. Children play together in the park and strangers greet each other as the pass on
the street. The city appears in contrast to the lazy comfort of the suburbs, but it still operates like
a well-oiled machine as long as everyone is properly playing their part. But all it takes is one
citizen to set out of line for weakness to penetrate the balance. In this case it is not a homeless
man or a deviant who spreads disease in the city, it is an affluent businessman with a private
coach and a fur collar who indifferently spreads disease to a child. The child’s mother is also
implicated in his infection, as he crawls into infected spittle while her back is turned and is not
made to wash his hands before eating. The bustle of crowds through the city is reminiscent of
the frenetic dance of the viral bodies as they occupy an infected space, creating a sense of unity

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among a collection of individuals. It serves as a reminder that in spite of class differences,
everyone is still linked together sharing a common space. One person, even a rich man who
represents modern successes, can become the source of affliction in the body politic.
Both Theorizing Government and The Spread of Infection reflect the relationship between
kokutai ideology and animated plasticity. The national body is constantly present; there is little
individualism in either film. The people who populate them both are joined and interchangeable.
Even Mutô’s effort to promote himself as a political candidate is framed as a benefit for the
whole, not for himself as an individual. According to the conservative logic of these films,
society is understood as a body in which everyone must succeed or fail together. Individual
effort only matters in so far as it can benefit the group. This type of moral logic, deliberately
based in Japanese values, can also be broken down and understood through representation. That
is, not only did the moral logic of many animated films depend on reinforcing group ethics over
individual reward, the representation of young girls, boys, and anthropomorphized animals were
all common and distinctly linked to national ideology. Each of these had a different relationship
with the dominant ideology, and can be deconstructed to see how media operates to sustain or
resist these cultural paradigms.

Children’s Media, Gender, and the Animated Body

In addition to a introducing new sense of collective identity, which could be found both
in urban and rural spaces as well as in the unifying political doctrine of the kokutai, modernity
also redefined individual differences, such as those between genders and different races and
ethnicities, as well as creating new sub-categories that had existed before. Among the new social
categories is that of youth culture. According to Karatani, the concept of childhood is a modern
construct that until recently went relatively unquestioned by scholars. He cites the origins of

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childhood and youth culture in the introduction of the compulsory school system in the 1870s as
the moment when young people went from being treated as little different from adults to being
distinguished as a separate population of “school children.”
39
As he states:
“it was the appearance of ‘youth’ that created the division between the child and the adult and
conversely, the division guaranteed that a period of ‘youth’ would inevitably appear.
Psychologists who assume ‘development’ and ‘maturation’ to be self-evident fail to perceive that
this division between childhood and adulthood is itself a historical product. It was not until ‘the
child’ came to exist that literature and amusements ‘for children’ appeared.”
40

Karatani places the origins of children’s literature in 1911, but Owen Griffiths argues that the
very first child-oriented literature, which were generally adventure stories and morality tales,
emerged with the Sino-Japanese War in the late 1890s.
41

Griffiths intervention ties the emergence of children’s literature with the introduction of
cinema with the construction of nationhood around warfare and military victories. He contends
that “much of the gendered rhetoric of manly, sacrificial death we see emerging during
Japanese’s years of total war (1937-1945) can be traced back to the earliest days of children’s
print media in the 1890s” referring to “the increasingly single-minded glorification of manly,
sacrificial death in war” as “the culture of death.”
42
Children’s media “reveals the manner in
which adults transmitted their fears, aspirations, and values to children” in tandem with the
formal structure of the educational system.
43
Griffiths’s work begins to address the blind spot
that Karatani identifies around education and childhood as themselves modern constructs by
refusing to make assumptions about childhood, education, and content. It suggests that the
focused integration of imperial infrastructure with popular culture and everyday life described by
Young was already in process long before the period of total empire she identifies as beginning
in 1931. Griffith’s displays a tendency to equate all children’s literature with shonen boys’
culture. While this was not the case, as a genre of literature and media developed to appeal to

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shojô or girls, but shonen-oriented material was more common, popular, and available. The
mainstreaming of boys culture is even more exaggerated in animated film, as shonen adventure
films were not only one of the most popular, they were also the most common genres to be
found.
Although adult-oriented animated content was not unusual in Japan, the fact remains that
the majority of animated films at this time were intended for a younger audience.
44
As children’s
media, animated films offer similar connections and associations as children’s literature. The
shonen genre relates animated film to the gendered culture of death that formed over time as a
result of the importance of warfare and imperial expansion to the process of nation building.
This is particularly interesting to think about in relation to the perceived threat cinema posed on
young men in particular. Archetypal characters that exemplify everything that the adults desire
children to be would be one way to manipulate the content in order to control cinema’s infectious
effects and turn them towards preventing youthful violence and misbehavior rather than
encouraging it. The figure of the shonen often stood in as a metaphor for the nation in domestic
animated films. He was the answer not only to cultural anxieties, but also to ethnic ones, was
perhaps the least flexible figure in pre-war animated films. In a medium defined by plasticity,
the bodies of shonen characters rarely expressed much fluidity, only using their plastic abilities
to win fights and battles. From film to film, and even from character to character, he was
remarkably consistent in his depiction.
The consistent portrayal of shonen in animated films as athletic, morally upright leaders
is based in part on the archetypal figure Momotarô as a template.
45
John Dower noted the role
Momotarô played in 1940s propaganda, referring to the prominence of the folkloric character the
“Momotarô-paradigm.”
46
But Momotarô was a significant national symbol long before media

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portrayals of him had escalated to the intensity of wartime levels. The Momotarô legend was
integrated into the educational system in the Meiji period, and the legend was used as part of
moral education to teach about kokutai and the Japanese spirit.
47
Some of these, such as
Momotarô the Undefeated (Nihon-ichi no Momotarô, Yamamoto, 1928), were straightforward
retellings of the legend. But more often than not, the legend was only a starting point, and
Momotarô appeared in many films, for example The Toybox Series Chapter Three: 1936 Edition
(Omocha Hakô no Shirîzu Dai San: 1936 Hen, J.O Tôkî, 1934), as a defender of the nation and
the empire. He was the embodiment of kokutai ideology worked into the child-friendly context
of animation.
Momotarô the Undefeated recounts the legend in full beginning with the hero’s birth
from a giant peach to a childless elderly couple and ending with the defeat of the demons (oni)
on Demon Island. It is split into five vignettes which all showcase his strength, cleverness,
wisdom, and leadership. Immediately upon his birth, Momotarô begins somersaulting around
the room, lifting the pieces of the peach over his head, juggling them. In the next scene, he
defeats a full-grown demon even though he’s only still a child. After a brief scene showing his
parents making a batch of millet dumplings, he is next shown taming the monkey and the dog.
Rather than subdue then by force, he convinces them to get along by offering the dumplings as a
reward. Once he has similarly won over the pheasant, the third member of his invasion force, he
teaches them how to be civilized, giving them armor to wear and weapons to fight with. The
demons they ultimately fight on demon island fight well, but they are drunk and disorganized
from too much carousing and are easily taken by surprise. In spite of his youth, Momotarô is a
paragon with his unmatched strength and wits. He is a self-assured leader, who knows when to
use force and when to use guile. In fact, he is nothing but a perfect role model. He is only

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mischievous as a young boy fighting the first demon, and his fighting style is teasing and light-
hearted. But by the time he and his band of animal companions storm the stronghold at Demon
Island he is a serious and composed, despite his youth.
The character of Momotarô that appears in Undefeated does not display a great deal of
animated plasticity. There are no points in the film where his legs, neck, or arms stretch, either
for comic or narrative effect. By contrast, the demons he fights bend and stretch as he delivers
his blows. One is stretched at the neck as Momotarô dangles him from a tree. To defeat it, he
pulls and stretches the demon’s horn, finally removing it and beating it over the head until its
eyes bounce out of its head. Later animated renditions of Momotarô through the 1930s and
1940s, including his famous appearance in Mitsuyo Seo’s feature length films for the Navy,
Momotarô’s Sea Eagles (Momotarô no Umiwashi, 1943) and Momotarô’s Divine Warriors
(Momotarô no Umi no Shinpei, 1944), exhibit similar non-plastic qualities. (Fig. 11) The relative
rigidity of Momotarô’s body relates to a fantasy of power in the face of unstable social and
geopolitical developments. Harootunian writes “The rapid pace of Japan’s capitalist
modernization in the twentieth century prompted an effort among [Japanese] to discover a fixed
identity in relation to origin in the pre-capitalist past.”
48
As a folkloric figure, Momotarô
maintains a connection with the nostalgic past that modern Japanese feared they might lose. He
can also exist as an idealized version of traditional Japanese culture. Momotarô’s lack of
plasticity makes him infallible, resistant to negative influences from the outside. In a world
populated by malleable bodies, his becomes influential, bringing and preserving law and order
with him wherever he goes.

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Figure 11 Momotarô stretches the demon’s horn in Momotarô the Undefeated
At the same time that he provides modern Japan with a constructed connection with a
mythic past, Momotarô was not limited to feudal or folkloric settings. He appeared often as a
modern military hero, particularly as the 1930s progressed and militarism was an increasingly
visible element of popular culture. For example, in the films Momotarô’s Sky Adventure (Umi
no Momotarô, Murata, 1931) and Momotarô’s Sea Adventure (Sora no Momotarô, Murata,
1932), he is both an accomplished pilot and submarine operator respectively. Encased in metal
machinery he performs impossible feats of derring-do, spinning and whirling in ways that defy
the laws of physics. (Fig. 12-13) But the animated gags that fuel these films are not based in
Momotarô’s ability to bend and stretch his plastic body. They are based in showcasing his
excellent agility and cleverness, still taking advantage of animation form to create special effects
that were impossible otherwise. Again, however, in both films Momotarô’s body exhibits little
plasticity. Even in the context of modern technology, Momotarô is a fixed point, a constant,
reassuring presence whose victory is always assured.

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Figure 12 Momotarô operates the periscope in Momotarô’s Sea Adventure

Figure 13 Momotarô pilots a fighter plane in Momotarô’s Sky Adventure

Momotarô provided the template for many of the other shonen figures that appeared in
animated film. Sato Ginjiro and Chiba Yoji’s long-running character Ma-bô is one example.
Ma-bô is similar to Momotarô in that he is often shown as the leader of a band of animals, he is
often involved in some form of competition or combat, and he is usually called upon to defend a
weaker group against a stronger one. Not only does Ma-bô fit into Dower’s Momotarô-
paradigm, he is also an example of the athletic shonen body that was part of the culture of
militaristic nationalism. Wada-Marciano writes that

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modern sports brought not only westernization, but also an accelerated nationalism that connected
with the growing militarism in Japan…The imbrication of nationalism with modern sports led to
depictions of the strong ideal body, embedded with the discourse of nation and modernity.
49

Although she is writing about the male bodies that appeared in live-action sports films, the same
can be said about the animated shonen, who was similarly athletic and powerful.
Sato Senga Seisakujo, the animation studio Sato and Chiba founded in order to produce
Ma-bô films, was established in 1936 and produced films until the mid-1940s. (Fig. 14) Likely
due to their timing, Ma-bô films are heavily imperial and fit into Griffith’s “culture of death,”
constructing masculine imperial identity related to warfare. Many Ma-bô films take place in
colonial settings, such as China and the South Pacific, requiring Ma-bô to perform fantastic acts
of bravery and athleticism for the sake of the empire. In Ma-bô the Young Aviator (Ma-bô no
Shonen Kôkûhama, 1937), he does aerial reconnaissance for a unit of adults in China, using his
skills as a dogfighter to hold off an enemy air attack. The enemy, who wear robes, long braided
queues, and Fu-Manchu moustaches, gather and attack the base in droves while Ma-bô aides
them from above, fighting back the attackers almost single-handedly in his airplane. In Ma-bô’s
Expedition to the Unexplored Continent (Ma-bô no Tairiki Hikyô Kenzaki, 1938), he liberates
downtrodden Chinese peasants from their military oppressors. While riding a camel in the
desert, he comes across a group of mal-nourished, mistreated native peasants being abused by
Chinese soldiers, again wearing Fu-manchus. On top of the transparent justification narratives
within these stories, in which Ma-bô resists an onslaught from innumerable Chinese hordes and
saves the Chinese from themselves, his playful antics constitute a form of power. He easily and
unquestionably wins every conflict he engages in.

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Figure 14 Ma-bô (on the bottom left) speaks to a native king in
Ma-bô Fights Hard in the South Seas

However, like Momotarô, Ma-bô does not win by bending or expanding his body. He is
depicted executing complicated and impossible somersaults and martial arts movies, but he does
not stretch his arms or legs to overcome his enemies. At one point in Continental Expedition, he
repels a volley of bullets by creating a giant magnet from his surroundings. Even though
animated characters had the indestructible ability to receive and repel violence, shonen like Ma-
bô and Momotarô use ingenuity and agility to avoid injury and are rarely shown with bullets or
weapons bouncing off of their plastic bodies. Considering that these films, and the larger culture
of children’s media and shonen as a genre, are fantasies of power, dominance, and masculinity, it
is interesting that their animated bodies do not take advantage of the characteristic that was seen
by film critics as one of animation’s greatest strengths. The image of the shonen and his
symbolism were perhaps so powerfully reinforced through both popular culture and education
that they did not need the added edge that plasticity and in animated invulnerability could
provide. The fact that they were not plastic characters also suggests the rigidity of the role that
they played in national ideology. As role models for children, already a population considered to
be particularly susceptible to the ill effects of cinema and consumerism, shonen could not afford

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to be flexible. Animated shonen were the charismatic defenders of the empire, and their
indefatigable support was necessary for promoting future generations of young men who would
be morally willing to continue sacrificing for the sake of the empire.
While the figure of the shonen was more common, there are some interesting
counterpoints. One of these is the figure of the lazy, old man. Where the shonen were a playful,
but unflappable, expression of idealized state ideology, the old man was loveable, but unruly and
resistant to authority. Often the buffoon, stories that featured a lazy or incompetent old man in
the lead played on his inability to care for his family or complete his job for comic effect. These
still worked to reinforce mainstream moral values. Inevitably, the lazy old man would experience
some kind of hilarious humiliation, and even if he did not explicitly learn the error of his ways,
the audience is left with the distinct impression not to imitate his behavior. The role of the lazy
old man is a more extreme version of that played by the hybrid shonen, namely a naughty anti-
hero who is teaching by failed example. There is perhaps some implied lack of faith in older
generations and their perceived ability to adapt to modern life built into the contrast between the
old man’s resistance to rules, work and technology and the shonen’s easy acceptance of these
things. But featuring older male characters was not meant as an appeal to older audiences. In
fact, structurally these films still neatly into the shonen character, and while they are drawn as
older men, these characters behave like naughty children rather than informed, mature consumer
subjects.
Nonki no O-tôsan, a character from an Asahi newspaper comic strip, is one example of
this type. In The Nonki no O-tôsan Returns from the Dragon Palace (Nonki no O-tôsan Ryûgû
Mairu, Kimura, 1925), O-tôsan is swept into the story of Urashima Tarô. In the original story, a
fisherman returns a fish to the sea, and in return the fish takes him to the Dragon Palace where

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the fisherman marries the princess and spends many happy years with her. When he returns to
his world, however, centuries have passed and he has lost everything he used to know. In the
Nonki no O-tôsan version, O-tôsan is shirking work, spending time at the beach. He finds his
way to Dragon Palace by teasing fish and flirting with the pretty dragon maidens. Once there, he
abuses the hospitality at the Dragon Palace by eating and drinking too much and chasing the
pretty servant girls until he is finally expelled before he can marry the princess. Swimming
desperately back to shore, he is chased by warrior octopi. But just as one of them catches him,
he wakes to find himself still on the beach, his work for the day unfinished. As he hurries home
to his wife, who will surely be angry with him, he thanks his blessings, declaring that all the
drink and pretty girls are not worth being chased by angry octopi and in the end nothing could be
more satisfying than an honest day’s work.
Nonki no O-tôsan films reinforces the moral of a steadfast work ethic, but rather than do
so in the form of an authority figure who should be respected and imitated, they are examples of
what not to do. The old man begins the film as a comic failure rather than a hero. Either he is
not very bright, or downright lazy and unwilling to do as he is told. Through a series of
misfortunes he learns the error of his ways, or at least he learns not to repeat the same mistakes
again. Where the shonen represents the embodiment of the nation, the lazy old man is a kind of
flipside. His bad behavior still works to emphasize the group over the individual parts by
making the consumeristic desires of the individual, in this case wine and women, into critical
jokes. The audience can participate vicariously in his amusing antics, knowing all the while that
he is getting himself in trouble through his indulgent selfishness. The pleasure and amusement
of the lazy old man as a trope emerges from his nonsensical behavior, but in the end these types

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of films are no less moralistic than those featuring shonen, putting forth the same message of
hard work and communal identity.
The most rare voice in animated educational films was that of the young girl or shojô.
The shojô is one of the most interesting and prolific voices in the post-war period, but in the pre-
war, while she was a significant demographic and appeared in many other media, she did not
appear as much on the big screen in animated form. Much like the shonen, she represented both
a hope for the future, but perhaps more so than her male counterpoint she was a site of the state’s
anxieties. The general lack of animated educational films aimed at female audiences is itself
interesting in this context. Female identity was a source point of state anxiety. As in most
countries, modernization opened up the social possibilities for women, leading to a significant
rise in female consumption and an erotic celebration of the female body. In the 1920s, the
“modan gyaru” or “moga” appeared as a tense archetype of this trend.
50
Unlike youth behavior,
which came to be explicitly linked with motion picture with the Zigomar Incident, anxieties
surrounding female behavior were more centered on the experience of theater going and fan
activity rather than the potentially negative effects of consuming motion picture itself.
Animated shojô were not allowed the same access to the rollicking adventures of their
male cousins. Neither were they presented as sinister, modern villains as they were in live-action
cinema. In fact, domestic animated films shied away from aggressive sexual imagery; there were
no Japanese equivalents for characters such as Betty Boop who operated in a hypersexual mode.
The most common shojô to appear in animated films was the damsel in distress, an innocent,
attractive young figure who unwittingly attracts negative and even dangerous attention from
older men around her. She is almost helpless, and at the mercy of outside forces, implying that
the onus is on those around her to act properly for the sake of protecting her. In opposition to

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“the tendency to mark a modern woman figure with the negative aspects of modernity,”
animated shojô often represented the ultimate victims of the modernization process.
51
In The
Unlucky Butterfly (Cho no Sainan, Unknown, 1931), a pretty butterfly has her kimono wings
stolen by an aggressive mouse riding a scooter. He forces her to serve him food and drink with
the promise that he will return the wings once he has eaten, but upon finishing his meal he keeps
them and sneaks away instead, locking her wings in a trunk. The butterfly is helpless to do
anything until a cat dressed in a suit and a bowler hat comes to her rescue. (Fig. 15) She is
juxtaposed in between two poles of masculinity, one a violent aggressor and the other a gallant
savior, but as a victim she lacks any agency of her own. Interestingly, she is portrayed as a
traditional maiden rather than a modern vamp, with her kimono-esque wings and her mastery of
cooking. But the careless act of hanging her wings out to dry and sitting in her underclothes
made her a victim of aggressive, unwanted male attention that she was powerless to escape.

