THE BEGINNING The earliest Japanese animators were individual film hobbyists inspired by American and European pioneer animators. The first three Japanese cartoons were one-reelers, one to five minutes each, in 1917. Animation of the 1920s ran from one-to-three reels. A few were imitations of foreign cartoons, such as the Felix the Cat series, but most were Oriental folk tales in traditional Japanese art styles. The more well-known silent-era animators included Oten Shimokawa, Junichi Kouchi, Seitaro Kitayama, Sanae Yamamoto (whose 1924 The Mountain Where Old Women Are Abandoned seems to be the earliest anime title still in existence), Yasuji Murata, and the master of paper silhouette animation, Noboru Ofuji. Most of them worked in small home studios, though they came to be financed by the Japanese theatrical companies, which provided production money in exchange for distribution rights.
DIVINE SEA WARRIORS (1944)
During the 1930s, folk tales began to give way to Western-style fast-paced humor, which gradually began reflecting the growing influence of Japanese militarism, such as Mituyo Seo’s 1934 11-minute cartoon Private 2nd-Class Norakuro, an adaptation of Suihou Tagawa’s popular newspaper comic strip about an unlucky dog soldier in a funny-animal army. After Japan went to war in China in 1937, the need to get productions approved by government censors resulted in a steady stream of militaristic propaganda cartoons. In 1943, the Imperial military government decided Japan needed its first animated feature. Mituyo Seo was authorized to assemble a team of animators for the task. Their 74-minute Momotaro’s Gods-Blessed Sea Warriors was a juvenile adventure depicting the Imperial Navy as brave yet cute anthropomorphic animal sailors resolutely liberating Indonesia and Malaysia from the buffoonish foreign-devil Allied occupiers—too late for even wishful dreaming, as it was barely released before the war’s end.