Figure 15 The butterfly begs the mouse to return her wings in
The Hapless Butterfly

There is a similar dynamic at work in the famous 1943 art film The Spider and the Tulip
(Kumo to Chulip'u) by Masaoka Kenji. Widely hailed as a technical tour de force, The Spider
and the Tulip was one of the first Japanese animated films to feature both sound and the depth of

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field made possible by the multi-planar camera, making it an important art film for the time. In
the film, the shojô is not human; she is an anthropomorphized ladybug. Unlike the butterfly
discussed above, she is decidedly modern, but also very young and naïve. She has a more human
figure, appearing more like a girl wearing an insect costume, and wears her hair in a bob. The
spider appears almost as a Little Sambo character in black face, wearing a straw boater and with
thick pale lips against his black skin. (Fig. 16) He tries to lure her to his web. The interpretive
possibilities are wide, but there is a sexual undertone to the film that is disturbing. The ladybug
comes across the spider by accident, as he weaves a hammock in his web. He then invites her to
“play” with him, and when she refuses he laments at “how boring she is” and as she tries to leave
he chases her through the grass. She’s able to escape thanks to help from the flowers around her,
and she hides in a motherly female tulip’s petals while a storm blows the spider away. There is a
certain suggestiveness, not only in the particular movement of their respective bodies, but also in
his invitation to come play with her cross-cut with shots of the empty hammock swinging in his
web.

Figure 16 The spider’s shadow looms over the ladybug in
The Spider and the Tulip

The ladybug is very young and girlish, and aside from wandering too far from home and
being helplessly attractive, there doesn’t seem to be an indictment of her behavior as much as

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that of the spider for his unwanted and vaguely sexual advances. The spider is himself an
ambivalent character, one that is punished for incorrect behavior, and also by isolation. The
flowers and other insects rally in favor of the ladybug, coming to her defense even at the risk of
their own safety. The flowers who defend her, first a poppy with the face of a young boy and
then the motherly tulip, get bound up in the spiders web. They’re released after the storm by a
friendly fly. The characters are reliant on a unified community, of which the spider is not a part.
His Western clothing, darker coloring, and aggressive, individualistic attitude set him apart even
before his predatory advances to the ladybug marked him as a villain. As alluring as he is with
his fancy singing and attractive words, he codes as distinctly sinister. The ladybug is not as
helpless as the butterfly, because she chooses to try and escape rather than ride out her
discomfort in the spider’s company, but she was helpless without aid from her community.
In some cases, however, the shojô was not entirely helpless and expresses a form of
consumer agency that places halfway between the rigid, anxious nationalism of the shonen and
the playful nonsense of the unruly animal. Examples of this type of film are rare, but fortunately
we are left one example in the Nishikura film Chame’s Day (Chameko no Ichinichi, 1931).
Unlike most animated films that have survived, which were sponsored by the government as
educational films and did not need or refer to any advertising or private enterprise, Chame’s Day
was an early sound film that featured celebrity singers and actors as its voices.
52
At one point,
while the main character is getting ready for her day at school, there is a close up on her
toothpaste to emphasize that it is Lion brand. (Fig. 17) The fact that Chame deviates from the
moralizing that is so prevalent otherwise can be ascribed to its closer relationship to
commercialism than government sponsored films. But it does not change the fact that given the

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chance to make a commercial film, the subject who was allowed to display her consumerism was
the shojô.

Figure 17 Chame brushes the lion logo on her toothpaste

The film itself is a charming, musical retelling of a typical day in the life of a young
schoolgirl. She washes up, has her breakfast, and attends school. Her morning routine is
characterized by all the proper, hygienic modern behaviors; she brushes her teeth carefully with
the Lion brand toothpaste and uses her own individual towel, as recommended to prevent
spreading infection.
53
At school she attends mathematics and reading comprehension courses
before returning home. Rather than settle in and do her homework, however, Chame lies to her
mother about how well she did at school and convinces her to take her to the movies as a reward.
The film ends as Chame settles down to bed after the outing to the movie theater.
As a shojô, Chame’s responsibility towards the state is different from shonen characters
such as Momotarô and Ma-bô. She is not expected to defend the nation against Western
encroachment, nor does she have the same adventurous opportunities to show off her physical
strength and agility. She occupies a more domestic space and has more domestic
responsibilities, like hygiene and healthy eating and homework. But she is also allowed more
direct access to consumer culture than her shonen counterparts. Her unruly behavior, such as

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over-eating, lying to her teacher, is not accompanied by some form of moralistic censure. She
isn’t punished for lying to her mother or for eating too much food at breakfast time, nor is her
behavior shown to have a negative effect on others. Rather, her role is flexible enough to
accommodate the occasional youthful indiscretion. This flexibility is visually expressed in her
body’s plastic ability to expand, particularly at the times when she is being naughty or
mischievous. During breakfast, Chame celebrates the elements of a traditional Japanese breakfast
of rice, miso soup, pickles and fish. The elements that go into a healthy breakfast are there, but
she indulges in a glutinous spectacle that leaves her stomach distended and her mother
affectionately chastising her for overeating. Later, when she returns home from school, she fibs
to her mother about getting a special commendation at school and asks to be taken to the movies
for her reward. In both these cases, her body exhibits plasticity, with her swelling belly and
elongating nose (Fig. 18, 19). Her greater capacity to encompass behaviors that the state saw as
detrimental to young people becomes visible in her body’s expansion in these scenes.

Figure 18 Chame thanks her mother for the delicious breakfast

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Figure 19 Her nose grows when she lies to her mother
The final part of the film, in which Chame is taken to the movies, and watches both live
action newsreel footage of a female Olympic athlete as well as an animated rendition of a
samurai chanbara film full of beheadings (Fig. 20).
54
Including integrated live action footage of
Kinue Hitomi, Japan’s first female Olympiad who won a silver medal in track and field at the
1928 Olympic Games, puts Chame into dialogue with shonen and sports films, both of which
showcased athletic bodies. Kinue’s fit appearance has more in common with athletic shonen
than coiffed, fashionable modern girls. She also brings in the idea that girls have more to offer
than proper domestic behavior, that they can also be strong role models. But there is also a light-
heartedness to her appearance related to the consumption of female bodies for pleasure. The trip
to the theater is a fun reward for good schoolwork (though the audience secretly knows Chame
lied to receive it), and Kinue as a positive role model works to mitigate any negative influence
that the samurai film might have to offer. In other words, the trip to the movies is diverse and
offers education along with its entertainment.

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Figure 20 Chame and her mother watch Kinue compete on screen
Chame’s Day is a distinct departure from the strict moral education that appears in
shonen films. It is a significant reminder that in spite of the effort on the part of the state to use
film as a means of education and social control, it still belonged to the realm of popular
production and consumption. Audiences didn’t feel the same anxiety towards the medium that
the state did, and popular culture was full of moments of fun and entertainment for the sheer
enjoyment of it. In the following section, we will see the popular tenet of “nansensu” as it
appeared in and around the bodies of animated animals.

The Unruly Animal: Moral Education, Ethnicity, and Nonsense

The animated animal body represents an ethnically complex Japanese identity that is not
entirely at odds with the culture of pleasure and modern consumption. Where representations of
human bodies such as shonen and shojô tend to be consistent from film to film, year to year, with
little variation, the animated animal was characterized by inconsistency, fluidity, and even
outright contradiction. There is a strong precedent for representing anthropomorphized animals
in animated film. Paul Wells sees animals in animated film as “empty signifiers” that are open to
interpretation without being tethered to any immediate social context. He uses the animated
figure of King Kong as an example, claiming that while many have interpreted Kong as a

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representation of blackness, there is no real need to ground him in that manner.
55
As an
animated animal, there is some leeway to interpret Kong more widely than if he were a human
character played by an ethnically African actor. His argument is similar to Iwabuchi’s
understanding of cultural odor in which anime by its very nature has no overt cultural markers.
Wells understanding of animals as empty signifiers can explain in some respect the interpretive
freedom that was granted to animal bodies in early Japanese animated films. But rather than
being empty and open to any interpretation, animals are a flexible signifier. The representation
of animals in animated film cannot be wholly disassociated from the cultural context in which
they were created, but they are open to a wider range of interpretation than was granted to human
bodies in animation from that time.
Modern Japanese ethnic identity was complex and multivalent. The interaction between
Japanese ethnicity and whiteness was different from that between Japanese ethnicity and Asian
ethnicity. Japanese identity desired to distance itself from whiteness particularly as imperial
expansion into mainland Asia intensified in the 1930s. Animals provided a useful metaphor for
ethnicity and race at the time. In his essay discussing the discourse of dog breeding in fascist
Japan, Aaron Skabelund notes that dog breeding became a venue for discussing eugenics and for
indirectly defining national characteristics through the definition of a national breed.
56
Saitô
Hirokichi, who worked to establish the Society for the Preservation of the Japanese dog and is
responsible for spreading Hachikô’s fame, defined a list of Japanese breeds and their
characteristics. He was especially antagonistic to Western values such as individualism, defining
Japanese dogs as loyal, brave, and self-sacrificing. The discourse of dog breeding reveals
the complex nature of Japanese attitudes about racial identity during the 1930s. These attitudes
were represented by two conflicting strains of thought, one of which regarded Japanese as a
racially homogeneous people, and the other of which considered Japanese to be of mixed racial
origin.
57

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Japanese imperialism did not have the same cultural and ethnic distance from the people it
colonized in the same way that the West did. In fact, the logic of imperialism in Japan relied on
that proximity in order to justify occupation. As the first non-white nation to modernize, Japan
carried out its own imperialism as a means of bringing that modernity to the rest of Asia. The
resulting ethnic relationship is torn between the desire to establish superiority over Asia and
preserve Japanese purity while reinforcing historic ties with Asia to demonstrate the
“attractiveness” of Japanese imperialism over Western imperialism.
58

Ethnic representation in cinema was vague even in the case of live-action films. Actress
and singer Ri Koran, born in Manchuria as Yamaguchi Yoshiko, was able to make a career out
of playing Chinese, even though she was ethnically Japanese. Her onscreen persona as a native
Chinese who fell in love with the Japanese conquerors
confronted the well-known hostility of the Chinese people toward the Japanese invaders and recast
it as a ‘misunderstanding.’ If only the Japanese would show the same patience and consideration
[the male lead] shows toward Ri, domestic audiences were told, the hostility would melt away and
the Chinese would realize that the apparent aggression was but the affectionate prodding of a
lover.
59

Ri was Man’ei’s “ambassador of Manchu-Japanese Good Will,” thanks to her own porous
identity.
60
On the other hand, actor Sessue Hayakawa was not able to translate his success in
Hollywood to Japan, where he received a lukewarm reception.
61
Their relative success can be
traced back to the attitudes towards the West and the rest of Asia. Where imperial identity built
an affinity with Asia, which grew even as it became more problematic through the thirties and
forties, hostility towards the West was on the rise. Hayakawa’s gender and association with
Hollywood, which in spite of the Film Law of 1939 was still a dominant paradigm, at least in the
realm of cinema, did not allow for him to as easily traverse ethnic and cultural boundaries in the

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same way that Ri could. Ethnic representation in Japanese cinema was a constant negotiation,
even as it worked to ultimately support and justify Japanese expansion.
In the case of animation, Western scholars most often remark on the fact that Japanese
animated films shied away from the kind of blatant racial representation that was used in
equivalent American propaganda films.
62
It was not so much the case that animated films
avoided racial representation. When representing ethnicities and races that did not have
proximity to Japanese, such as African or Western identities, the racial/ethnic representation was
very clear, and carried with it clear-cut value judgment. For example in The Olympic Games on
Dankichi-Island (Dankichi-jima no Olympic Taikai, Unknown, 1932) a group of native people
with black skin, wide white lips and wearing grass skirts compete and lose every competition.
(Fig. 21) Ten years later after the war effort was well underway, the film Nippon Banzai (Misaki
Shôkai, 1943) depicts Western soldiers with grotesquely exaggerated noses, overbites and
adam’s apples beating and threatening helpless South Pacific natives. While these films indicate
an active engagement with cultural hierarchy of imperialism and a narrative of Japanese
superiority.

Figure 21 Dankichi, wearing a crown, enjoys watching the
Olympic Games with island natives

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In the thirties, moral education became more invested in building public support for the
empire and the war effort, but this did not mean that the ongoing effort to negotiate the modern
came to an end. Animated educational films continued to define and redefine the parameters of
Japanese values as they were laid out in the Imperial Rescript on Education. To that effect,
many of films were loosely based in familiar folktales or Aesop’s Fables, which were used in
textbooks and designed to reinforce proper social behavior.
63
The most common moral messages
reinforced group identity over individualism and hard work over pleasure. One of the most
popular and most commonly retold tales was that of the ants and the grasshopper.
64
Retellings of
this fable, however, did not always depict the opposition between hard-working ants and
frivolous grasshoppers. The animals that represent hard work and the animals that represent play
would sometimes change. For example, the film Two Worlds (Futatsu no Sekai, Murata, 1929)
follows the original fable, portraying a family of ants preparing for the winter and a group of
more colorful insects, specifically a grasshopper, a butterfly, a ladybug, and a beetle, dancing
and playing instruments. Nearly fifteen years later the fable itself had not lost any significance,
and was retold in Total Mobilization on the Mountain (O-yama no Sôdôin, Yamamoto, 1942),
only this time with a whole different set of animals. The hardworking creatures are bears and
birds, while monkeys and tanuki do not take the time to prepare for the winter. The ethnic
representation in each case demonstrates the subtle shift in focus of moral education. In the
earlier film, Japanese values represented by the ants are juxtaposed with a consumeristic
modernity that is roughly associated with Westernization. In the later film, the conflict is
between Japanese values and Asian backwardness, with the former defending against the
childish selfishness of the latter with force.

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Two Worlds opens with a family of ants dressed in kimono gathering food for the
summer. They are working in the fields, gathering rice for in the hot weather. The work is hard
and they wipe exaggerated drops of sweat from their foreheads as they work. The smallest ant at
one point becomes distracted by something he sees in the distance. A motley group of insects
are having a picnic among the flowers, drinking sake, playing jazz music on fiddles and cellos,
and dancing the Charleston. A grasshopper wears a fashionable white Western suit and a fedora
and his pretty butterfly companion’s wings form a drop-waist dress and her hair is cut in a bob.
The little ant is very curious about these insects that are engaged in modern forms of
consumption and play, but his parents keep him focused on the work in front of him.
Nonetheless, for a long while the film follows the modern insects in a song and dance sequence.
At the end of the film, his companions gone, the tattered grasshopper that danced all summer is
reduced to begging as he trudges through the snow. The ants ultimately take pity on him and
share their food.
The moral message in Worlds is transparent. Behave properly by ignoring modern
pleasures like music and fashionable clothing and you will reap the rewards of comfort and
safety in the future. But in spite of the clearly Western cultural coding of the grasshopper and
his friends, it is not a rejection of Western-ness, nor is it a representation of Western ethnicity.
The grasshopper’s band is a group of Japanese who have chosen modern living, urban and jazzy,
over traditional agrarian work. The film “expresses the choices and interpretations made by
Japanese consumers of film, fashion, food, and other consumer items that could be coded as
Western but were decoded and re-encoded as modern (emphasis in original).”
65
It contrasts a
fantasy of unchanging, rural Japan against that of urban consumption culture, in the process
ascribing a moral value onto the former and working to removing from the latter. But it is

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ultimately accepting of modernity, as the grasshopper is allowed back into the fold once he has
seen the error of his ways.
In Two Worlds, the behavior and outward style of the insects was more important than
any kind of ethnic or racial identity that the animals have. The films purpose was more to
positively and negatively code different types of Japanese behavior and favor tradition over
modern pleasures. By the release of Total Mobilization in 1942, the same fable is used in a
different manner in order to further reinforce the distinction between Japan and the rest of Asia.
In Total Mobilization, the juxtaposition of positive and negative social behavior is much
more clearly marked along ethnic lines and is less invested in encoding different types of modern
behavior. The film begins with a family of bears, again wearing different types of traditional
Japanese clothing, gathering up fish and fruit to store in a cave with the help of some birds. As
they are doing their work, groups of monkeys and tanuki raccoons tease them and try to disrupt
their work.
66
When the winter comes, the birds and the bears are comfortably relaxing and
playing games inside the warm, well-stocked cave while the monkey and tanuki are homeless
and hungry. At this point, the film explicitly engages with the narrative of assimilation and
ethnic stereotypes of the Asian other.
The last half of the film is an escalating battle of bears and birds against monkeys and
tanuki. The monkeys go to visit the tanuki, who have formed and outdoor camp with a small
stockpile of food. They are completely disorganized, however, and squabble over who gets to
eat the most. After deciding there isn’t enough to go around, the monkeys and the tanuki decide
to assault the bears and take their supplies. Before attacking, the tanuki put on Chinese-style
clothing with hats and mandarin collars, and a few of them use their shape-shifting powers (and
animated plasticity) to use to become heavy weapons like tanks and machine guns. The monkey,

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who lack the same shape-shifting abilities of the tanuki, take to the trees, providing air support
for the attack. The bears and the birds mobilize instantly, and easily overcome the violent, but
haphazard attack. Once the tanuki and monkeys have been subdued, they kneel and humbly
apologize for their actions, trading in their mandarin-collar robes for kimono in a ceremony at
the end. The cultural transformation undergone by the monkeys and raccoons is transparent;
they shift from an unruly band of Chinese marauders to a civilized group of Japanese subjects.
According to Baskett, imperial Japanese cinema ascribed different cultural identities to
different regions in the empire. The Japanese attitude towards China was paradoxical. On the
one hand “China was an archive from which Japanese filmmakers drew inspiration to define
Japan’s own identity,” while on the other it was “an ossified, backward nation so possessed by
visions its own glorious imperial past as to render it unable to either modernize or defend
itself.”
67
On screen Chinese appeared as “hostile, faceless masses, as columns of refugees
stolidly trudging roads to nowhere, or as clumps of lifeless flesh littering trenches and
riverbeds.”
68
Korean identity was seen as the most Japanese, but this was not as sign of respect
as much as it was almost a dismissal. Japan did not have the same respect for Korean culture
that it had for Chinese culture, marking them more clearly for assimilation. The South Pacific,
which stood in also for Southeast Asia in the public imaginary, “represented the polar opposite of
Japanese reality.”
69
They were more foreign even than the West due to both their perceived
backwardness, which was even greater than that of China, and the sheer foreignness of life in
those regions comparable to the Japanese experience.
Animation had a less direct relationship with ethnic and racial representation. When
Chinese or South Pacific people were drawn using human bodies, there was often some overt
bodily representation, such as the native peasants and soldiers with Fu-manchu mustaches or

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long braids in Ma-bô’s Expedition to the Unexplored Continent or the islanders the dark skin and
wide white lips in sports films such as The Olympic Games on Dankichi Island. But animal
bodies in Japanese animated films were not bound to one-to-one ethnic, racial, or national
correlations, and these might change from film to film. For example, in Total Mobilization,
bears represent the civilized behavior and Japanese identity, but in an earlier film, Sankichi the
Monkey: Shock Troops (O-saru no Sankichi: Totsugekitai, Seo, 1934) enemy Chinese troops
appear as bears. A common slang term for Chinese soldiers during the Fifteen Year’s War was
buta, meaning pig. A later film that also featured Sankichi, Sankichi the Monkey: A History of
Hard Fighting (O-saru no Sankichi: Funsenki, Kataoka, 1943), depicted enemy Chinese troops
as pigs.
70
But pigs also appeared in films where they were clearly meant to be Japanese citizens.
In the 1942 educational film The Collaborative Air Defense Battle (Kyôryoku Bôkû Sen, Misaki
Shôkai), pigs act as the teachers relating to audiences the proper procedures for what to do and
where to go in the event of an air attack. The village is populated with a variety of animals,
including dogs, monkeys, and horses, but it is the pigs who stop and break the fourth wall in
order to list and highlight the important safety protocols during an air raid. Animal
representation reflected the porousness of Japanese imperial identity, suggesting that filmmakers
and audiences alike had little trouble deciphering the ethnic logic from film to film because there
was not strict logic of ethnicity, race, or nationality that was associated with animals.
Lamarre notes that the representation of animals in Japanese pre-war animated film
resists one-to-one associations with national context in ways that human figures cannot. He
writes “there is a problem with reading animations in terms of a one-to-one correspondence
between animal and nation, that is, in terms of direct and unmediated representation.”
71

According to Lamarre, animation is in a position to represent a multi-ethnic nationalism because

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of its specific quality of plasticity, which he refers to by Eisenstein’s term “plasmaticity.”
Japanese animation in the twenties and thirties is “not about a mono-ethnic Japan conquering a
mono-ethnic Korea. It is about a multi-ethnic Japanese evaluating and integrating peoples,
ethnicities, or nationalities.”
72
Animation mediates a multi-ethnic nation, not just because it
allows for the bodies in the films to be plastic, but because the plasmatic body of cute,
indestructible animals provided a “nexus conjoining children, folktales, and animals in popular
entertainments.” Animated animals operate in two registers “that of plasmaticity and that of
representation” which frees them from one-to-one interpretation.
73
Lamarre’s intervention
expands on Wells idea that the animal acts as an empty signifier, acknowledging that
representation plays a role in interpretation and that the animal is not empty, but that it is an open
signifier due to animation’s specificity. It is important to note that this interpretive flexibility is
only available to animal bodies. Human bodies, as representations of shonen, shojô, and lazy old
men indicate, open interpretation is not inherent to animation as a whole, even though it is only
made possible through animated form.
The ambiguity was not limited to representing Asian identities. Dower has pointed out
that when representing the West in animation, the strategy was to use “failed humans” such as
demons and monsters.
74
According to Dower, this allowed Japanese filmmakers to maintain a
hierarchy of Western identity over Asian identity by arguing that even failed human characters
come across as more civilized than animals. Lamarre points out that Dower’s interpretation
assumes one-to-one correlations between representation and meaning that are complicated by the
animated form, but the point that the West was not represented in the same manner as Asia
stands. But it was not always the case that the West was represented as human, as in Nippon
Banzai, or as failed humans. In some occasions, the West was represented by familiar characters

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from animated films. For example, the demons in Momotarô’s Sea Eagles (Seo, 1943) bear a
striking resemblance to the characters of Bluto and Popeye from the Popeye the Sailorman
series. In Fighting Eagles of the Sky (Sora no Arawashi, Ôfuji, 1938) a cloud shaped like Popeye
appears with a British flag on its belly and attempts to swat the hero’s airplane out of the sky.
75

(Fig. 22) There is little ambiguity here that these character represent the West or that they are
villains, but this is also related to the fact that the characters who are borrowed have bodies that
are more human than animal. Dower doesn’t account for films in which the villain is portrayed
as an animal. When using animals to represent the West, the situation becomes more fluid.

Figure 22 Chinkoroheibei fights a cloud shaped like Popeye with the Union Jack
on its belly

While Asian antagonists were imagined as faceless hordes, when the West appeared as a
villain in animated films it was most often characterized as a single, aggressive bully. The bully
would be presented as an unbeatable foe, one which colonial companion animals are unable to
resist on their own. Human shonen would then make an appearance, acting as the savior figures
that repel the hostile invaders and protect the weaker natives. Both Momotarô’s Sea Adventure
and Momotarô’s Sky Adventure follow this type of pattern with the West represented by a shark
and an eagle respectively. (Fig. 23, 24) It is impossible to ascribe a specific nationality to either

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creature, even the eagle. It is enough that these animals appear as lone aggressors rather than a
horde, and that they cannot be rehabilitated, they can only be overcome. In this case, the affinity
towards the West suggested by Dower and the representation of failed humans breaks down, as
the aggressive animals are nothing but antagonists. They offer no closeness to Momotarô,
instead only presenting themselves as a chance for Momotarô as Japan to exert its might over a
bigger, stronger, but ultimately fallible, opponent.

Figure 23 A giant shark attacks Momotarô’s submarine

Figure 24 The eagle attacking in Momotarô’s Sky Adventure
The complex relationship of animated animals to representation is perhaps most evident
in the image of Mickey Mouse. It is hard to image today that Mickey’s image could code as

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anything other than the behemoth that Disney studios has become. The famous mouse was the
turning point for what was an ailing animation studios that had in the 1920s lagged behind
Fleischer Studios, who produced Betty Boop, Popeye, and Koko the Clown from the Out of the
Inkwell series, and Sullivan’s Studio, who produced Felix the Cat.
76
Before Mickey, Disney
Studios had only had mediocre success with the character Oswald the Rabbit. But the overnight
success of the 1929 synchronized sound film Steamboat Willie catapulted Disney Studios into
the limelight and Mickey has been the face of the studio ever since. Japan was introduced to
Mickey Mouse in 1933, when Disney’s distributor Columbia pictures released the first collection
of synchronized sound short films known as the Silly Symphonies to Japanese theaters.
77
These
included some Mickey Mouse films, although exactly which is not clear, even though the
Mickey Mouse series and the Silly Symphonies series were not the same. Mickey and Disney
were soon both recognizable celebrities.
78

This did not come without a degree of antagonism. In 1934 the studio J.O Tôkî released a
film called The Toybox Series Chapter Three: 1936 Edition. Based in an imagined invasion
from the West that was purported by the yellow press to take place in 1936, Toybox depicts the
invasion of a South Pacific island by an aggressive, be-fanged Mickey Mouse look-a-like. (Fig.
25) The film pits Mickey’s invasion forces against a legion of characters taken from Japanese
folklore lead by Momotarô. The fantasy of overcoming Western culture with Japanese tradition
is difficult to miss. Mickey comes across as a one-sided villain intent on totally subjugating the
animal inhabitants of the island. The specific ethnicity of the toys that live on the island is open
to interpretation. They might code as Japanese colonists or assimilated Asians, but for the
purpose of the film, which is to glorify Japanese culture, the distinction is not important. What is
significant is that in the individual context of Toybox, Mickey Mouse codes as a Western

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aggressor and Momotarô as the defender not only of the Japanese nation, but also Japanese
culture.

Figure 25 “Mickey” and his army attack from above
Toybox begins with a group of toys playing on the beach of a palm tree studded island.
The group of toys includes a paper doll, a tiger string puppet, a teddy bear and a daruma all
typical toys one might find in an average middle class children’s environment. As they dance
they are suddenly interrupted by the drone of a plane flying overhead and look up to see what
appears to be Mickey, only with fangs and an exaggerated scowl, flying above on a bat, who also
sports the infamous mouse ears, casting an ominous shadow. After writing the year 1936 up in
the sky, he tosses down a scroll demanding that the toys hand over their island. He then
summons an army of snakes, bats and alligators who bomb the island and kidnap the paper doll,
who is also the only female toy. The tiger runs to an oversized copy of Japanese myths and
legends and calls Momotarô from the book’s pages to ask him for help. Momotarô agrees, and
summons figures from Japanese folklore to come to the rescue. Mickey and Momotarô go into
battle one on one, first in an aerial dogfight, and then fighting with katana before the film shows
some scenes of the different Japanese legends defeating Mickey’s army. In the end, even though
Mickey is bigger and stronger than Momotarô, he defeated through teamwork. The thunder

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demons zap him with lightening, and after Mickey is made to look foolish, Urashima Tarô opens
his box, aging Mickey with the burst of white smoke that held his old age.
The negative portrayal of Mickey is interesting given the high evaluation that he received
in the eyes of film critics and animators in the mid-1930s. Toybox was released the same year
that Film Criticism published the special edition on animation in which Katô and Kurada praised
Mickey and Disney’s films for their quality, entertainment value, and innovation. But that
Mickey fit so seamlessly into the role of the villain suggests tension below the surface.
Audiences did not seem to mind traversing between Mickey as villain and Mickey as appealing
foreign culture. On the one hand, for Mickey to work as a villain in the xenophobic context of
the Crisis of 1936 he necessarily had to code as not only not-Japanese but specifically Western.
There seems to be a contradiction between Mickey as a celebrity and Mickey as a villainous
foreign invader, but it is a contradiction that is possible and acceptable within the context of
animation.
The situation is muddied even further by later depictions of animated mice that resemble
Mickey. His image was not automatically associated with Western imperial aggression; he was
also a sympathetic character who could claim some of the closeness with Western power Dower
sees Japan as aspiring to collect. In Ma-bô’s Big Race (Ma-bô no Daikyoso, Unknown, 1936)
Mickey is sitting with Minnie and Betty Boop cheering for Ma-bô as he competed in an Olympic
race winning gold for Japan. There is no sense of competition with the Western cartoon
characters in this film that appear to be lending Ma-bô their support even though he is racing
against taller Westerners. It is an example of the flexibility allowed to animal bodies, while the
human bodies that Ma-bô races against cannot be flexible, the image of familiar characters can
be.

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By 1942, Mickey’s image had undergone a total transformation from aggressive
antagonist to sympathetic, sensitive hero. The 1942 film Potatoes and Soldiers (Imo to Heitai,
Kataoka) features another mouse again with Mickey’s trademark ears and trademark pants with
big white buttons. The character appeared in multiple wartime propaganda films as a sort of
kindly spirit looking out for soldiers at the front or sailors at sea. In the wake of the Film Law of
1939, which gave animated film its first firm foothold in the film industry, the limits on foreign
import of animated film may have in effect “de-fanged” Mickey Mouse so to speak. In 1934 on
the heels of the Silly Symphonies and their great popularity and with the local industry still
struggling to establish itself, Mickey likely seemed like a great cultural threat, even in spite of
the value that critics and animators placed on him. In the 1940s, after the Film Law limited the
number of animated films that could be imported and exhibited from foreign countries, a few
wartime films featuring a mouse character with big round ears, white gloves and pants with two
buttons in the front were released. In these films, the mouse is just a little bit mischievous,
enough to allow for the set up of animated gags, but really he acted as a means for the audience
to emotionally access the sentimental nationalism found in the films.
Potatoes and Soldiers takes place on the Chinese front at a soldiers camp the night
before a battle. Food is scarce and the little Mickey-esque mouse is searching around for
something to eat. Throughout the whole film, the audience experiences the environment on the
front through a “mouse-eye” point of view. At one point, the mouse accidentally ends up in the
officer’s quarters, and overhears the plans for a terrible battle that is to take place the following
day. While trying to sneak in and eat the commanding officer’s sweet potatoes, he comes across
the officer praying for the safety of his men and victory for the coming day, and is so moved he
bursts into tears, which drip large and cartoony off of his face. Bowing solemnly to the officer,

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the mouse chooses not to eat his potatoes out of respect. That a powerful nationalistic film such
as Potatoes and Soldiers could use Mickey speaks to the flexibility of animated animal figures.
Mickey existed simultaneously as the Western celebrity from Disney’s films, a villain
representing Western cultural encroachment, but also a figure whose familiar, well-liked face
could be molded to suit the war effort. Japanese identity was situated between the West and
Asia, and borrowed from both sides as needed to reinforce its position.
In addition to allowing animal representation to be multi-ethnic, animated plasticity gave
animal bodies a different access to the cultural mode of nonsense. The linked point between
children, folklore, and human bodies created a site where imperial ideology, the “culture of
death,” was reinforced in a playful way that was made palatable to child audiences. With the
animated animal, the ideology was less specific to top-down ideology and more open to
pleasurable expressions of modern mass culture. For example, in the case of the Futatsu no
Sekai, a film that was deliberately constructed to discourage overindulgence in modern
consumption, the weight of the message is undermined to some extent by the introduction of
jazz. When the grasshopper and his friends are dancing and playing jazz instruments, the film
spends a long moment reveling in their light-hearted play. This is presented as temptation to the
smallest of the ants, but it also plays as pleasure for the audience.
As children’s media animation did not delve into the seedier side of modern and kept its
distance from the dance halls, department stores, and cafes that are all associated with the inter-
war period culture of pleasure. Sports films proved to be a genre that skated the line between the
modern consumer and the imperial subject with the plasmatic animal mediating between the two.
Films about sports days, competitions, or the Olympic Games “establishe[d] the sense of
modernity through the spectacle of sport as an expression of the new, cultural expansionism and

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a collective modern identity.”
79
This was expressed differently depending how modern sports
were presented. Films that focused on international competitions operated very similarly to live-
action sports films in which Japanese identity was reasserting itself and its authority. Wada-
Marciano writes,
While the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics established Japanese singularity with the spectacle of small
Japanese bodies competing against the West, in films that followed the Japanese body would be
depicted as already Westernized and modern, erasing the visible inferiority implicit in earlier
comparisons to the West.
80

Animated films about the Olympic games fit into this paradigm that can be said to apply to both
the 1932 and 1936 games. Ma-Bô’s Big Race juxtaposes his small, boyish body against giant
Western bodies, but he is able to overcome their greater speed and size to win the gold. Sports
competitions also provided a place to reinforce the stereotypes associated with Asian identity.
The Olympic Games on Dankichi Island show Dankichi, a shonen character that originated in
manga before being adapted to animation, competing against dark-skinned natives. He wins
every competition, which they accept with cheerful smiles. Sports competitions provided a safe
reassuring place to reinforce Japan’s place in the imperial order.
But in some cases, sports films provided an acceptable jumping off point for animation to
explore the fun, light-hearted side of animation plasticity and revel in nonsense. In a rare
example of shonen plasticity, Ma-bô is able to win his race only after he’s been inflated like a
balloon and gains speed as he exhales all his air. In a sports film, the stakes are less severe than
in a combat film, and the ordinarily impervious shonen is allowed to look ridiculous for a
moment for the sake of a visual gag. His authority is not undermined because not only does he
win the gold medal, and with it all the prestige it has to offer for his nation, he also wins the
approval of Mickey Mouse and his friends. Two Worlds also taps into nonsense and amusement.

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The grasshopper ends up starving because he didn’t work hard during the summer, but his
purpose in the film is undermined by the sheer entertainment value offered by the scene with his
jazz band. Though the moral message of the film must ultimately deny the modern music and
dancing have any merit, Worlds builds off of both these things in order to construct an amusing
scene for the audience. The nonsensical can be found in the mildly subversive way that these
films refuse to completely uphold their moral message. Making the shonen appear ridiculous
and dwelling on the pleasure of an insect jazz band are very minor infractions, but the tap into
the fleeting sense of pleasure and fun that nonsense culture offered, rejecting a pure ideology of
hard work.
The two sports films Our Baseball Game (Oira no Yakyû, Murata, 1931) and Our Skiing
Outing (Oira no Sukî, Murata, 1930) are two examples of animated films that engage with the
idea of cultural nonsense with the weight of a heavy moral or colonial message. In these films,
animated animals that bear a strong resemblance to the animals that appear in The Scroll of
Frolicking Animals from the Heian period play baseball and go skiing, respectively. Understood
as a rejection of the heavy-handed moralizing, these films fit into a light-hearted version of
nonsense that has room for fun even if it does not fit neatly into the modern imperial ideology.
Even in the baseball game, there are no winners and losers because the game is interrupted part
of the way through due to a lost ball. Though the engage with the negotiation of what it means
to be a modern Japanese, the entry into modern life is playful and friendly, free from the anxiety
that top down administrators and bureaucrats felt towards modern entertainments. In all fairness,
modern sports were a site of positive modern expression because they were seen to encourage
teamwork and healthy living. But these films fit into a growing culture of modern leisure that
made allowances for relaxation and pleasure.

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Both Baseball and Skiing include a character that is as yet unfamiliar with these types of
modern games and needs to be initiated. Our Baseball Game begins at a ballgame between a
team of rabbits and a team of tanuki. (Fig 26) The tanuki are losing until one of them stretches
his tail into a bat and knocks the ball out of the park for a grand slam. At this point, the film
leaves the game behind entirely, focusing on the encounter of a frog with the ball. The frog has
no idea what the baseball is, having never seen one before. He assumes it is an egg and
swallows it so that he can help it to hatch. (Fig 27) The rabbits finally find them, and explain to
him that the ball is not an egg, at which point everyone works together to try and remove the ball
from the frog’s stomach. When they finally do succeed in extracting it, the ball is flat and
ruined, but everyone shares a laugh calling the game a draw. Baseball not only represents the act
of playing the game as exciting leisure but also the act of watching the game. The audience is an
active part of the film, cheering and waving repeatedly. The shared modern experience of the
game is disrupted by the frog’s ignorance, but he is brought into the fold at the end and in the
end everyone is a winner because the game is a draw.

Figure 26 A tanuki prepares to bat in Our Baseball Game

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Figure 27 The bullfrog contemplates the mysterious ball
In Our Skiing Outing, a pair of rabbits teach a tanuki how to ski. Though rabbits and
tanuki are often presented as folkloric rivals, in this case the rabbits happily bring him along with
their fun. The tanuki is initially drawn out of his warm den by the noise that the rabbits are
making as they ski around, but they successfully convince him to join them in spite of his
irritation. Much of the amusement of this film is in the plastic bodies of the animals as they bend
and twist in order to perform tricks or narrowly avoid scrapes. The climax is a spectacular
accident in which the three become bodily entangled with each other. Exhibiting the
indestructibility that is in their nature, however, all three of them emerge unscathed and share an
congenial laugh at the end.
Both Skiing and Baseball present modern living as something accessible and enjoyable.
Leisure is something that should be available to everyone, and should be enjoyed. It is
significant that only the characters in these films are allowed to behave in this manner, adding
another dimension to the plastic freedom allowed to the animated animal which the animated
human body cannot access except fleetingly. As the 1930s progressed films such as Our
Baseball Game and Our Skiing Outing were more and more rare. The increased desire for films

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that built moral support for the war effort directed the focus of filmmakers outward towards the
West and the colonies and away from more introspective, internal negotiations of modernity.

Conclusion

Akita read the use of folkloric animals in animated films as an example of Japan
dreaming nostalgically for a lost traditional past. He based his argument on the use of folkloric
bodies in animated nonsense films contrasted against the institutions of modern sports and the
cultural influence of jazz music.
81
But the animated body cannot so easily be summarized.
Animated bodies often made a convenient site to reinforce kokutai ideology. In some cases, such
as Theorizing Government and The Spread of Infection, this was integrated into the fabric of the
film so that the political or moral message was reinforced in every aspect of the finished product.
These films represented bodies, but they also strove to construct a communal, national body that
was shared by all Japanese citizens. Other films used a complex logic of symbolic
representation, fragmenting and reducing the national body into specific types or characters. The
shonen, shojô, and the lazy old man represent different aspects of modern Japanese society,
while also offering a collective identity to the Japanese audience. The animated animal offered
an important site of flexibility and slippage that was facilitated by animation form itself. Bodies
in animated film were stretched and bent, deconstructed and reconstructed, as Japanese
animators and audiences sought to make sense of their place in a changing geopolitical order.
As important as representation is, however, it is also necessary to consider the role of production
and the influences that the behind-the-scenes process of bringing ideas to the screen. The next
chapter will focus on the relationship of animation to technology, in order to better understand
how technology both facilitates and limits the possibilities offered by animation.

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Chapter Two Notes

1
Leo Charney and Vanessa R Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995); Wolfgang Schivelbush, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in
the 19th Century (University of California Press, 1977).

2
Aaron Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925,
First Trade Paperback (University of California Press, 2010), 45.

3
Cinema is significant not only for recording the body, but also for fragmenting it through framing (close-ups or
canted angles). In fact, the act of recording a film is an act of fragmentation, reducing the analog experience of time
into broken individual frames that are then reassembled through playback. For more work on how this relates to
comics, animation, and caricature see: Scott Bukatman, “Comics and the Critique of Chronophotography, or ‘He
Never Knew When It Was Coming!,’” Animation 1, no. 1 (July 1, 2006): 83–103.

4
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 11.

5
Plasticity was considered an intrinsic quality of animation for much of the twentieth century due to the
predominance of line-drawn, two-dimensional animation. The properties of so-called qualities of “squash and
stretch” are no longer considered to be traits that are necessarily limited to animation, nor are the considered to be
essential, defining aspects of animation as a medium because “animation” has expanded to encompass media and
contexts, such as military or medical applications, that are not as readily plastic as early line animation films. But it
was an important concept particularly from the 1920s to the 1940s. For more on animation and plasticity in the
modern era see: Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art, 2nd ed. (University of California Press, 2006); Sergei Eisenstein,
Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda and Alan Upchurch (London: Meuthen, 1986); Yuriko Furuhata, “Rethinking
Plasticity: The Politics and Production of the Animated Image,” Animation 6, no. 1 (March 1, 2011): 25–38,
doi:10.1177/1746847710391226; Kristian Moen, “‘This New Mode of Expression’: The Idea of Animation in 1930s
France,” Animation 8, no. 1 (March 1, 2013): 7–21, doi:10.1177/1746847712473805.

6
Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, 1st ed. (University
of California Press, 2007), 32.

7
Ibid.

8
John Crump, Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan. ([S.l.]: Routledge, 2013); Andrew Gordon, Labor and
Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (University of California Press, 1992).

9
Louise Young, American Council of Learned Societies, and Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and
the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1999).Mark Driscoll, Absolute
Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895 1945 (Duke University
Press, 2010).

10
In addition to the fascination with the modern girl, class conflict expressed itself through fashion. Modern girls
found power through consumption, as did modern boys. For more about modern girls see: Michiko Suzuki,
Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2010).For modern boys see: Benjamin Uchiyama. “The Wartime Dandy” PhD
dissertation (University of Southern California, 2012) p 72-124. Naito Hanae. “Dansei Oshare no hirogari to
Kokumin Fuku Seitei.” Gendai Nihon wo Kangaeru Tame Ni. Ed. Suzuki Shinichi (Tokyo, 2007) p112-145.

11
Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths (Princeton University Press, 1987), 36–37.

143

12
The primary values are loyalty (to the state), filial piety, modesty, moderation, and learning. The specific
wording from the Imperial Rescript of Education regarding morality and values is as follows:
Know ye, Our Subjects:
Our Imperial Ancestors (waga kôsô) have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting and have
deeply and firmly planted virtue; Our Subjects ever united in loyalty (chû) and filial piety (kô) have from generation
to generation illustrated the beauty thereof. This is the glory of the fundamental character of Our Empire (kokutai no
seika), and herein also lies the source of Our education (kyôiky no engen). Ye, Our subjects, be filial to your
parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives by harmonious, as friends true; bear
yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all; pursue learning and cultivate arts, and
thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers; furthermore advance public good and promote
common interests; always respect the Constitution and observe the laws; should emergency arise, offer yourselves
courageously to the State (giyûkô ni hôshî) and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne
coeval with heaven and earth. So shall ye not only be Our good and faithful subjects (chûryô no shinmin), but
render illustrious the best traditions of your forefathers.
The Way here set forth is indeed the teaching bequeathed by Our Imperial Ancestors, to be observed alike
by Their Descendents and the subjects, infallible for all ages and true in all places. It is Our wish to lay it to heart in
all reverence, in common with you, Our subjects, that we may all thus attain in the same virtue.
The 30
th
day of the 10
th
month of the 23
rd
year of Meiji (1890)
Ibid., 121.

13
Ibid., 15.

14
Wada-Marciano, Nippon Modern, 13.

15
Ibid., 63.

16
Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths (Princeton University Press, 1987), 35.

17
Because the majority of animated political films were independent or amateur productions, there is very little
record of them that survives. Based on what is available, political PR films seem to be particularly rare. The most is
known about Kôuchi’s political films because as one of the founding fathers of Japanese animation, he is a high
profile animator. There is also some evidence of instances where animation came together with politics in a more
haphazard fashion. For example, in an essay about proletariat film magazines, Makino Mamoru briefly mentions a
moment when proletariat film, amateur film, and animation intersected. Small gauge film appealed to the people
who were involved with alternative media such as the proletariat magazine Prokino because as a small-scale, largely
amateur filmmaking context there was a slightly greater degree of freedom for production and exhibition. In the late
1920s and early 1930s, small gauge film organizations such as the Motion Picture Journalist Club and Kyoto Baby
Cinema Society formed. Often the people who worked with Prokino were also members of these kinds of clubs.
Makino lists Tanaka Tashiji, Nakano Takao, Funaki Toshikazu, and Nomura Toshio as members of Prokino who
also produced silhouette animation. Specifically they made the animated films The Story of Ali-baba (Aribaba
Monogatari, 1929), Tom Thumb (Is'unboshi, 1930) and Pero the Chimney Sweep (Entotsuya Pero, 1931). Of the
three films, only Pero was the only film to screen along with the proletariat films Children (Kodomo) and May Day
(Me De). Mark Howard Nornes et al., In Praise of Film Studies: Essays in Honor of Makino Mamoru (Victoria,
B.C.; Yokohama: Trafford ; Kinema Kurabu, 2001), 40.

18
The Jitsugyo Doshikai was made up of businessmen who favored a laissez-faire approach to economic policy.

19
After a brief stint working for Kobayashi Shôkai, Kôuchi founded his own studio, Sumikazu Eiga Sôsakusha in
1923. He produced an autobiographical animated film for the mayor of Tokyo, Gotô Shinpei, in 1924. After
working with Mutô, Kôuchi eventually stopped producing political films, and experimented with sound animation
briefly before retiring from animation entirely in the mid-1930s. In addition to his rare and unique political films,
one of Kôuchi’s major contributions to the world of animation was mentorship. He personally fostered Ôfuji

144

Noboru’s interest in animation, and many second-generation animators recall his influence. For more about Kôuchi
see: Tokyo Anime Fair. “The Twenty People Who Founded Japanese Anime (Nihon no Anime wo Tsukut'a Ni Jyû
Nin).” Special Trade Publication. (Tokyo, 2005) p 5; Yamaguchi Katsunori and Watanabe Yasushi, Nihon
animēshon eiga shi (Yūbunsha, 1978), 10; Yasuo Yamaguchi, Nihon no anime zenshi: sekai o seishita Nihon anime
no kiseki (Tokyo: Ten Bukkusu, 2004), 47–48.
Mutô Sanji earned a name for himself by reforming the managerial techniques for the silk factories of
Kanegafuchi Spinning Company, the antecedent to present day Kanebo. Effectively combining nationalistic cultural
rhetoric based in the idea of the kokutai with the Western Taylorism, he turned Kanebo into one of the most
lucrative ventures in pre-war Japan. His success made him a wealthy, influential presence, and he was quite
outspoken with his beliefs. In 1917 he represented Japan at an international industrial conference in Washington
D.C., and he published extensively in Japanese about his theories for industrial factory management. Through the
1920s he served in the House of Representatives, but in 1930 retired both from Kanebo and from politics to be a
journalist, an act that would indirectly lead to his assassination for exposing a political bribing scandal in the mid-
1930s. As the leader of the Jitsugyo Doshikai, an economically liberal party that advocated for legislation that
would protect industrial business and exports, Mutô never gained much real political momentum. He believed in
treated workers well, but within a paternalistic hierarchy that depended on an understanding of a pure Japanese
spirit. Throughout his short-lived political career Mutô worked with Kôuchi to produce animated promotional films
that reflected his approach to business and politics. Seiji no Ronrika sits at the intersection of Mutô’s paternalistic
nationalism, but also the marginalized position of his political party in relation to the dominant parties of Seiyukai.
Although Mutô did not consider himself a part of the political majority, his conceptualization of the Japanese state
and the system still adhere to the metaphor of the kokutai. For more see: William M. Tsutsui, “Rethinking the
Paternalist Paradigm in Japanese Industrial Management,” Business and Economic History 26, no. 2 (Winter 1997):
561–572. Richard H. Mitchell, Justice in Japan: The Notorious Teijin Scandal (Univ. of Hawaii Pr, 2002); Richard
J. Samuels, Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Cornell University Press,
2005).

20
“Spurred by an incipient labor movement and chronic problems of worker retention, Japanese employers
experimented with a variety of paternalistic management techniques from the late 1890s through the 1920s.”
Tsutsui, “Rethinking the Paternalist Paradigm in Japanese Industrial Management,” 562.

21
Harootunian, xxx.

22
Justice in Japan points out that many businessmen in the 1920’s operated ideologically in service of the state.
Mitchell, Justice in Japan, 27; Samuels, Machiavelli’s Children, 120–124.

23
It is unclear whether Kôuchi actually used a chalkboard to animate or if he was imitating that style.

24
Samuels, Machiavelli’s Children.

25
Koichi used to be a newspaper cartoonist before becoming curious about animation. Both he and Oten would
return to that field after quitting animation. Frederik L Schodt and Tezuka, Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese
Comics (New York, N.Y.: Kodansha USA, 2012).

26
The use of cartooning and caricature as a visual shorthand is itself a form of lexicon. Political cartooning has its
own traditions in Western culture, beginning in eighteenth century Europe and spreading to the United States from
there. In the nineteenth century, Europeans introduced the Western style of cartooning to Japan where it met with
the indigenous tradition of manga and sketching. Magazines such as Tokyo Puck integrated manga style with
Western cartooning, with a heavily satirical edge. For more see: Frederik L. Schodt, Manga! Manga!: The World of
Japanese Comics (Kodansha International, 1986); Martha Banta, Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture
of Conduct, 1841-1936 (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
The Rice Riots of 1918 are the combined result of growing labor unrest, rising socialist thought and inflation due to
World War I. They resulted in the overturn of the Terauchi administration. For more about the Rice Riots of 1918
see: Michael Lewis and Michael Lawrence Lewis, Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial Japan (University
of California Press, 1990).

145

27
Chushichi Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan 1825-1995 (Oxford University Press, 2000), 185.

28
Kōjin Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 105.

29
Robert A Scalapino, Democracy and the Party Movement in Prewar Japan: The Failure of the First Attempt
(Berkeley u.a: Univ. Of California Pr., 1975), 281–285.

30
Harry D. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life
(Columbia University Press, 2000); Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space,
and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930 (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Asia Center, 2003); Mitsuyo Wada-
Marciano, Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,
2008), 45–62.

31
Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan, 43.

32
Wada-Marciano, Nippon Modern, 45–62.

33
Greg DePies, “Posters and Politics: Red Cross Hygiene and International Health Education in the Interwar Period”
(presented at "The Meaning of Health: The Spread of Discourses on Life and Well-Being in Early 20th-Century
Japan", Association for Asian Studies Conference, March 22, 2012).

34
This is a particularly interesting choice given the antagonism between institutionalized medicine and folkloric
remedies. Given that the goal of the film in part is to update Japanese thinking related to disease and infection so
that it is more modern and scientifically aware, it is interesting that it should rely on a clearly folkloric creature as
the initial point of infection. Morris Low, Building a Modern Japan: Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Meiji
Era and beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

35
Karatani describes the identification of the tuberculosis bacterium and how that is linked not only to modern
science, but also to subjectivity and institutionalized medicine. Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese
Literature.97-113

36
Gerald A Figal, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan / Ld Figal, Asia-Pacific (Durham
[N.C.]: Duke University Press, 1999), 78.

37
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light: (Shadow Optics) (U of Minnesota Press, 2005), 43.

38
DePies, “Posters and Politics: Red Cross Hygiene and International Health Education in the Interwar Period.”

39
More specifically, Karatani is writing about how childhood was discovered and distinguished from adulthood in
early twentieth century literature. His overall goal is to move the focus of literary criticism away from “the delayed
development of modern Japanese literature [and] its differences from Western literature” and instead highlight “the
issue of literature as a system.” (116) As part of this process he is pointing out the historicity of the “child” situating
awareness of childhood within a framework of modern psychology and modern institutions (of which literature is
one). One of the more useful results of this essay is the acknowledgement that neither the “child” nor the
educational system are constant, but they are both often treated as though they are. Karatani, Origins of Modern
Japanese Literature, 114–135.

40
Ibid., 119.

41
Owen Griffiths “A Nightmare in the Making: War, Nation, and Children’s Media in Japan, 1891-1945,”
International Institute of Asian Studies Newsletter, 38 (October 2005), 12-14; “Militarizing Japan: Patriotism, Profit,
and Children’s Print Media, 1895-1925,” Japan Focus (Fall 2007); Karatani, 129-135.

146

42
-----. “Nightmare.” 12.

43
-----. “Militarizing Japan.” http://www.japanfocus.org/-Owen-Griffiths/2528 (last accessed February 28, 2014).

44
Animation worldwide developed a stereotypical association with children’s media as early as the 1930s. But this
was not always the case, and much of the early American animation was heavily sexualized, even the content
produced in the context of Hollywood where appealing to the widest of general audiences was an important
influence. Betty Boop, for example, began as a very risqué figure, and was slowly sanitized as animation took on a
more child-oriented aura. Early Japanese animation did not experiment heavily with sexual imagery or themes.
There is little evidence left to indicate what the reaction to Betty Boop and character’s like her was. This is
interesting given that in the current environment, one of the most difficult stereotypes that anime has faced is that of
hyper-sexualization.

45
One popular folkloric character that appeared in many films is the legendary Peach Boy, Momotarô. Born from a
peach to a virtuous, but childless, elderly couple, he grows up to lead an army of animals to victory over the
stronghold on Demon Island. Gifted with a supernatural strength, intelligence and charm, he is an adolescent
authority figure, a general commanding an army of animals. He relies on his wits to defeat demons and rescue more
helpless creatures.

46
John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (Random House LLC, 1993), 252–259.

47
Klaus Antoni. “Momotarô (The Peach Boy) and the Spirit of Japan: Concerning the Function of a Fairy Tale in
Japanese Nationalism of the Early Showa Age.” Asian Folklore Studies, Vol. 50, No. 1 (1991), 155-188.

48
Harry Harootunian. Figuring the Folk: History, Poetics, and Representation.” In Mirror of Modernity: Invented
Traditions of Modern Japan. Ed. Stephen Vlastos. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998)
145-159.

49
Wada-Marciano, Nippon Modern, 64–5.

50
Harootunian, 13-14, Silverberg 51-72

51
Wada-Marciano, 64.

52
The name Chame is also a way to refer to young girls, similar to the way that Dekobô refers to vaguely to boys as
well as being a proper name. Chame’s voice was played by child star Hideko Hirai, while the adult characters, her
mother and her teacher and the movie theater benshi, are played by Ruby Takai and Teiichi Futamura, respectively.
Both of the latter worked at the Asakusa Opera. Aaron Gerow. “Chameko’s Day.” The Roots of Japanese Anime:
Until the End of WWII. From the DVD booklet p 7.

53
Depies pointed out that having a separate towel for each family member was an explicit part of the !910s Red
Cross hygiene campaign. The need to purchase and label towels feeds back into the middle class ideal the campaign
inadvertently endorsed along with the science of cleanliness.

54
The samurai movie is meant to be based on the one-eyed, one-armed samurai Sanzen Tange. Gerow, 7.

55
Paul Wells, The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2009), 24.

56
Skabelund briefly touches on similar discourse in Italy and Germany at the time. Aaron Skabelund, “Fascism’s
Furry Friends: Dogs, National Identity, and Purity of Blood in 1930s Japan,” in The Culture of Japanese Fascism,
ed. Alan Tansman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 155–183.

57
Skabelund, p168.

147

58
Michael Baskett, The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 2008), 6.

59
Peter B. High, The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931-1945, (Wisconsin
Studies in Film) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 272.

60
Part of Ri Koran’s flexibility was possible because of her gender and the additional power hierarchy that is in
place between men and women during this time. Gendering was something that was not very common in Japanese
adventure films, which coded firmly as child-oriented boys culture. Ibid., 273; Baskett, The Attractive Empire, 77–
84.

61
Daisuke Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (Durham: Duke University Press,
2007).

62
High, The Imperial Screen, 470–474; Baskett, The Attractive Empire, 49–52.

63
There is a long tradition of using Aesop’s Fables to teach morality in Japan that dates back even earlier than the
modern education system. Under the compulsory system, fables were included in textbooks in the same manner as
the Momotarô legend. Audiences would have been very familiar with the basic storylines, which accounts in some
part for the flexibility of the retellings. Pack Carnes, “The Japanese Face of Aesop: Hoshi Shin’ichi and Modern
Fable Tradition,” Journal of Folklore Research 29, no. 1 (April 2001): 1–22.

64
The story of the ants and grasshoppers is as follows: All through the spring and summer, the ants worked hard to
collect food and build shelter for the winter. Because the weather was fine and food was abundant, the grasshopper
laughed at them. He spent the warm days playing and dancing in the sun. When the weather turned cold, the ants
went inside, comfortable with the stockpiles of food and safe from the winter chill. The grasshopper, which had not
prepared for the hard days, was left outside, cold and hungry, to spend the winter alone.

65
Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, 1st ed. (University
of California Press, 2007), 32.

66
Tanuki is translated as raccoon, and there is a species of Japanese raccoon that is known as a tanuki. But it also
refers to a folkloric shape-shifting trickster figure.

67
Baskett, The Attractive Empire, 73.

68
High, The Imperial Screen, 276.

69
Baskett, The Attractive Empire, 102.

70
“Buta,” or pigs, was a common slang term for Chinese soldiers during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

71
Thomas Lamarre, “The Biopolitics of Companion Species: Wartime Animation and Multi-Ethnic Nationalism,” in
The Politics of Culture: Around the Work of Naoki Sakai, ed. Richard Calichman and John Namjun Kim (New
York: Routledge, 2010), 87.

72
Ibid., 88.

73
Ibid., 84–85.

74
Dower, War Without Mercy, 255.

75
Arawashi literally translate to wild eagles, but it is also WWII slang for fighter pilots.

148

76
The Out of the Inkwell series was originally produced by Bray Studios from 1916-1919, though it was directed by
the Fleischer brothers. In 1920s when they established their own studio, the Fleischers took the property with them.
Bray Studios was influential ten years earlier, particularly since Bray is responsible for streamlining the animation
process and inventing the cell system, but by the early 1930s Bray was not producing any major properties and by
1937 the studio folded.

77
Steamboat Willie was originally a stand-alone film. Its wide success is due in part to the technological innovation
of synchronized sound as much as to the charm of the character himself. Given his success with making sound
films, Disney continued along that vein with the Silly Symphonies series, which included now well-known films
such as The Skeleton Dance (1929). The specific list of films that were sent to Japan as the block of Silly
Symphonies is not recorded. Magazines from the time refer to the Silly Symphonies by that name and do not
mention which specific individual films were included.

78
Disney was a celebrity in his own right. Articles about his future career plans appeared in the fan magazine Star
and he began to be included in lists of most influential directors.

79
Wada-Marciano, Nippon Modern, 64.

80
Ibid., 13.

81
Akita Takahiro. “Manga Eiga no Dôbutsu Kyarakuta [The Animal Characters in Animated Films” in Nihon Eiga
to Modanizumu: 1920-1930 ed. Iwamoto Kenji. (Tokyo: Ribûro Poto, Shohan edition, 1991) p 158-163

149

CHAPTER THREE.

ANIMATED EMPIRE: THE SPECTACULAR POWER OF SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY

Introduction

Throughout much of the imperial period in Japan, technology was an important symbol.
Meiji authorities recognized that if Japan had any chance of maintaining its own sovereignty,
that mastering modern transportation, industrial, and military technologies would be key. The
ability to access and manipulate scientific knowledge was an indispensable part of the Japanese
modernization project. Later, it would be a significant justification for expansion into Asia, for
as Japan was able to help itself, the argument went, so too could it help its neighbors. In this
chapter, I will look at the relationship between animation and scientific technology in order to
demonstrate how these two concepts became tools for promoting imperial ideology. Animation
and the culture of popular science have a shared access to spectacle and what Mizuno calls a
“sense of wonder.”
In the 1920s, Harada Mitsuo fostered an interest in science as popular culture when he
started publishing popular magazines such as Children’s Science (Kodomo no kagaku) and
Science Illustrated (Kagaku Gahô). He felt that science education within the school system had
become boring and stale, and wanted to reinvigorate an interest in the sciences. According to
Harada,
to be scientific mean to experience and appreciate the wonder of nature…In the pages of these
magazines, science was packed and packaged for sale as wonder-filled knowledge that the
enlightened nation needed to have. His magazines emphasized the wondrous and spectacular
aspects of nature by using the latest visual print technology and the various acts of seeing and
doing were incorporated into the magazine’s pages to elicit the sense of wonder
1

For Harada, as much as the “sense of wonder” was directly related to experiencing
science–that is measuring, quantifying, and learning. In other words, it was based in the

150

consumption of scientific knowledge and the act of observation. Wonder, in this sense, is
related to the idea of spectacle.
Cinema is in many ways, closely related this sense of wonder and spectacle. It carries a
twofold identity as a means of presenting and representing technology to the people, but also as a
technology in and of itself. On the one hand, when consumed as a technology, it inspired a sense
of wonder. But it was also connected to an economy of looking and seeing that was linked to
larger structures of culture and power. As Shohat and Stam state:
The cinematic “apparatus,” that is to say the cinematic machine as including both the instrumental
base of camera, projector, and screen and the spectator as the desiring subject on whom the
cinematic institution depends for its imaginary realization, not only represents the “real” but also
stimulates intense “subject effects.”…From the Diorama, the Panorama, and the Cosmorama up
through NatureMax, the cinema has amplified and mobilized the virtual gaze of photography,
bringing past into present, distant to near. It has offered the spectator a mediated relationship with
imaged others from diverse cultures. We are not suggesting that imperialism was inscribed either
in the apparatus or in the celluloid, only that the context of imperial power shaped the uses to
which both apparatus and celluloid were put.

In the case of Japan, cinema also fit into a form of misemono culture that is very similar to
fairground or sideshow culture in the West. Emphasizing the idea of cinema as technological
spectacle, Gerow states that “cinema and x-rays were to a certain degree simply interchangeable
blocks within the misemono structure.”
2
When animation was first introduced to Japan, it arrived
as another spectacle, a new and different type of motion picture technology for people to come
and experience.
3

In this period, these sites of spectacle were embedded in the Western imperialist structure
of power, expressed through the act of looking and seeing.
4
Shohat and Stam note how cinema
combines the culture of science with the culture of attractions:
The social origins of cinema were schizophrenic, traceable both to the “high” culture of science
and literature and to the “low” culture of sideshows and nickelodeons. (At times the two culture
coalesced: the flying balloon in Around the World in 80 Days, designed to circle the world, is also
the object of spectacle for enthusiastic Parisians.) The desire to expand the frontiers of science
became inextricably linked to the desire to expand the frontiers of empire. The immediate origins
of the cinema in Western science meant that filmic exhibition also entailed the exhibition of

151

Western triumphs. The visible achievements of both cinema and science also graced the
proliferating world fairs, which since the mid-nineteenth century had become the new
“international” showplaces for the spectacular fruits of industrial and scientific progress.

Cinema acts as a spectacle that presented a convergence of science as technology, attractions as
mass culture, and imperial ideology.
Animation presents an exaggerated example of cinema as technology because it
maintained a close relationship with the cinematic mode of attractions even well into a time
when narrative cinema had become the dominant means of cinematic experience. As a motion
picture medium, animation has a perpetual relationship with the early cinematic mode of
“cinema of attractions” primarily due to the relationship that it has with technology.
5
Tom
Gunning defines cinema of attractions as an “exhibitionist cinema” that can be contrasted the
dominant voyeuristic mode of “narrative cinema.”
6
The primary interest of cinema of
attractions is “that of exhibitionist confrontation rather than diagetic absorption” and it bore a
closer relationship with “the attractions of the fairground than with the traditions of the
legitimate theater.”
7
He goes on to note that should we ever forget that in the earliest years of
exhibition the cinema itself was an attraction.”
8
That is to say that in the beginning, cinema as
much attractive for its technology and the new modes of looking and seeing it offered as it was
for the specific type of content that was being show.
As time progressed, cinema came to be disassociated with the culture of sideshows and
attractions, developing a closer relationship with theater and the act of telling rather than
showing. Animation, however, maintains its exhibitionist mode, even as it began to incorporate
more narrative storytelling in addition to showcasing the latest special effects. It is similar to the
description that Gunning offers of trick films that seem to have a narrative thrust.
The trick film, perhaps the dominant non-actuality film genre before 1906, is itself a series of
displays, of magical attractions, rather than a primitive sketch of narrative continuity. Many trick

152

films are, in effect, plotless, a series of transformations strung together with little connection and
certainly no characterization. But to approach even the plotted trick films, such as Voyage Dans
La Lune(1902), simply provides a frame upon which to string demonstration of the magical
possibilities of cinema.
9

Because it lacks the indexical relationship to the object, animation cannot create the same sense
of integrated suture for the viewer. Even with the most photorealistic techniques, one is always
reminded that it is artificial, an approximation. The farther animated representation goes from
approximating realism, the closer it comes to showing instead of telling. At the same time that
cinema developed towards narrative and suture, the animation industry grew around finding the
next interesting special effect. Even Disney animation, which by the late 1930s was considered
the highest quality animation there was to offer from anywhere in the world, built much of that
reputation with films that offered some form of spectacular technological attraction, such as
synchronized sound, photorealism, and Technicolor. Animated films could not hide from their
technology, and this was an important element in how ideology was constructed within the films.
Japanese imperial identity necessarily negotiated between the two geopolitical poles of
the West and rest of Asia. The structures of Western imperialism had for centuries fostered
economic, political, military and cultural conditions in which the West had hegemony over the
East, placing itself and any culture that had not yet undergone modernization at opposite poles of
power. The binary in this case was more than the perceived incompatibility of Eastern and
Western culture. Rather it was the ideological condition that allowed Orientalism to seem like
the natural order of things. In this context, Japan situated itself in between the Western
aggression and Asian backwardness in order to justify their own imperial interests. Their desire
was both to demonstrate superiority over an Asian population with which they had an ethnic and
cultural proximity, while also catching to (or ideally overcoming) the hegemonic presence of the
West. Technology provided a convenient site for this ideological desire. On the one hand,

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technological advancement set Japan apart from the rest of Asia that had not reached the same
level of modernity. It also provided the means of meeting the West on its own terms.
In the 1930s the focus of Japanese moral education expanded to encompass military
culture in order to build morale for the ongoing fighting and support for colonialism and
increasingly aggressive campaigns overseas.
10
Though the implementation of “thought control”
policies would not come together until the late 1930s, animated film began to reflect the growing
desire to justify expansion and build public support for the military much earlier. After 1931
there was a marked shift in the tone of animated educational films. At this time, Japanese
colonial expansion took a more aggressive turn with the Manchurian Incident of 1931, in which
the Japanese army faked a terrorist attack in order to create a justifiable reason for occupying
northern China. More and more films began to feature combat and they began to take place in
colonial spaces such as the deserts of the Chinese mainland, or the islands of the South Pacific.
Animated educational films through the 1930s and early 1940s continued to wrestle with
domestic social problems associated with modernization, but even these began to be inflected
with the increased focus on outward expansion and eventually the mobilization of total war in
1941.
The war effort fostered an interest in news media, which helped animation. Japanese
cinema has long had a deep connection with warfare. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
the Russo-Japanese War provided a platform for domestic film production to gain a foothold in
Japan as Japanese people wanted the latest news from the front as often and as quickly as
possible. The war also encouraged domestic production as people wanted to see content that was
related to their experience in the war.
11
Each major military conflict in Japan was accompanied

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by a flurry of growth for both entertainment and news media. Young describes the impact that
the “war fever” that broke out in 1931 had on news media at the time:
Because of its level of development, the rise in demand for news from the Manchurian front
spurred competition for the expanding news market. This in turn stimulated technological
innovation in newspaper production as well as the diffusion of a new medium of communications,
radio. Competition, technological innovation, and market expansion became key forces behind
the imperial jingoism that suddenly engulfed Japan.
12

The competition for market share between the Asahi Shinbun and the Mainichi Shinbun helped
to promote the production of animated film. Along with the production of newsreels, Asahi
promised their readers that they would also begin to offer animated sound films as part of their
project to increase the film production branch.
13
Like much of the media at the time, animation
was caught up in the wave and many animated films in the 1930s began to more heavily reflect
imperial ideology, focusing more and more on defining Japanese identity in relation to either a
colonial other or an aggressive Western other. Technology, both as representation in the films as
well as in the context of behind the scenes production, played an essential role in this process. In
the following chapter, we will analyze the interaction between technology and content as it
relates to the structures of power inherent to imperialism.

The Spectacle of Technological Representation and Japanese Identity

According to Mizuno, “the nature of science and the sense of wonder were highly
malleable; science could be easily encouraged either for peace or for war, and the sense of
wonder as either universal or Japanese depending on the current of the time.”
14
She describes
how popular science mobilized the sense of wonder in order to work against institutionalized
education, but also how that sense of wonder lent itself just as easily to the imperial machine that
supported colonial expansion and military advancement.
15
Much like the ideology of the
kokutai, spectacular wonder could be used as a means to reinforce the dominant national

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narrative or to critique it. It was also able to change together with those national myths as they
shifted away from an internal focus on defining a modern, urban Japanese self towards an
imperial self-defined by a colonial or adversarial other. It is possible to see how wonder operates
as a flexible force. In this section, I compare and contrast films that seek to define Japanese
modern life from with to the growing genre of combat films that proliferated in the 1930s. In
both cases, technology generates the spectacle that ultimately defines the direction of Japanese
identity for each film.
Taro’s Toy Train (Tarô-san no Kisha, Aoji, 1929) is a rare type of film that incorporates
three different motion picture effects. A whimsical fantasy of Japanese everyday modern life, it
integrates live-action cinema, stop-motion animation, and two-dimensional drawn animation.
16

By deconstructing domesticity and train travel and reconstructing them through different special
effects, Toy Train renders the ordinary into the extraordinary. The film begins with live action
footage of a child playing “trains” with his friends in his suburban backyard while his mother
looks on. The boy, Taro, wears an engineer’s hat and his friends play passengers on a commuter
train. (Fig. 28) As the children play and Taro’s mother hangs laundry, his father returns home
from work, presumably having taken the train from town, and presents Taro with the gift of a toy
train. After dinner, Taro and his father play with the train together, before Taro is put to bed.
The film then briefly switches to stop-motion, as the little train wakes up after the boy has gone
to sleep and pushes its way out of its box to frolic across his bedspread. (Fig. 29) The next
sequence is an animated version of the boy’s dream, which is a fantasy extension of the game he
was playing earlier with his friends. An animated version of Taro is again the conductor on a
commuter train full of animals and toys playing out the mundane pleasure and frustrations of
train travel. (Fig. 30) An ostrich in a kimono struggles to see her face in the tiny bathroom mirror

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and splashes too much water in her eyes while a pair of rhinoceroses drink too much and disturb
the other travelers. The film ends when Taro’s is thrown from the train trying to quell an
argument between a pair of feisty monkeys and wakes up from his dream.

Figure 28 Tarô plays a train game with his friends in the front yard

Figure 29 The train gets up and rolls out of the box

Figure 39 Animated Conductor Tarô speaks to a pair of hippos

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In the live action portion of the film, trains are a somewhat mundane, unspectacular
element of modern life. Rather than roaring symbols of military advancement or industrial
progress, the train in this film represents the ordinariness of white-collar living and the nostalgic
pleasures of being a child. The family in the film is well off with a big, clean house in the
suburbs. The father maintains a white color job of some sort in the city while Taro’s mother
contents herself with domestic chores and Taro plays with his friends after school. Train travel
is referenced both in the father’s commute, although we do not actually see him board or
disembark a train, and in Taro’s play with his friends. The routine repetition of both the
salaryman’s commute and the children’s game establish a quaint familiarity with the ideal
construction of middle class urban life, but neither of these are spectacular attractions in the
context of this film. They represent a place of safety and familiarity from which Tarô (and the
audience) can then wander into a spectacular dreamland without losing his way home.
It is not until the toy train comes to life and the audience is transported to the whimsical
world of Taro’s imagination that train travel becomes exotic again. Ordinary, boring, or even
frustrating experiences are rendered interesting when filtered through animation and animal
bodies. A pretty ostrich is too tall to see herself properly in the mirror, and has a hard time using
the faucet while the train is rocking back and forth. A grouchy pig grumbles at the drunken
rhinos as he tries to read his newspaper. Their appearance and plasticity add interest to the
familiar. Stereotypes that are potentially irritating or disruptive become winsome and charming
due to the inherent plastic charm that animals have to offer. In this way, the line-drawn portion
of the film takes a familiar everyday experience and makes it spectacular and amusing.

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Arguably the most spectacular moment in the film is when the toy train comes to life in
its box and crawls across Taro’s bed. The stop-motion sequence is very short, serving only as an
entry into the dream-space represented by the shift to animation from live-action. It breaks from
the charming yet mundane tone of the rest of the film to make trains spectacular again, filtered
through the additional technological apparatuses of the motion picture camera and projector. Its
inclusion is jarring, a startling transition between the familiar world of Taro’s home and the
exotic realm of his dream. The sequence is only twenty-seconds long, but as the train transports
Taro to his exotic dreamland, the stop-motion sequence takes the film from familiar to
spectacular.
The technological display in this film is two-fold. On the one hand, it declares that train
travel is a familiar, mundane part of Japanese existence, so seamless integrated as to appear in a
child’s dreams. The technology that is simultaneously the basis of leisurely tourism, industrial
production and military advancement is also one that is at the fingertips of every metropolitan
Japanese. Likewise, the film is also playing with film form, experimenting with different
integrated technologies to bring the imaginary domestic world of the train to life. Technology
acts as a conductor. Whether as a train with its ability to transport people from place to place, or
whether as motion picture with its ability to virtually transport people from reality to dreams, the
inherent spectacular appeal of animated films is linked to the fact that they cannot be wholly
disconnected from the technological apparatus that creates them. According to Yamaguchi, one
of the earliest reactions to animated films was wonder. Audiences marveled at “the manga that
could move” and wondered how the effect was created.
17
The animation medium provides a
conduit through which the mundane structures of everyday life can engage with the sense of

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wonder that was inherent to the consumption of popular science and its fascination with the
natural, scientific, and technological worlds.
In another example, The Plane Cabby’s Lucky Day (Oatari Sora no Entaku, Kato, 1932)
uses technological representation and a fantasy of a utopian future to construct a hierarchical
national identity. Plane Cabby establishes a careful hierarchy oriented around technological
access that eschews Western influence while establishing Japanese modern advancement. The
world of the film is visually divided into different spaces that summarize the simplified
assumptions that serve to delineate Japanese identity. Plane Cabby takes place in the near future,
an imaginary 1984 where technology has allowed people to populate the skies while animals
have civilized and begun to inhabit the infrastructures left behind on the ground. At the
periphery of this evolutionary world lies the timeless world of myths and monsters. The clouds
above the humans are home to the demons that control the rain and thunder while deep under the
sea lives the catfish whose restless wriggling causes earthquakes. It is a vertically oriented world
that separates the natural world from one of human making.
The story is about a cheerful shonen with an ailing mother who makes his living flying an
airplane taxicab for human commuters. (Fig. 31) His first passenger of the day leaves a
mysterious parcel in his taxi, and his efforts to return the parcel take him on an adventure outside
of the human city in the sky, up to the world of the demons (oni), down to the catfish under the
sea where he is ultimately rewarded with a bag of treasure to bring home to his mother. The
opening scenes take their time establishing the whimsical, futuristic environment. After
establishing that the city of the future has taken to the skies, the scene pans down to the ground
to spend some time with the civilized animals on the ground. Pigs with whistles wearing police
helmets calmly direct daily commuter traffic a mother duck wearing an apron leads her children

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to school. (Fig. 32) There is a steady rhythm to the scene that evokes a sense of content
efficiency, but also the unavoidable jazzy rhythm of modern fun. The amusing scene is based
on a reductive idea of social evolution made possible through access to technology. Once the
cities have been built, the assumption is that anyone, even an animal, can eventually learn how to
occupy that space. It also takes for granted that the space of the future will be urban. Humans
have the unique ability to build and manipulate the technology that is necessary for this type of
evolution, without them there would not be this type of progress.

Figure 31 The plane cabby flies around to look for a fare

Figure 32 In the city below him, animals obey traffic rules
The future world of Plane Cabby operates similarly to that of Taro’s dream-world train
ride. The ordinary mundane street scene becomes exotic when it is populated by civilized

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animals. This is contrasted with the exotic, impossible city of the skies that the humans have
come to inhabit. Even the inclusion of mythic creatures such as thunder demons and giant
catfish fits into the spectacular fantasy of a scientific new world by fitting the man-made
technological world of the humans and animals into a larger framework of “natural order.” And
it is an order that privileges the technological. (Fig. 33) The Plane Cabby underlines the ideology
behind Asian colonization and Japanese modern progress because it emphasized the power of
technology to make the future possible, but also its sheer ability to “civilize” even those elements
of culture/identity that were particular points of contention. The modern city eventually becomes
a space that could make urban or colonial populations into productive industrial agents. It would
even lend some careful control to demons, as the radio helps the demon to relax, discouraging
him from unleashing thunder on the city below. It is perhaps this connection to technology that
is one of the elements that lingers through to the contemporary moment. A hopeful promise, but
it is built upon a hierarchical world in which these thing can co-exist so long as they are
separated into their individual spaces and only humans have the privilege to traverse between
these spaces.

Figure 33 A demon listens to the radio to relax

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In the films above, technology is represented in its capacity for industry and in relation
to everyday urban life. To that end, the focus is on transportation technologies like trains and
taxis. Even the use of the airplane, which suggests at colonialism and expansion, is converted
into the domestic space of the street when it becomes the working class (if upwardly mobile)
symbol of the taxicab. As interest in imperial expansion grew among consumers, animated films
began to feature combat with more frequency. These films took place in exotic locations, like
the desert steppes of north China or palm-tree studded islands and beaches. The types of
machines and inventions that appeared in animated film combat films were the exotic machines
of war. Particularly significant were airplanes, submarines, weapons and communications
technologies such as telegraph and ham radio. Machinery that signified comfortable middle
class living in an earlier context instead came to represent the tools that made victory in China
and the South Pacific a guaranteed outcome. Airplanes were no longer common taxis that could
be flown by ordinary working class people, but the vehicle of choice for talented flyboys who
used their skill to outwit enemies and protect grateful civilians. The representation of
technology in animated film was deliberate and carefully constructed to support a powerful
image of the nation that would inspire pride in the hearts of everyday consumer-subjects.
At this time, airplanes became an important symbol of Japanese military strength, and as
such were also a symbol of national pride. Air combat was a significant factor in the conquest of
China. At the start of the Pacific War in 1941, Japan controlled the most technically advanced
aircraft in the world short of the German Luftwaffe. Print media was awash with airplanes,
which were used in advertising to promote films, as propaganda to encourage people to enlist,
and just as often as objects of beauty among the many disparate parts that made up the collages
in popular magazines. Air combat lends itself well to the construction of technological spectacle

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in animation. Animation as a special effect allowed airplanes to contort into fantastic patterns,
showcasing the technology by freeing it from the laws of physics. In animation, aircraft were
more than static symbols of progress. They were mobile spectacles of victory.
The 1934 film Sankichi the Monkey: Shock Troops (O-saru no Sankichi: Tosugekitai,
Seo) blends the spectacle of modern warfare with the animated spectacle of the plastic body. As
with most adventure stories, the combat takes place on the exotic terrain of north China. An
army of Japanese monkeys attacks an army of Chinese bears. The monkeys, in this film coding
as Japanese, display a far greater comfort with and access to modern machines than their teddy
bear opponents, who as we see at the beginning of the film are inept, disorganized foes. Monkey
stretch their tails turn into helicopter blades allowing them to drop bombs, stretch their arms to
reach enemies around corners, or bend and twist to avoid and repel oncoming bullets. (Fig. 34)
Not only are the monkeys themselves plastic, so too are their machines. Mortar shells swerve,
weave and ripple in order to avoid friendly targets, only hardening when they reach their targets.
(Fig. 35) Shock Troops exhibits a dizzying economy of order and chaos that paints the monkey
troops in a positive, powerful light. They appear organized and precise, but that precision takes
on a spectacular edge through the constant barrage of movement as well as plasticity. The
civilized edge that the monkeys bring both to the rugged desert terrain and to the wayward bear
soldiers reinforce the overall narrative of justification based in spreading progress and
advancement. They are the offensive vanguard of the empire’s civilizing project, and their
plastic bodies not only protect the borders of the empire, the help to expand them.

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Figure 34 The monkeys prepare to drop bombs using their
tails as helicopter blades

Figure 35 A frightened enemy bomb balks in fear from the monkey troops
Movement is a key element in the spectacular appeal of aerial combat. Even in films
such as Momotaro’s Sky Adventure in which the human body exhibits little plasticity, the
dynamic aerial ballet provides for more than enough visual excitement. Airplanes swooping and
weaving, defying the laws of physics and gravity, were a common means of creating both an
offensive and defensive sense of security for audiences. For example, in Fighting Eagles of the
Sky (Sora no Arawashi, 1938), Ôfuji’s recurring character Chinkoroheibei must maneuver his
plane around a giant cloud shaped like Popeye the Sailorman that is trying to pluck him out of
the sky. The Popeye shaped cloud has the Union Jack anachronistically drawn across its chest,
but this suggests less that Japanese thought Popeye was British and more that the cloud is meant

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to be a condensed visual representation of the West. In spite of the fact that Chinkoroheibei’s
airplane is not exactly the most technologically advanced—the “engine” is a mouse on an
exercise wheel, while a pair of fish and a frog operate the gears—he is not only able to elude the
grasp of the Popeye cloud, but also defeat a squadron of pig pilots flying American flags.
Fighting Eagles brings the spectacle of a shonen whose flying skill out match every opponent,
even though his airplane is tantamount to a child’s toy.
Fighting Eagles is a much about the Japanese fighting spirit as it is about technology.
Where Sankichi and his shock troops could rely on their technology to be superior to that of the
Chinese bears, Chinkoroheibei might very well have been flying into a superior force of
American aircraft. But the audience does not need to worry for his safety, in spite of his
adorable, jerry-rigged plane. At one point, his “engine” is damaged when the little mouse is
knocked unconscious, but through teamwork and perseverance, Chinkoro and the frogs are able
to revive him just in the nick of time. Embedded into Chinkoro’s ultimate victory over a full
squadron of American planes is the idea that one spirited young boy has the moxie, and the
inherent skill set, to take on many enemies, even if they are Western and not Asian. The
technological spectacle in this case is not so much the machine itself, although the cute airplane
can be read as its own form of spectacle, as it is the unique ability of Japanese pilots to use them.
Air combat played an even greater role in reassuring audiences of not only their eventual
victory but also their personal safety in educational films intended to teach basic safety
procedures. The Collaborative Air Defense Battle (Kyôryoku Bôkû Sen, Misaki Shôkai, 1942)
begins with a village of animals gathering for a paper play (kamishibai). A pig acts as the barker
for a very technical lesson about 3 different types of bombs and the types of fires that they can
create. There is a detailed description, including diagrams, of each bomb, its effects and the

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procedures that are necessary to extinguish the flames. The second, for example, will only be
encouraged by water, and needs to be smothered, while the third is explosive, so it’s necessary to
beware of shrapnel. After this sobering demonstration, the animals decide that if they band
together and act as a team they can overcome anything that might happen to them. The film ends
with a spectacular air raid, in which the village manages to protect itself with the knowledge they
have learned long enough for air support to arrive and drive off the enemy in an air battle.
Though it takes its time showcasing harmful enemy technologies, Air Defense Battle is also
carefully framed to be reassuring rather than frightening. The bombs themselves might represent
superior engineering, or at least foreign engineering that is designed to kill, but a thorough and
scientific knowledge of that foreign technology is all that is needed to survive, at least until
Japanese machines can come to your aid.
The film If Enemy Planes Should Come (Tek'i Kuraba, Yamamoto, 1942), takes an
entirely different, less sober tone, instead falling back on the same dizzying displays of Japanese
flying skills to promote a sense of safety. This film begins with an aerial battle showing
Japanese frog pilots heroically protecting a civilian population. In spite of their efforts, ships
bearing American flags on their bows break through and send a squadron of planes in for an air
raid. The civilian animals all call to action. A mouse whose big ears allow him to hear the
approach calls an alarm and an owl turns on huge spotlight eyes to light the city and the sky.
The civilians then demonstrate what to do in the case of an air raid. They first allow women,
children and the elderly into the shelters and everyone must wear gas masks. One of the bombs
gets through and a fire breaks out, but the frogs join up with the civilians who are not yet in
shelters to form bucket lines for water or smother the flames with blankets and sand. Finally, the
combined efforts of the searchlights and anti-aircraft guns defeat the enemy planes that drop

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from the sky like insects. In contrast to Air Defense Battle, where scientific knowledge of the
individual bombs was a key factor for protection, this instead teaches the protocol for how to
react in an air raid. Technology and teamwork are the reassuring framework that prevent the
attack from being a tragedy. The mouse and the owl, even though they are civilians, are able to
turn their bodies into machines that make the victory possible. The approach to technology and
how it is best used is different, as this film falls back on the spectacle of air combat and victory
rather than the use of scientific knowledge, again demonstrating the flexibility that science as an
ideology had to offer.
In addition to actual combat, animated films also highlighted the role of industry in
promoting warfare. Another film featuring Sankichi and his troops, Sankichi the Monkey:
Battling Submarine (O-saru no Sankichi: Tatakau Sensuikan, Kataoka, 1943) takes a time-out
from showcasing dizzying action and combat to show a set of simplified, cartoonish design plans
for a new submarine. The film begins with the monkey’s assembling in a classroom with a
blackboard for a briefing. It then features a few shots in which the blackboard fills the screen,
with animated plans for the submarine. A dotted line represents movement through the ship, and
hatches open and close as Sankichi explains how they will then use the boat to attack. When it
finally does come time to attack, rather than focus on the external battle, the film’s action
remains inside the ship, showing how the monkey’s react to hits, stop leaks, and rush around,
again in a state of organized chaos, in order to keep the submarine up and running to win the
conflict. Unlike Shock Troops, where the monkey’s bodies were the weapons, this film
showcases the weaponry itself. The lingering shot of the design plans acts as a reminder of the
process, the scientific ingenuity that created the ship in the first place. Limiting the action to the
interior of the ship again highlights the machine, which is the exotic, spectacular tool for victory.

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In Ma-Bô’s Paratroopers (Ma-Bô no Rakasanbutai, Satô, 1943), Ma-bô runs a scientific
research center (kagaku kenkyû sentâ), where he produces advanced weaponry.
18
There is no
surviving copy of the complete film, but in the first half we see Ma-Bô touring the facilities in a
white lab coat. He watches as giant magnets lift tanks and huge saws bore down trees. While he
isn’t paying attention, his hippo assistant gets himself tangled up in one of the machines because
he doesn’t understand how it works. The industrial center produces shells and weapons, which
are loaded up on trucks and taken to front, where futuristic airplanes repel an enemy attack. This
film spends a long time in the manufacturing facility, linking the aerial battle later on with the
production process required to produce. The spectacle is both in the exaggerated size and power
of the industry, as well visual gag of the ethnically ambiguous hippo companion animal
becoming twisted in an undefined machine. The film is interesting for the way that it links the
end product of the weapons and the airplanes to the process of research and discovery that
creates them, evoking the popular scientific sense of wonder at the level of process as well as
results.
The combined spectacle of science and animation could be used as a powerful tool.
Before the escalation of military tensions, it allowed for domestic Japanese spaces that in the
1920s and early 1930s were losing their modern allure and becoming ordinary and familiar to be
revitalized and exotic again, reaffirming a dynamic modern identity rather than a stagnant one.
Later, the same sense of wonder and scientific knowledge would be used throughout the war in
varying ways to build moral support and reassure audiences of their own safety. But these
fantasies of power and control are only possible on the screen and in the films. In the realm of
physical production, animators had to deal with a set of problems and limitations such that it was
always apparent to them that they had a lot of catching up to do before they would be able to

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produce films that were as technologically developed as those coming out of the West.
Nonetheless, they applied different strategies to assert Japanese identity and maintain a powerful
image.

The Science and Technology of Animation Production: In Between Flatness and Depth

Despite the spectacular victories technology allowed to them on the screen, Japanese
animators struggled with real life limitations on their access to the technologies they needed to
make the latest, state-of-the-art animated films. Imported films from the Silly Symphonies to
Popeye and Betty Boop were appealing in large part because of their slick quality and high
production value and the Japanese industry was eager to catch up. In the first decades of the
twentieth century, animation produced in different national contexts had roughly the same level
of production value as aspiring animators experimented with motion picture technology in order
to achieve the different kinds of effects that they wanted. Early cinematic animation was a simple
affair that did not require materials that were very different from those used in live-action
filming. Techniques such as stop-motion or chalkboard animation required a lot of time, but did
not need specialized materials. They were relatively simple to reproduce and the degree of
fluidity, photorealism or visual interest depended on the artists’ skill or cleverness rather than the
photographing apparatus or physical materials being used.
19

That changed in the mid-1910s when John Bray came up with a way to save time. Bray
not only invented materials that would become the foundation for the dominant animation style
until computer technology, he also perfected the fragmentation of animation labor for the sake of
efficiency. In order to decrease the amount of time it took to draw an individual frame, Bray
came up with the idea of using a static background with an animated foreground. He started
using sheets of clear celluloid to draw any moving parts, shooting them overlaid on a still,

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reusable background. He introduced Taylorism to the animation process, decreasing the time
that it took to produce a film. Bray’s technological intervention was a key component in the
hegemony of American commercial animation. The Americans were the first to have access to
the time and labor saving techniques, and through the years they had consistent, easy access to
the celluloid that was produced in America. While this doesn’t account for the popularity of
American films and characters, it can in some capacity account for the volume of American films
produced in the Golden age, which was another factor leading to US dominance in this area.
20

In the late 1930s, due to the overwhelming success of Walt Disney’s feature films,
photorealism came to be the measure of quality for animated film. Disney’s success has always
in some part been linked to his awareness of the latest in film technologies. Steamboat Willie
(1929) owes as much to Disney’s tenacious insistence that it be a synchronized sound film as it
does to Mickey’s innate charms.
21
When Disney first conceived of Snow White (1938), it was an
ambitious project for many reasons.
22
First, it was to be the first feature-length animated film
ever made. Animation production even in the United States during this time was costly and
time-consuming, and no one had yet been willing to take the financial risk of producing one. On
top of that, Disney wanted the film to be shot in full Technicolor, with as much details as
possible in order to best mimic a photorealistic aesthetic. This increased the costs even more.
The technical investment was considerable. It was at this time that Disney developed the
multiplanar camera, a device that separated a drawn image into multiple layers in order to better
achieve an illusion of visual depth. He used more cells than usual in order to increase the quality
of the motion and ensure that movements would have a smooth flow like that of live-action
recording. Producing the color that he wanted was also a challenge. Early Technicolor was
always a dialogue between the object being filmed and a finicky camera. It was sometimes

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necessary to tweak the colors in real life so that they would appear to be natural once they’d been
filmed.
23
Disney struggled with lighting and the chemical composition of paints in order to give
Snow White her signature blushing cheeks and full red lips. The film cost a fortune to produce,
and if it had not been a hit Disney studios would have had to fold. But Snow White did turn out
to be a massive, international hit. Disney’s success with Snow White set the tone for animation
production for much of the rest of the twentieth century. Animated films that lacked the same
attention to detail, photorealistic finishes, and smoothness of motion were not received as well.
Disney feature films became the universal standard of measure for the best that animation had to
offer.
It was a standard of measure that Japanese animators, with their limited access and
resources, struggled with. On the one hand, they wanted to prove their technical prowess by
producing a Japanese film with Japanese content that could be measured along Disney’s
yardstick. The environment of the late 1930s and early 1940s allowed animators some
opportunity to do this, particularly with the use of state funds allocated to educational animated
films. In addition to tailoring the on screen narratives to better boost nationalistic morale, a
handful of innovative filmmakers were working on developing a visual style that could itself
express Japanese culture. The logic underlying animation technique is related both to the
individual animators desire to produce an attractive, marketable product, but also to the
nationalistic desire to create a cultural product that reflected a unique identity, not just a copied
version of Western culture. Different filmmakers had different approaches and these break down
roughly into two strategies. With Disney and similar films dominating the field, one means to
promote Japanese culture in animation was to meet the international standards, specifically those
of photorealism and synchronized sound. The other strategy was to find an alternative paradigm

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that didn’t need to be subjected to the same criteria, something that could be easily and quickly
understood to be Japanese at a glance.
Rather than compete with the West at its own level, animator Ôfuji Noburo instead
looked to find an alternative mode of filmmaking that would be unique to Japan. For much of the
1920s and 1930s, the Japanese animation industry had limited access to the physical materials
that had facilitated commercial animation film production in the United States. In particular,
Japanese animators had limited access to celluloid sheets, which lead Kityama Seitarô to develop
a cut paper animation technique that simulated the effect of 2-D cell animation.
24
While
Kitayama’s paper cutout (kirigami) technique did estimate the visual impression of cell
animation and could lend a great deal of fluidity to the image, it was not as effective a time-
saving device as celluloid. With paper cutout animation, the backgrounds stayed the same, and
figures were cut from paper to approximate motion, meaning that not only did the figures need to
be drawn separately and the cut from the sheet one at a time. In any case, Kitayama developed
his innovative technique in order to make Japanese films look more like imported films as much
as he was trying to find a way to streamline the animation process.
Ôfuji embellished on the cut-paper technique in such a way that his films did not mimic
the popular commercial celluloid animated films coming out of the United States. Instead, he
worked to develop a visual style that ultimately rejected the dominant tendencies in the
animation in order to assert his understanding of Japanese culture. His method began with the
materials themselves. He used chiyogami, a type of paper printed with traditional geometric or
floral patterns and rather than drawing on it he cut shapes and patterns, layering them to create
figures and backgrounds. The effect is decidedly different from the conventional drawn two-
dimensional style, and operated in a visual mode that actively rejected the visual and

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technological standards being set by the American industry. In the pre-war period chiyogami
animation was Ôfuji’s signature style.
25
(Fig. 36) Chiyogami animation is a dizzying spectacle of
patterns and shapes that borders on the abstract. The geometrical display is held together by the
engaging rhythm of the motion and the use of sound as a unifying element. Movement is playful
and choppy rather than fluid, and chiyogami films appear to be very flat, lacking in visual
perspective.

Figure 36 Screenshot from The Black Cat (Ôfuji, 1929)
This desire to develop a uniquely Japanese technique instead of reproducing Western
techniques to represent Japanese content can be understood in the context of cinema as an
infectious medium. The best way to instill cultural integrity and negate the potentially harmful
effects of watching cinema would be to find a cinematic style or mode that could somehow
guarantee the cultural message. By developing an animation technique that incorporated
traditional elements of Japanese culture even to the level of production, Ôfuji was exploring the
power of motion picture to reinforce rather than break down his native culture. One of the first
chiyogami films that Ôfuji released with his studio Chiyogami Eiga was a remake of the
American film The Thief of Baghdad starring Douglas Fairbanks. According to Miyao, the
Fairbanks film was very popular and critically acclaimed when it was released in Japan in 1926.

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Ôfuji’s remake appears as an attempt to take what was popular about the film, namely the
adventurous and charismatic hero, and present it in a more carefully constructed context of
Japanese culture. In other words, Ôfuji’s version, The Thief of Baguda Castle (Bagudajô no
Tozoku) is an attempt to take foreign culture and make it “safer” for Japanese consumption, free
from the dangerous potentially subversive effects of unaltered foreign cinema. Miyao argues
“what was ambivalently critical in the production and reception of The Thief of Baguda Castle
was this modern notion of ‘Japan,’ which was in fact a mediated construct via the West, and the
notion of the ‘foreign,’ which must have been contained.”
26

The intervention of chiyogami animation in the animated remake of The Thief of
Baghdad not only renders a foreign property into a safer, more culturally appropriate domestic
form, but also breaks down the live-action spectacle of Douglas Fairbank’s Western body and
reassembles it as a spectacle of Japanese materials. One of the major selling points of the
original film were Fairbank’s elaborate stunts, all of which he performed himself even though he
was forty years old at the time. In addition, adventure films are themselves generically linked to
the consumption of exotic locations and confrontations with native peoples, which Thief offers in
spades.
27
The spectacular appeal of Baguda Castle on the other hand is that of the animation.
(Fig. 37) To be sure, setting the film in a feudal land of myths and legends adds to the exotic
appeal, but it is no longer the voyeuristic imperial appeal of a conventional adventure film. The
flat, dizzying patterns hold the viewers attention with their unconventional design. The task of
infusing the original property with an even greater sense of wonder was made possible through
Ôfuji’s unusual version of animation technology.

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Figure 37 Full page ad for The Thief of Baguda Castle from June 1, 1926 issue of
Film Report (Kinema Junpo)

176

Miyao’s point can be further linked to the contemporary concept of “superflatness,”
which provides a useful entry into understanding the cultural logic behind chiyogami and the
extent to which it resists the existing geopolitical hierarchy. Superflatness refers “a certain
structural methodology, in which they created surface images that erased interstices and thus
made the observer aware of the images’ extreme planarity.”
28
Murakami describes it as the
“DNA that formed Japanese culture,” an artistic point of view that is uniquely Japanese and that
can be found in Japanese art through the ages.
29
The concept of the superflat has been the
theoretical link between postmodern animation and pre-modern Edo period painting and art,
although superflat discourse consistently eschews the modern period. It is a concept that not
collapses the visible planes of a particular image, it also collapses historical experience, creating
an historical link between animation production in the twenty-first century with artistic
production in earlier time periods. Critiques of superflat point out that it is an essentializing
concept that acts as a throwback to myths of Japanese uniqueness, and Lamarre specifically
locates the concept in the deeply rooted post-traumatic experience of defeat. He states, “this
insistence of the impotence of the Japanese (male) in relation to the potency of the United States
has a long and complicated history. But it is clearly part of a cultural nationalism that would
erase the history of Japanese militarism, reconstructing national values by lingering on Japan’s
subordination to the United States.”
30

Superflatness is not entirely inseparable from its postwar contexts, however. Neither is it
necessary for it to represent some sort of genetically encoded trait of Japanese artistic tradition.
It does represent a resistance to Western hegemony and a rejection of the high-art values of the
West that value depth-whether it be visual depth or depth of meaning. “If it is possible to set
aside, at least temporarily, Murakami’s transformation of the superflat into Japanese nationalism

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and militarism, there may be another way to think about the superplanarity of the anime image in
relation to action. This other way of looking at superflatness calls attention to an information-
rich Japan. It does not find a Japan obsessively trying to catch up with America, but a Japan that
is struggling to situate itself in transnational networks—and succeeding, for the most part.”
31

Lamarre’s comments refer to contemporary anime fitting into the transnational environments of
new media and the time-space compression that they represent. In this context, superflat is more
than a nationalistic, post-traumatic reaction, and a means of processing Japan’s place in the
global order.
That logic of a geopolitical negotiation of identity can be applied to the environment of
the 1930s and 1940s, even though this period is side-stepped in much of the current discourse.
The collapsed image of chiyogami operates more on than the surface level of cultural odor,
which as a concept refers to representation (costume, ethnicity, setting) alone. The flattened
image eschews hierarchy, and represents a fantasy of a world without a hierarchy of images as
well. “This is the basic idea of superflat: no element within the image is more important than
any other element. The result is a visual field without any hierarchy among elements.”
32

As an animation style, chiyogami provides a non-hierarchical canvas upon which the
imagery and narrative content can operate. Looser goes on to argue that “superflat pictorial
space instead allows for the layering of different surfaces, and each surface can be thought of as
its own production of identity, with its own relation to an origin (in a way, each layer is an
origin.) There is no hierarchy of space or privileged gaze of the eye that might create a stable
unified subject position or create a singular depth.”
33
Where the superficial cultural details of the
films such as sakura blossoms or traditional geometric patterns are still embedded in a
problematic belief that Japanese culture and Western culture constitute an incompatible binary,

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the flatness of chiyogami animation exhibits a more sophisticated means of establishing a fantasy
space in which cultural hierarchies are collapsed and lost, and upon which a logic of Japanese
cultural superiority, or at the very least the illusion of cultural isolation, can be built.
The chiyogami style was ultimately very successful. In terms of visual spectacle, Ôfuji’s
unique approach appealed greatly to Japanese audiences. His chiyogami films are among the
few that earned coverage in Kinema Junpo in the 1920s. (Fig. 38) What is interesting to note, is
the way that his technique incorporates a nostalgic return to non-technological visual culture, in
spite of the fact that it was a technological innovation. While the general audience might not be
aware of that fact, both Kitayama and Ôfuji’s paper cut out techniques were regarded as
technical wonders by the peers. In spite of this, however, the majority of animators sought
instead to reach what they perceived to be the cutting edge of animation technology. Specifically,
they were less interested in rejecting the hegemony of photorealism as they were in achieving it.
In the next section, we will look at the work of Mitsuyo Seo and his first feature-length film
Momotaro’s Sea Eagles.

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Figure 38

Ôfuji’s
film
Cutout
Urashima
(Kirinuji
Urashima,
1928)
featured
in
a

collage
from
August
18,
1928
issue
of
Kinema
Junpo.

The closest that pre-war production came to the level of photorealism set by Disney were
the two feature films Momotaro’s Sea Eagles (1942) and Momotaro’s Divine Warriors (1944)
directed by Mitsuyo Seo. Seo is often hailed as one of Japan’s greatest animators, along with
Ôfuji and Masaoka Kenji, who is credited with directing the first Japanese animated sound film.
Unlike Ôfuji, who experimented with a wide variety of materials in order to find a visual style
that was both unique to himself as well a unique to Japanese culture, Seo’s work was geared
more towards achieving greater fluidity of motion for drawn two-dimensional cell animation. He
worked on incorporating depth and realistic detail to create films that were more in keeping with

180

the international standards of quality for commercial animation. Seo’s feature films, however,
have a somewhat different interaction with the imperial gaze inherent to spectacle. Each film
consists of layered types of animation technology, specifically rotoscoping, multiplanar
photography and cell technology. The ultimate effect, rather than multiplying the sense of
wonder towards directed towards the empire, comes across as more ambivalent. The spectacular
displays of violence, contrasted with moments of stillness and beauty, become exaggerated, as
horrific as they are mesmerizing. In this sense, the technological spectacle of Seo’s films subtly
undermines as well as reinforces the imperial ideology.
Momotaro’s Sea Eagles, the first of Seo’s two wartime feature-length films, was heavily
marketed in Japan as the longest Japanese animated film to date. At forty-two minutes, Sea
Eagles was four minutes longer than Baguda Castle, a modest thirty-eight minutes, and is the
first animated film to be referred to as “feature length” (chôhen). Until the release of Momotaro’s
Sea Eagles, the length of animated film rarely factored animated discourse as either a selling
point or a point of cultural identity. Though Baguda Castle was nearly the same length, the
Kinema Junpo review of the film doesn’t mention its length one way or the other. Taken in the
context of Disney’s hegemony and Snow White, however, the emphasis on this film’s length
becomes a tool for highlights the technical aspects of producing animation over the artistic effect
of the individual drawings or the animator’s style. It also demonstrates an awareness of the
differences between animation production and live-action film production, given that audiences
would likely not have been excited about the prospect of a thirty-eight minute long live action
feature. Sea Eagle’s “feature length” was presented as a technological novelty, harkening back
to the period of misemono when film and animation were the latest in a line of technological
wonders. It was one element of the overall spectacle that lay behind the film.

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Narratively, Sea Eagles is an animated re-telling of the bombing of Pearl Harbor from a
Japanese point of view. Momotaro is an admiral in command of an aircraft carrier equipped with
bombers and fighter planes. Demon Island is a thinly veiled avatar of Hawaii, and the demons
all bear a resemblance to the characters of Bluto, Popeye, and Wimpy from Popeye the
Sailorman. (Fig. 39) The climax depicts a sanitized, cartoon version of the attack in which the
animals under Momotaro’s command use cute, cartoon visual gags to overcome the hapless,
drunken, demons. In and around the basic structure of the Pearl Harbor attack, however, Seo fits
in a secondary storyline in which one of the airplanes, Bomber #3, stops to help a lost baby
eagle. Their kindness pays off later when the eagles rescue them after their airplane is damaged
in the attack. Bomber #3’s aircraft is in the end the only Japanese casualty, and everyone makes
it back alive.

Figure 39 Demons from Momotarô’s Sea Eagles run from the attack
Much of the film’s nationalism can be found in the way that technology is visually
represented on screen. The bodies maintain their cartoon plasticity, but there was a meticulous
effort to draw the machines with pristine precision. Sea Eagles opens slowly, with dawn
breaking over an aircraft carrier that is far out to sea. (Fig. 40) Seo used rotoscoping, a technique
in which photographed imagery or film footage is traced and the traced drawings are re-shot, in

182

order to render the naval technology. Within the film there was a meticulous effort to render the
technology in as much detail as possible. The first three minutes of the film show different shots
and angles of the aircraft carrier sailing powerfully through the sea. As the morning sunlight hits
different points on the ship, the shots linger for a moment on each carefully constructed tableau.
We see the bow of the ship rising and falling through the waves, a shot of shipside torpedoes
glistening, a close-up of a Zero’s windshield and a long shot of the Zero’s neatly lined up on the
deck for polishing. The entire opening of the film is a slow-paced slideshow of the Navy’s latest
machines. (Fig. 41-43)

Figure 40 Rotoscoped image of Momotarô’s aircraft carrier at daybreak

Figure 41 Rabbit mechanics prepare Zero fighters for take-off

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Figure 42 Rabbit signals from the tower using his ears as semaphore

Figure 43 Long shot of the aircraft carrier
Later in the film, however, Seo also used rotoscoping to render the battleships that the
animal squadron has come to destroy. Even though the Popeye-look-a-like demons are not
harmed in the attack, they hyper realistic portrayal of the destroyed ships as they burn and sink
into the harbor is striking. (Fig. 44, 45) The destruction stands in stark contrast with the shining
glory of the more advanced and more powerful Japanese technology. On the one hand, this
comparison could go to reinforce the idea that Japanese aircraft and naval power has overcome
that of the West. But the realism offered by rotoscoping and the multiplanar camera end up
emphasizing rather than obscuring the level of destruction that was wrought, even by a group of
adorable animals using comedic gags as their weapons. Rather than cutting off the level of

184

interpretation, the hyper-realism of the technology creates not only a sense of visual depth, but
interpretive depth. On the surface, Seo seems to be complying with the need to present Japan as
a glorious victor. But by applying the same level of realism and detail to the destroyed enemy
ships, he highlights the potential for destruction that lies behind the shining order represented in
Momotaro’s clean, well-run aircraft carrier. The ultimate effect, at least for someone watching
the film in hindsight, is unclear, perhaps suggesting at a flexibility of interpretation based on the
point of view of the viewing audience.

Figure 44 Destroyed ships in the Demon Island bay

Figure 45 Sunken vessel
The sequel to Sea Eagles, released in early 1945, is a longer film and is seventy-four
minutes long. It is remarkably polished, particularly considering that quality of animated shorts

185

began to deteriorate as more and more resources were diverted to the war effort. The spectacular
appeal of Momotaro’s Divine Warriors, however, departs greatly from the image of shining
technological glory that is presented in Sea Eagles. There is a decided shift towards nature and
natural settings. The film is less a combat film, presenting itself more as an educational film
about the South Pacific islands Japan is working so hard to defend. At one point, a cat sailor is
sitting with his brother, watching the dandelions get blown away. (Fig. 46) In the opening
sequence sailors returning from the front stop and admire the flight of a flock of birds. Later
they stop at a temple to pray and pay their respects. The first fifteen minutes of the film are
about peaceful homecoming, showcasing the natural beauty of Japanese landscapes. Although
the focus here may not be on technology, it still operates as a visual spectacle, evoking the sense
of wonder that is to be had in observing nature. The homecoming portion of the film, interesting
because it comes at the beginning rather than the end, also reinforces a “why we fight” sort of
logic, a reminder that while soldiers may struggle overseas, their efforts and ensure a safe,
comfortable homeland. (Fig. 47)

Figure 46 Dandelions float away. This image is a good example of the visual depth
made possible with the multiplanar camera

186

Figure 47 Sailor with his younger brother enjoy a view of Mt. Fuji
The middle portion of Divine Warriors is set in the Dutch East Indies, and showcases the
positive influence Japanese occupation has had on the natives, who are productive, healthy and
industrious. (Fig. 48) It then takes a brief hiatus from forward action to give a history lesson of
the region, again introducing the logic behind the war effort, only this time rather than to protect
a beautiful homeland, it is to resist Western imperialism and protect the happy natives they have
already helped to become more modern. Technology is a thinly disguised justification for their
presence there. In this case, there is little criticism for Japanese presence in the Indies. Where
Sea Eagles opens up the possibility that the attack on Pearl Harbor was an abuse of Japanese
military power, Divine Warriors is not willing to go that far. The meticulous detail used to
portray the exotic, tropical island setting instead brings the South Pacific into the imperial fold,
creating a sense of closeness. The beautiful depiction of the island expands the borders of the
empire, suggesting that it is necessary to protect this innocent land as well as the homeland.

187

Figure 48 Exotic “native” animals enjoy a Japanese alphabet lesson
Only at the end when the ground battle to defend the Japanese position begins, does the
film again begin to open up to potential for excessive violence and use of force. The battle
sequence is almost jarring after the slow-paced, lyrical tone set by the earlier scenes in the film.
(Fig. 49-52) Here, Seo makes full use of the multiplanar camera in order to construct the deep
chaos of the war. Though the scene is full of the kind of frenetic motion that characterized
animated combat films, the fact that it is done with an eye towards photorealism and visual depth
rather than towards amusing cartoon gags lends the battle scene an ominous, morbidity. When
the Japanese animal soldiers dodge bullets and pull machine guns from their enemies hands it is
harrowing and tense because it lacks the easy, self-assurance of Katô’s indestructible dancing
line. Rendered more realistic, the action showcases the violence of war, rather than a fantasy of
boyish adventure and fun. Like Sea Eagles, however, there are no actual casualties aside from
the destruction to the landscape and to the enemy stronghold. The spectacular engagement with
violence in this scene creates a sense of ambivalence and unease relative to the use of force and
to battle itself. There is an air of self-reflexivity apparent in the more violent sequences that is
not there in the earlier parts of the film. The realism used to demonstrate the beauty and serenity
of the Japanese landscape is sincere, nostalgic, and un-ironic as is the use of depth and detail to

188

show the level of industrialization that has been brought to the colonies. But that same attention
to detail when brought to the battle sequences no longer holds up, opening the film up to a more
critical interpretation than is otherwise possible.

Figure 49 Troops provide machine gun cover

Figure 50 A bombed out enemy tank

Figure 51 Japanese soldier prepares to deliver a killing blow

189

Figure 52 Dying demon, his horn obscured by his helmet

Conclusion

Technology and science were key symbols in the effort to build an ideological foundation
for Japanese colonial expansion, and later to justify escalation into total empire and total war.
Cinema and animation as technological objects as well as media that represented technology,
were caught up in that effort. Tapping into a sense of wonder that grew up around science and
scientific knowledge combined with the internal politics of looking and seeing that is inherent to
the spectacle, animation became an interesting site of technological negotiation. Because it
cannot totally eschew the cinematic mode of attractions, animation constantly reminds the
audience of its technology, an effect that in some cases amplified the already heavy-handed
ideology of adventure and combat films. But as Mizuno points out, wonder is malleable, and the
cinematic gaze is not inherently imperial, according to Shohat and Stam. In some cases,
animation undermined the structure of imperial ideology through technology, creating an uneasy
sense of ambivalence towards the ordinarily invisible violence that is inherent to colonialism and
war.

190

Chapter Three Notes

1
Hiromi Mizuno, Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2009), 8.

2
Aaron Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925,
First Trade Paperback (University of California Press, 2010), 47.

3
Yamaguchi Katsunori and Watanabe Yasushi, Nihon animēshon eiga shi (Yūbunsha, 1978), 9.

4
Mizuno, Science for the Empire, 148.

5
Hiromi Mizuno, Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2009), 143–171.

6
Ibid.

7
Ibid., 232, 231.

8
Ibid., 231.

9
Ibid.

10
Louise Young, American Council of Learned Societies, and Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire [electronic
Resource]: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,
1999), 56–57.

11
Peter B. High, The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931-1945, (Wisconsin
Studies in Film) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 3–13.

12
Young, American Council of Learned Societies, and Young, Japan’s Total Empire [electronic Resource], 58.

13
“Has’ei Eiga Seisaku to Taiyo [The Loan and Manufacture of Sound Films],” Asahi Shinbun, February 24, 1932,
Morning edition, sec. 11.

14
Mizuno, Science for the Empire, 9.

15
Ibid., 143–171.

16
This is not the only instance of media mixing from this period. The 1930 film Goichi-san (Goichi-san,
Yamamoto) opens with live-action footage of children gathering at the miller’s house at a riverside in order to hear
him tell a story. Animation was used as a special effect in the comedy film The Comedian Kondô Isami (Enogen no
Kondô Isami, Yamamoto, 1935). During a large sword fight, the scene cuts from the mayhem to shots of an
animated moon covering his face rather than witness the carnage. Ôfuji Noburo was invited to animate the scene.
Toy Train is one of the only extant example of Japanese stop motion animation from this period and this sets it apart.

17
Yamaguchi Katsunori and Watanabe Yasushi, Nihon animēshon eiga shi (Yūbunsha, 1978), 18.

191

18
This film has been partially lost and only the first few minutes are extant.

19
Chalkboard animation is a simple technique that requires only a motion picture camera and a chalkboard. The
camera is set up in a fixed position in front of the chalkboard, and set to only record one frame at a time. The
animator draws a picture on the board, photographs it and then while the camera is stopped erases the board and
draws another picture that is then photographed. When the film is replayed, the illusion of motion is created. Stop-
motion animation operates on a similar principle of photographing individual frames of film one at a time, but the
space being photographed could be three-dimensional rather than drawn. This effect is used to make objects appear
to move of their own volition.

20
Jonathan Bray was both operating in the United States when he began to implement their ideas on how to save
time, money and labor on producing animated films. As a result, the US was one of the biggest manufacturers of
celluloid sheets, not to mention the base materials for filmmaking such as film stock and camera lenses. With the
dominance of the two-dimensional, line-drawn animation film, animation came to be distanced from its association
with trick films. The success of the technique is still felt today, as even in contemporary popular lexicon its
necessary to distinguish three-dimensional or computer animation when talking about those styles from what is
commonly understood as animation, the line drawn cartoon Kristin Thompson, “Implications of the Cell Animation
Technique,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa De Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1980), 106–120.

21
It’s also no accident that along with Mickey the first genuinely popular of Disney’s film series were the Silly
Symphonies. He recognized success in synched sound, and pursued it relentlessly, taking advantage of the new
wave of sound technology. Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt
Disney, Discus ed., 1969 (New York: Discus Books, published by Avon, 1969).

22
Although Disney’s feature films were not released in Japanese theaters until the 1950s, print media kept people
aware of the new and latest innovations. For example, in October 1941 Eiga Junpo ran the first of a three part series
of articles about Disney’s latest feature Fantasia (1940). The series featured reviews, explanations of the content, as
well as technical background on the production. The series was never completed, however, as the tone of the
magazine changed drastically in between the November and December issues due to the attack on Pearl Harbor and
the beginning of the Pacific War.

23
Ibid.

24
Kitayama Seitaro. “How to Make Line Films [Senga no Tsukurikata]” Eiga Kyôiku (September 1930) 62-102.

25
Ôfuji had a wide range of interests, and he did not work exclusively with chiyogami even though he appears to be
the only animator who used this particular style.

26
Daisuke Miyao, “Thieves of Baghdad: Transnational Network of Cinema and Anime in the 1920’s,” Mechademia
2 (2007): 89.

27
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “The Imperial Imaginary,” in Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the
Media (New York: Routledge, 1994), 100–136.

28
Takashi Murakami, ed., Super Flat, 2005, 9.

192

29
Murakami’s specific examples come from sixteenth century screen paintings, which he sees as having a direct
visual corollary with the film Galaxy Express 999. Murakami, Super Flat. 25

30
Thomas Lamarre, “The Multiplanar Image,” Mechademia 1 (2006): 135.

31
Ibid., 136.

32
Thomas Looser, “Superflat and the Layers of Image and History in 1990’s Japan,” Mechademia 1 (2006): 90.

33
Ibid., 98.

193

193

CONCLUSION.

In conclusion, I would like to return to the state of anime scholarship in order to
consider the role that the history of the early animation can play in the contemporary
discursive environment. What does an understanding of this period have to offer, and
how can it be put into the current dialogue? Histories are as much at work defining a
medium as production, consumption, and discourse. Cazdyn demonstrated the active role
that film histories played not only in defining cinema in Japan over time, but also how
they reflect the changing ideology underlying Japanese identity.
1
Histories act as a
framework that can emphasize or deemphasize different aspects of a medium. The
current scholarship with its emphasis on postwar media infrastructures and technologies
or pre-modern aesthetics and traditions inadvertently reinforces existing assumptions
about animation as a medium as well as assumptions about the nature of Japanese culture.
But the history of early Japanese animation, rooted as it is in the contexts of
modernization, industrialization, and empire, offers the chance to unpack the current
industry and the current scholarship in ways that it has not yet been understood. The
history of early Japanese animation has an interesting intervention to offer both for anime
as animation as well as anime as soft power. It acts as a bridge that links the two poles of
the current analysis, revealing similarities and exposing differences that cannot be easily
seen otherwise.
As we discussed in the introduction, the appeal of anime is sometimes located in
animation described as a medium with a particular aptitude for expressing the
postmodern condition. Along with this understanding of anime comes an association
with newness and new media. But much of how this appeal is described bears some

194

194

similarity to the association of animated media to the indestructible plastic line and the
spectacular appeal of animated motion. For example, Napier briefly elaborates on the
idea that anime is best suited for postmodern consumers, saying:
Indeed, anime may be the perfect medium to capture what is perhaps the overriding issue
of our day, the shifting nature of identity in a constantly changing society. With its rapid
shifts of narrative pace and its constantly transforming imagery, the animated medium is
superbly positioned to illustrate the atmosphere of change permeating not only Japanese
society but also all industrialized or industrializing societies. Moving at rapid—
sometimes breakneck—pace and predicated upon the instability of form, animation is
both a symptom and a metaphor for a society obsessed with change and spectacle. In
particular, animation’s emphasis on metamorphosis can be seen as the ideal artistic
vehicle for expressing the postmodern obsession with fluctuating identity. What
animation scholar Paul Wells describes as “the primacy of the image and its ability to
metamorphose into a completely different image,” is a function of animation that has
powerful resonances with contemporary society and culture.
2

Her description of postmodern societies as existing is in a constant state of change echoes
descriptions of modern Japan in the Taishô and Showa periods. We may look back now
and feel that change occurs more rapidly that in did before, taking place over a matter of
weeks and months rather than years, but the fact is that change has been an ingrained part
of everyday life since the beginning of the modern industrial period. The emphasis on
metamorphosis and speed, though not phrased in relation to the specific nature of a
drawn, animated line, also echo the understanding of animated plasticity set forth by
Japanese critics such as Imamura and Katô. For audiences that are always adjusting to
more speed and more automation, it would appear that animation holds some intrinsic
allure because of the way that it relates to the constant state of flux that defines
(post)modernity.
Likewise, the rhetoric of moral panic and degradation lingers in relation to anime.
Sharon Kinsella describes the negative reaction towards anime and manga, particularly in
the wake of the Miyazaki Tsutomu case.
3
Miyazaki’s taste in popular culture, which ran
towards the more extreme violent and pornographic genres, became a sensational part of

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the reportage as people speculated what role the media might have played in his crimes.
Though ultimately media had little relationship with the killings, anime and manga were
used as scapegoat causes for unsavory social behavior. In a less acute example, there was
a scandal related to the first season of the children’s television series Pokémon. An early
episode that featured one of the title character’s transformation involved brightly flashing
lights, which induced epileptic fits among a small group of children in Tokyo. The scene
was quickly edited to prevent further harm when it was distributed abroad, but the story
was nonetheless picked up by English language press as part of the media panic that
accompanied Pokémon’s expected popularity in the West.
4
In this case, there was again
concern that there was something inherent to the medium itself, not just the individual
series or genre that somehow posed a danger to its primarily youthful audience. The fear
over the effects of manga and anime on young audiences mirrors the Zigomar Incident
and the concerns of much earlier officials and journalists over the effects of cinema on a
similar population. Again, in this case, analyzed in conjunction the historical record, it
becomes clear that media panics are less a result of any actual impact that a medium has
on violent or disruptive behavior and more the expression of social anxiety on the part of
the existing mainstream towards an unruly population. They also suggest that the balance
of power itself has not changed, or perhaps a better way to think of it is that it has cycled
back to a point where the mainstream political system again has or desires control over its
youth population, disapproving of behaviors that do not support a broad, nationalistic
state agenda.
The connections between the current animation industry and the early animation
industry can also be found in the more concrete context of labor and production as well.

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After 1945, the landscape of film production changed significantly. It would be some
time before changes in the industrial infrastructure of the entertainment industry began to
be reflected in animated content, but once those changes took root the differences were
drastic. Production of animated film continued up until the end of the war, although
many of the films that were in the pipeline before August of 1945 were never completed
both due to the destruction of the studios and the heavy loss of personal. A year after
Seo’s second feature film, Momotarô’s Divine Warriors was released in 1945, over half
of the fifty or so animators who worked on that project were killed in the fire bombings.
In the months following the surrender, the surviving animators in Tokyo lead by seasoned
filmmakers Yamamoto Sanae and Masaoka Kenji, gathered together to form the New
Japan Animation Company (Shin Nihon Dôga Sha). Resources and funding were nearly
impossible to come by, and for the first year, the New Japan Animation Company only
produces a handful of short films, but it provided them a place to meet and keep the
animation industry alive.
In that sense, there is some continuity between the pre-war and post-war industry.
The people who are responsible for reviving animation production through the late 1940s
and into the 1950s were the same as those who were still working through the end of the
war. Although the defeat introduced a different set of values from those that were in
place before, the desire to create a product that would ultimately impress a Western
audience was still a significant driving force for post-war animators, at least during the
Occupation and through the early 1950s. In particular, perfecting animation technique
and the importance of demonstrating behind-the-scenes skill relative to the medium
remained important.

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Cooperation and production value would be an important theme for animators
into the 1950s. Toei Dôga actively made it their mission to begin repairing ties with
China through animation and entertainment. Their mission was one of peace this time,
but it still took place within the same geopolitical order that placed the West on top,
Japan in the middle and Asia at the bottom. The full-color theatrical release The Legend
of the White Snake (Hakujaden, Shirô, 1956) is based on a Chinese legend and was made
as collaboration with the Hong Kong filmmakers the Shaw brothers with the express plan
to exhibit overseas. (Fig. 2) It was an attempt to meet the level of photorealistic, full
animation Technicolor set by Disney’s films, and also to incorporate content that would
be appealing abroad (i.e. not too Japanese). The film won an honorable mention for color
at the 6
th
International Berlin Film Festival. As the Japanese economy recovered,
however, the nature of collaboration with Asia would change from one with at least the
appearance of equality to the much more hierarchical structure of labor outsourcing.
The contemporary stereotype of anime as cheap and of poorer quality would not
take hold until the 1960s with the advent of television and the beginning of the structures
of out-sourcing from the United States. When approached by Warner Brothers about
providing the drawings and the labor for a series of Bugs Bunny films in 1964, producers
at Toei Dôga were justifiably apprehensive. They recognized that if they were to produce
films that were up to Warner Brother’s standards, the finished product would be
indecipherable from an American made film, and they risked losing of ownership over
any hard work or completed films that might be done on behalf of Warner. In a series of
letters exchanged between the Warner Brother’s representative to Japan, Jack E. Degal,
and then President of Warner, Wolfe Cohen, Degal did his best to relay the unease on the

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part of Toei’s president over producing Bugs Bunny films in Japan. Warner’s primary
concern was that the level of quality that audience had come to expect from Warner
Brother’s films be maintained, and that there be no loss of Bug’s unique characteristics.
Toei, on the other hand, worried that by adjusting their style to meet Warner Brother’s
needs, the trace of their hard work would be lost, and they would lose credit for anything
that they did. They were explicitly concerned about producing a product that bore no
Japanese cultural markers, presciently anticipating Iwabuchi’s complaint about anime
from decades later.
In the end, a contract was drawn up and signed in June 1964, which set up the
parameters for Toei to produce 4 Bugs Bunny films within the next year. It seems that
this initial contract was something of a test, a moment for the respective parties to gauge
what this collaboration would look like and how it might proceed in the future. Given the
huge part that outsourcing continues to play in the animation industry, it would appear
that both Warner and Toei were pleased with the results. This was, however, the point
where Japanese animation began to lose the clarity of its cultural odor, both in regards to
visual style and content. The odorlessness of outsourced content would permeate all
types of Japanese animation, inadvertently reinforcing the troubling notion that animation
was a universally appealing medium free from the potentially off-putting effects of a
cultural fingerprint. It also supported the problematic idea that Japanese culture was so
unique as to be off-putting to any non-Japanese consumers.
At the same time that Japanese commercial animation was being introduced to
the system of out-sourcing, Ôfuji was doing his best to foster Japanese art animation as a
means of gaining greater recognition from the West. Before 1945, Ôfuji was one of the

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first, if not the only, Japanese animator to have his work exhibited outside of the empire.
His film The Curious Story of Yoshida Palace (Chinsetsu Yoshida Goten,1928) played in
Paris at the Studio Daimant along with one of Kinugasa’s features.
5
Given his stature in
the pre-war industry, he was in a good position to continue his work and expand his
artistic experimentation. Ôfuji set about earning recognition from the European film
establishment. His film Whale (Kujira, 1950) was recognized at the 1956 Cannes film
festival, and he was very vocal about Japan developing a presence within ASIFA
(International Animation Film Association) before his death in 1964. Ôfuji did much to
encourage alternative animation in the wake of the Asia-Pacific War, but his efforts were
based on earning recognition from institutions controlled by the West.
The institutionalization of outsourcing and the emergence of a counter-cultural art
animation community relate back to the dynamics of power that have defined animation
and Japanese culture in the postwar period. Since the defeat, the relationship with the
West has changed, but the desire for recognition and the persistent need to “catch up” are
still in place. At a consumer level, anime and Japanese media seem to have found a
comfortable niche, and professionally translated anime is now available at the touch of a
button through streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. Japanese content
are a comfortable and readily available part of the global media market, much more than
they have ever been in the past. But this is at the expense of the kinds of subcultural
practice that allowed anime to be a challenge to the mainstream system. The heyday of
soft distribution, in which fans were translating and sharing content with each other
online without formal approval of the producers or distributors, ended with the demise of
the DVD market. Conventions are highly commercial contexts, which may encourage

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individual expression and cross-cultural communication, but which do not constitute a
form of resistance against institutionalized distribution channels. In this sense, the anime
industry has gained power through greater control over the end product.
The fact that Japanese animation, which appeared twenty years ago as an
alternative context to mainstream animation production, has been subsumed into the
powerful structures of global consumption and distribution may be attributed less to a
lack of interest and more to the deeply ingrained ideological power of the system itself.
The face of empire may be displaced from the nation to the corporation, but it does not
erase the late imperial foundation upon which it is built. There is still a long way to go
before we understand how lingering geopolitical hierarchies continue to be expressed in
contemporary consumption. Focusing greater attention on the media production during
the time of empire, and tracking both the practical and ideological trace that it leaves are
an important first step toward unraveling the knot, and it is important that we see more of
this type of work in the future.
As we penetrate more deeply into the depths of socio-political analysis, it seems
that the farther down we go, the more resistant the infrastructures are to change. At the
surface level of everyday life, change is constant. It is an ingrained element of life that
extends from the modern into the postmodern. It is here that animation holds its greatest
appeal, that it is plastic and malleable, potentially molded by producers and consumers to
suite the uneasy instability that is at the heart of (post)modern living. It is at the level of
geopolitical interaction, of institutional control and mainstream rhetoric that change
happens in the slightest of increments. History matters the most in the macro analysis,
where change is only perceptible over a long period of time. I personally do not think

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that anime as soft power has done much to shift the overall balance of power in Asia that
has been in place since the era of late imperialism. In the long run it has not revealed
itself to be a genuine challenge to Hollywood, which still controls much of the world’s
entertainment and in particular animation industry.

Conclusion Notes

1
Cazdyn demonstrates how historical discourse is an active part of film culture, showing the connection
between the shifting foci of film histories through the ages and how they connect with the changes in how
Japanese identity was constructed. Eric M Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan
(Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2002), 52.

2
Susan J Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese
Animation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 12.

3

Sharon
Kinsella,
Adult
Manga :
Culture
and
Power
in
Contemporary
Japanese
Society
(Honolulu:

University
of
Hawai’i
Press,
n.d.).

4

Christine Yano, “Panic Attacks: Anti-Pokemon Voices in Global Markets” in Pikachu’s Global
Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon ed. Joseph Tobin. (Duke University Press, 2004) p 108-139

5
Studio Diamant's advert in La Semaine a Paris. In 1929 Feb 08 at p87, before the 8
th
arrondissement
listings is, which is reproduced in Kinugasa's autobiography, including the billing of the film by " Noburo
OHFOUJI "

202

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FILMS REFERENCED

TITLE DIRECTOR YEAR

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces J.S. Blackton 1906

Fantasmagorie Emile Cohl 1909

The Nonki no O-tôsan Returns
from the Dragon Palace
(Nonki no O-tôsan Ryûgû Mairu) Kimura Shiroyama 1925

The Thief of Baguda Castle
(Bagudajô no Tozoku) Ôfuji Noburo 1926

Theorizing Government
(Seiji no Ronrika) Kôuchi Jun’ichi 1927

Momotarô the Undefeated
(Nihon-ichi no Momotarô) Yamamoto Sanae 1928

Taro’s Toy Train
(Tarô-san no Kisha) Aoji Chuzo 1929

Two Worlds (Futatsu no Sekai) Murata Yasuji 1929

The Spread of Infection
(Byôdoku no Denpa) Yamamoto Sanae 1929

Steamboat Willie Walt Disney 1929

Our Skiing Outing
(Oira no Sukî) Murata Yasuji 1930

Momotarô’s Sky Adventure
(Sora no Momotarô) Murata Yasuji 1931

Our Baseball Game
(Oira no Yakyû) Murata Yasuji 1931

Chame’s Day (Chame no Ichinichi) Nishikura Kiyoji 1931

The Unlucky Butterfly
(Cho no Sainan) Unknown 1931

216

The Plane Cabby’s Lucky Day
(Oatari Sora no Entaku) Kato Teizo 1932

The Olympic Games on Dankichi-Island
(Dankichi-jima no Olympic Taikai) Unknown 1932

The Toybox Series Chapter 3:
1936 Edition
(Omocha Hakô no Shirîzu Dai San:
1936 Hen) J.O. Tôkî 1934

Sankichi the Monkey: Shock Troops
(Osaru no Sankichi: Totsugekitai Seo Mitsuyo 1934

Ma-bô’s Big Race
(Ma-bô no Daikyoso) Unknown 1936

Ma-bô the Young Aviator
(Ma-bô no Shonen Kôkûhama) Saitô Genjirô 1937

Fighting Eagles of the Sky
(Sora no Arawashi, Ôfuji Noburo 1938

Ma-bô’s Expedition to the
Unexplored Continental
(Ma-bô no Tairiki Hikyô Kenzaki) Saitô Genjirô 1938

Snow White Walt Disney 1938

Fantasia Walt Disney 1940

Princess Iron Fan
(Tiě shàn gōngzhǔ) Wan Guchan; Wan Laiming 1941

Potatoes and Soldiers
(Imo to Heitai) Kataoka Yoshitarô 1942

The Collaborative Air Defense Battle
(Kyôryoku Bôkû Sen) Misaki Shôkai 1942

If Enemy Planes Should Come
(Tekki Kuraba) Yamamoto Sanae 1942

Total Mobilization on the Mountain
(O-yama no Sôdôin) Yamamoto Sanae 1942

217

Sankichi the Monkey: Battling Submarine
(Osaru no Sankichi: Tatakau Sensuikan) Kataoka Yoshitarô 1943

Sankichi the Monkey:
A History of Hard Fighting
(Osaru no Sankichi: Funsenki) Kataoka Yoshitarô 1943

The Spider and the Tulip
(Kumo to Chulip’u) Masaoka Kenji 1943

Ma-Bô’s Paratroopers
(Ma-Bô no Rakasanbutai) Saitô Genjirô 1943

Momotarô’s Sea Eagles
(Momotarô no Umiwashi) Seo Mitsuyo 1943

Momotarô’s Divine Sea Warriors
(Momotarô no Umi no Shinpei) Seo Mitsuyo 1945

Barefoot Gen
(Hadashi no Gen) Mori Masaki 1983

Grave of the Fireflies
(Hotaru no Haka) Takahata Isao 1988

Princess Mononoke
(Mononoke-hime) Miyazaki Hayao 1997

Spirited Away
(Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) Miyazaki Hayao 2003

Ghost in the Shell 2 Oshii Mamoru 2004

The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) Miyazaki Hayao 2013

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Creator Manion, Annie (author)

Core Title Animation before the war: nation, identity, and modernity in Japan from 1914-1945

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 06/09/2014

Defense Date 03/24/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag animation,anime,History,Japan,OAI-PMH Harvest

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Language English

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Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Godart, G. Clinton (committee member), Jaikumar, Priya (committee member)

Creator Email annie.manion@gmail.com

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